A Different Vision

Interesting, that...

2007-05-08T19:45:00.000-07:00

I have not updated this thing in far too long. My apologies. Life has been chaotic to say the least but I'm graduating soon and heading to the University of Oregon in Eugene, to embark on my master's in International Studies. That is all for now. More to come later...

i cannot make you care but maybe i can make you think

2006-04-18T18:37:00.000-07:00

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963
US black civil rights leader & clergyman (1929 - 1968)

Is there a punchline to this? Is there some hidden joke or invisible clause that says oh wait a minute, injustice anywhere is contigent upon those defining justice and those defining justice obviously retain the power to decide who then is responsible for injustice?

I am presenting a chapter in two weeks on the rights of transgender people to safe and adequate (and affordable) healthcare.
I am presenting a slideshow in two weeks on WHY a gay pride parade in Idaho is relevant to those who fight for the very basic human and civil rights that others often take for granted.
ALSO, in three weeks, I am defending my honors thesis linking the local history and policy of HIV/AIDS to the national struggle for humanizing those living with HIV/AIDS.

Again and again, the conversations shift to me having to explain WHY one person's struggle should make a damn bit of difference to another...

WHY?????

Why should you care if a transgender prostitute has access to healthcare?
Why should you care if a gay man has AIDS, regardless of questions of risky behavior, education or socioeconomics?
Why should you care if someone a government considers a terrorist or terrorist threat is caged, tortured and held without charge or access to legal counsel?
Why should you care if Idahoans march in a parade?
Why should you care if someone feels offended by a religious monument inside a courthouse?
Why should you care if a President or any leader can claim his or herself and his or her nation exempt from any sort of international law that is deemed unfriendly to the whatever NOTIONS that nation holds sacred, even those of freedom and democracy?

WHY?

I keep going back to the quote by one of the most highly regarded civil rights leaders EVER and wonder exactly where the punchline is, if such effort will remain a joke.

For sanity's sake, I HIGHLY recommend the fantastic essay by Maia Ettinger titled, "The Pocahontas Paradigm, or will the Subaltern please shut up?" from the book Tilting the Tower edited by Linda Garber. Here's a quote so that you might see why:
"An interesting thing happens when people of color or queers speak up in class: everyone else feels silenced...In this case, however, race and sex categories are both over- and under inclusive." She explains that this "everyone else" includes what she calls, "People lacking an Agenda (PLAs), people whose interest in race, class and gender is grounded in something other than the need to survive in an alien culture and/or to assess in good faith their own position in the multiple systems of subordination that constitute the culture."

Why? Why should you care? Why should anyone?

Is injustice anywhere, injustice everywhere or is that just a nice turn of phrase?

What possible good is an education that touts critical thinking if one is neither encouraged nor expected to engage in the very debates that do make us uncomfortably and sometimes painfully aware that yes this privilege IS a result of someone else's oppression and that maybe even this FREEDOM IS precisely because someone else is caged.

What possible right can exist as a privilege? Either it is a right that the law will protect OR it is a privilege the law can ignore and even be bent to take away.

Where is the human in human rights if not in every SINGLE human being regardless of sex, religious orientation, race, class, education, family history or legal status?

I am excited about my projects. I am excited because I see every sentance as a chance to engage in an debate far larger than the borders of this state or this country. I see each discussion had and each lecture attended and each coffee shop debate as a chance to refuse and refute the comfort of silence and invisibilty.

In short, I see them as not only a chance but a part of the responsibility that an education entails and the quote and the legacy of King and others EXPECTS of all of us.

update

2006-03-31T12:33:00.000-08:00

Currently, my senior research projects are all in history and my interdisclipinary project is designing my own human rights curriculum proposal (complete with pedagogy, syllabus, annotated bib and the like).

My senior research projects are:

McNair Scholar Summer Research Title:
Visibility as Power: A Historical Analysis of the Gay Pride Parade in Idaho

Honors Senior Thesis Title:
Representative Bodies: The History and Policy of HIV/AIDS in Idaho

I have written extensively in my undergraduate on themes of visibility and the role of language in both a liberatory and oppressive function. My degree is in Human Rights Studies. Previous paper topics include: Post-Colonial Feminism, Gay Marriage, Language and Law, Civil and Refugee rights (particularly African American civil rights and Cambodian and Vietnamese Refugee Rights).

I am leaning toward a degree either in History (modern european or modern american history), international studies or literature and modern thought. The grad schools I'm seriously considering are: Stanford, UC Berkeley, Brown, Oxford, Washington State and Oregon State University.

interesting article that i'm writing an opinion piece on...op piece soon to follow

2006-02-02T20:33:00.001-08:00

THE ARTS/CULTURAL DESK
CONNECTIONS; Hate Crimes: What Is Gained When Forbidden Acts Become Forbidden Beliefs? By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN (NYT) 1026 wordsPublished: September 19, 2005Thirty years ago, hate crimes did not exist, though plenty of crimes committed out of hatred did. Could it be that the only thing that has changed is that we now have both? And perhaps that the concept of hate crime is more a burden than a benefit?
Such was the unease I felt on Tuesday night at the New York Tolerance Center of the Simon Wiesenthal Center listening to a panel of human rights advocates discuss a new report about hate crimes. The report, ''Everyday Fears: A Survey of Violent Hate Crimes in Europe and North America,'' written by Michael McClintock, the director of research for Human Rights First (formerly the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights), focuses on the United States, Canada, and 53 European and Central Asian countries.
It argues that hate crimes are on the increase and are not being taken seriously enough. In France, reports of violence against gay men more than doubled from 2002 to 2003. In Britain, anti-Semitic assaults on individuals doubled from 2003 to 2004. In the Netherlands, anti-Muslim violence flared after the murder of the filmmaker Theo van Gogh in 2004, leading to acts of arson and assault. The particular accounts are chilling.
What is to be done? At the panel, Mr. McClintock argued that ''data stops hate,'' that knowing the extent of hatred would lead to legislation and control. His report argues for the expansion of legal and governmental structures to monitor and prosecute hate crimes.
Europe might already seem well armed. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe has increased its focus on hate crimes in its Office of Democratic Institutions and Human Rights. According to Mr. McClintock's report, the security organization also has an international hate crimes program that has been documenting its member nations' failures to document those crimes. The European Commission Against Racism and Intolerance and the European Monitoring Center on Racism and Xenophobia also combat what the monitoring center calls ''racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia and anti-Semitism at the European level.''
But Human Rights First also says that only 19 of the 55 nations in the security organization actually have hate crime legislation and that only five include ''sexual orientation and disability bias'' in their criteria. Denmark does not make racism a factor in criminal law; France does but won't separate out statistics about particular groups. As for the United States, in the latest survey 90 percent of enforcement agencies did not report data on hate crimes at all.
The report suggests that all hate crimes are vastly undercounted, noting that ''the highest levels of violence were found where there was increasingly effective monitoring and reporting (in Germany and France).''
But how are such crimes to be identified? The concept of hate crime developed only in recent decades out of a particular political perspective. It asserts that there are groups so injured by being at society's margins that any further injury rising out of hatred is particularly heinous. A hate crime is not just an individual crime but a reflection of a presumed social crime. Prosecution of hate crimes is a form of social exorcism, a declaration that traces of past sins will be expunged.
This is more peculiar than it may seem at first. Usually, a crime is prosecuted because it is a forbidden act; a hate crime is prosecuted because of a forbidden belief. Usually, punishment is assessed by judging a criminal's plans: Was the murder premeditated? Was it accidental? In hate crimes the motive is central: Was it done out of greed? Was it done out of hatred? Prosecuting hate crimes is meant to be an attack on prejudice, meant to reform feelings, not just behavior.
Thus hate crimes tend to fit a particular political ideology. It is not really group hatred that gives hate crimes their meaning, but social grievance. In the United States, for example, there is palpable discomfort when an incident of black-on-white crime is called a hate crime. It doesn't fit the model: where's the victim's social grievance? Anti-Semitism has also typically been seen as the spur to a hate crime only when it comes from the far right, as an extension of familiar fascistic victimization.
Human Rights First refers to terrorist acts as spurring hate crimes in retaliation but not as hate crimes themselves. They are ignored even though the Washington sniper of 2003, John Allen Muhammad, made his group hatred apparent, and even though radical Islamic clerics regularly preach hatred against Jews, infidels and Westerners and urge that it be acted upon (with considerable success). These are not considered hate crimes because the victims are not considered socially aggrieved.
In fact, debates about hate crimes can even resemble debates over who merits social restitution. This report urges that the concept be standardized: hate crimes should be crimes based on prejudice motivated by race, religion, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation and disability.
Given all this, it is not surprising that statistics are inconsistent and difficult to come by, that some hate crimes prove to be crimes committed for other motives, that some hate crimes are not crimes at all and that others go unrecognized. Hate crimes are hard to prove and easy to claim, related to feelings not acts. It is not clear that monitoring and reporting will eliminate hate crimes. More agencies and legal structures are now devoted to them than ever before, without diminishing their prevalence.
Is it possible that one of the best ways to eliminate hate crimes is to jettison the concept itself? As for eliminating acts of hatred well, that is a more serious problem.

state by state analysis

2006-01-10T02:03:00.000-08:00

This site is a fantastic wealth of information on everything from health care coverage to state spending. Please check it out. ~peace~

senior honors project prospectus (excerpt)

2005-12-23T03:54:00.000-08:00

I'm determined as of late...to look at the way individuals and communities respond to crises and face unfathomable odds. My senior honors project will hopefully reflect this in a way that is both useful and inspiring. Here's an excerpt fro my prospectus. I'll begin this project in the Spring.

Community Response to HIV/AIDS in Idaho
I.
The first case of HIV/AIDS in Idaho was reported in 1985. Idaho’s first Gay Pride Parade occurred in 1990. In 1994, Proposition One (an anti-gay initiative in Idaho) was defeated. This research delves deeper into the history surrounding these events to explore and analyze community involvement and response to HIV/AIDS in Idaho from 1985 to 2005. The purpose of this project is two-fold. First, the research offers a history of HIV/AIDS, told by those who have lived and/or documented it. Second, this project gauges the origins, existence, and efficacy of local community resources, response, and outreach programs. It will culminate in a web log or blog, which will serve to connect the history with updated and interactive links to existing resources, support systems, and statistics of HIV/AIDS in Idaho. It will also result in a paper, which will detail the process of compiling this history through interviews and archival research.
II.
This project is significant in that it documents the history of the AIDS crises in Idaho. This could easily invite future comparative analysis between the historical and political responses in Idaho with other states with lower rates of reported cases of HIV/AIDS. Ideally, it could also help community members, particularly those in need of such services, better understand what is available currently and how such services might be utilized or improved. This project holds personal significance in that I have been involved in health care since 1998. I have also been involved in and passionate about AIDS awareness, education and activism since 1989. I have written countless papers and even a play about AIDS, examining specifically the multiple ways AIDS has been historically debilitating and dehumanizing. Finally, this project holds professional significance for me as an aspiring academic. Health care as a human right is still a heavily debated issue, particularly with regard to HIV/AIDS treatment. The national history of the AIDS crisis and the current international struggle with soaring infection rates in younger and younger people shows however, that there is a place for and need of integrating education/awareness with analysis of the efficacy of existing programs and resources. It is my hope that this research can help to illustrate why access to quality health care is and should be a human right. To this end, I intend to build upon the connections made between socio-economics, race, gender and access to health care, eloquently and passionately described by Dr. Paul Farmer, in his book, Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights and the New War on the Poor.

III.
I did not find any books or scholarly articles specifically addressing the history of or community response to the AIDS crisis in Idaho. There is, however, ample writing on the relationship between socio-economics, health care and the human rights of those with HIV/AIDS. Proponents advocate a rights-based approach to health care, which would assure every person has access to quality medical care and specifically, to the resources needed to maintain health. Opponents quickly label this unrealistic, idealistic and some even consider it, unjust. Richard D. Lamm argues, “Rights are adversarial and individual, where health policy has to balance both who is covered and what is covered for all citizens. We can and should provide basic healthcare to all citizens, but this should be done through the legislature, not the courts and it should be accomplished as a matter of good social policy, not by playing the trump of rights”1. Lamm focuses on limited resources and the differing ways in which health is even defined. He maintains that while governments should provide healthcare to citizens, they should do so not because it is a right but because it is good public policy.
Such an argument does not include any mention of those whose lives may go unaccounted for in such policy. Lamm does address this though, by stating, “We, in fact, limit healthcare in one of the cruelest ways that any nation can do so—by simply leaving people out of that system”2.
Historically, the AIDS crisis offered a prime example of how easily a government can choose to leave people out of legislative protection, out of housing protection, out of employment protection, out of, in fact, having any human rights at all. This is why entering this debate at a local level and grounding it in local response and outreach is so crucial. Idaho was not Washington, New York, or California. Idaho has been minimally impacted by the AIDS crisis compared to those states. However, according to the most recent statistics from aidsaction.org, in September 2004, Idaho’s drug assistance program for AIDS treatment was capped and had a waiting list of 34. There may be less “need” here due to the fact that a smaller percent of Idaho’s population is knowingly infected but there is obviously still need.
IV.
Being that this project has a two-part focus, I will approach it similarly. First, I plan to ground my research in the archives of the Diversity newsletter, the Idaho Statesman, Your Family, Friends and Neighbors or YFFN by focusing specifically on the reaction to AIDS/HIV within the history of the pride parade. Second, I intend to synthesize this archival research with interviews from those who participated in and/or organized the parade as well as various community responses and activist groups dealing specifically with HIV/AIDS in Idaho. I will use the blog I create to document and compile the results of this part of the research. When this is complete, I plan to compile a list of HIV/AIDS resources exclusive to Idaho and to compare their utilization of the national and state funding of HIV/AIDS programs and outreach. I hope to conduct interviews with local leaders to document their views on the efficacy of Idaho programs compared to other Western states and those existing nationally as well, which would give a human take on the statistics offered by the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare. My primary methodology will be compiling and presenting data attained through archival research, existing infection statistics, funding reports and personal interviews.

another story

2005-12-23T03:50:00.000-08:00

Marina Pisklakova is Russia’s leading women’s rights activist. She studied aeronautical engineering in Moscow, and while conducting research at the Russian Academy of Sciences, was startled to discover family violence had reached epidemic proportions. Because of her efforts, Russian officials started tracking domestic abuse and estimate that, in a single year, close to fifteen thousand women were killed and fifty thousand were hospitalized, while only one-third to one-fifth of all battered women received medical assistance. With no legislation outlawing the abuse, there were no enforcement mechanisms, support groups, or protective agencies for victims. In July 1993, Pisklakova founded a hot line for women in distress, later expanding her work to establish the first women’s crisis center in the country. She lobbied for legislation banning abuse, and worked with an openly hostile law enforcement establishment to bring aid to victims and prosecution to criminals. She began a media campaign to expose the violence against women and to educate women about their rights, and regularly appears on radio and television promoting respect for women’s rights. Pisklakova’s efforts have saved countless lives, at great risk to her own.

When I started the first domestic violence hot line in Russia in 1993 (we named it Anna, Association No to Violence), I was alone, answering calls four hours a day, every day, for six months. I was counseling people in person the other four hours. I couldn’t say no; there were so many women. I had no training, no distance, no boundaries. But at the same time, I don’t know how I could have done anything differently.
Without realizing what I was embarking upon, I began this work while a researcher at the Institute for Socio-Economic Studies of the Population within the Russian Academy of Sciences. While coordinating a national survey on women’s issues, one day I received a survey response I did not know how to classify. It described a woman’s pain and suffering at the hands of her husband. I showed it to some colleagues and one of them told me, "You have just read a case of domestic violence." I had never heard this term before. It was not something even recognized in our post-Soviet society, much less discussed. I decided I needed to learn more about this mysterious phenomenon.
Shortly thereafter, I encountered the mother of one of my son’s classmates in front of the school. Half of her face was severely bruised. She wouldn’t tell me what had happened. One evening a few days later, she called me. Her story shocked me. When her husband was wearing a suit and the button fell off, and it was not fixed quickly, he took a shoe and slapped his wife in the face. For two weeks she couldn’t go out. She was really distressed, and hurt—physically and emotionally hurt—because half her face was black and blue. I asked her, "Why don’t you just leave him?" A very typical question. And she said, "Where would I go?" I said, "Divorce him. Get another apartment." She said, "I depend on him completely." And in this exchange, I saw everything: the way the abuser was consolidating control, decreasing self-confidence, and diminishing self-esteem. I also heard her story of how he would come home and go to the kitchen, touch the floor with his finger, and, if there was the slightest dirt, ask sneeringly, "What did you do all day?" The floors in Russian kitchens always have some dirt, especially if you have kids at home who are running around—the kitchen is often the center of family life in our small apartments. For outsiders, scenes such as I have just described might seem ridiculous, but I was to soon discover that they were commonplace. For this woman, our conversation was an opportunity to communicate with someone who didn’t judge her, who didn’t say, "What did you do wrong?" I didn’t realize that I had actually started counseling her. But I did realize from her story that from psychological violence comes physical violence.
So I started thinking that I should help her; I should refer her to somebody. And then I realized that there was nowhere to go. I cannot tell you my feelings. I really felt hopeless and helpless. In Russia there is a saying, "He beats you, that means he loves you." I now knew the meaning of that saying. I asked myself, "What can you do about a cultural attitude?" But I knew what I had to do. I started the hot line. One cold January day, a woman called in and I started talking with her. After a few minutes, she stopped, saying, "I am not going to talk to you on the phone. I need to see you." So I said, "Okay," and when she came in, her first tearful words were, "I’m afraid my husband is going to kill me and nobody will know." She told me her story. Her husband was very nice until she told him she was pregnant. At that point, everything turned upside down. He became very controlling. She was vulnerable and dependent: "I was terrified; his face was not happy. It was like he’d won. As though he was thinking, ‘It’s my turn. Now I can do whatever I want to you.’" The danger was real.
My first reaction was, "Oh, my God, what am I going to do now?" I knew the police would do nothing. But I called the police in her district anyway. The officer seemed nice, but then he immediately called the husband and said to him, "What is your wife doing? And why is she going around talking about family matters? Look, if you do it, do it quietly." I realized how hopeless the problem really was for her. Her problem became mine. I could not walk away. I called a woman I knew who was a retired lawyer and said, "I don’t have any money and this woman doesn’t have any money. But she needs help. She needs a divorce and a place to live." In Moscow, housing is a big problem. When this woman married her husband, she traded her apartment to his family and now his brother lived there. So she had nowhere to go. She was trapped. Her story got worse. When their first baby was nine months old, her husband tried to kill her. "I don’t know how I survived," she told me. The lawyer and I helped her file for divorce. That’s when the husband told her, "I will kill you and nobody will know. And I will just say to everybody that you ran off with another man and left your baby." I started calling her every morning just to make sure that she was alive. For three months, the lawyer counseled us at each stage and helped us develop a plan.
In the midst of all of this, the situation took a scary turn. The woman called and said: "They know everything we are talking about!" Her mother-in-law worked at the phone company and we quickly figured out that she was listening to her calls. I said, "You know, maybe it’s better. Let them hear about all the support that you have outside." So we started pretending we had done more than we actually had. On the next phone call, I started saying, "Okay, so this police officer is not helpful, but there are lots of other police I am going to talk to about it and your lawyer will, too. So don’t worry." The next time she came to see me, and she said, "They became much more careful after we started talking that way." Eventually her husband left their apartment, partly because the lawyer told us how to get him out, and partly because he and his family realized that she was educated about her rights now. Ultimately, they got a divorce. Her father-in-law came to see her and said, "You have won, take the divorce, and take back the apartment; you will never see my son again."
Soon after this success, a friend of hers in a similar situation started legal proceedings against her own ex-husband and also got her apartment back. I was elated, and for the first time, encouraged! Even in Russian society, where there were few legal precedents, a woman who is willing to do so can stand up for her rights and win. But these stories are just a small fraction of the thousands we continue to hear day after day. Unfortunately, most of the women who call us do not know their rights, nor do they know that they do not have to accept the unacceptable.
There have been some bad moments along the way. One time I picked up the phone and a male voice started saying, "What is this number?" I was cautious since it was not common for a man to call our hot line like that. I responded with "Well, what number did you dial?" And he said, "I found this phone number in the notes of my wife and I am just checking—what is it?" I told him, "Why don’t you ask your wife? Why are you calling?" And at first he tried to be calm and polite, saying, "Look, I’d just like you to tell me what it is." And I said, "If you don’t trust your wife, it’s your problem. I am not going to tell you what it is and I am not asking your name. If you introduce yourself maybe we can talk." And then he started being really aggressive and verbally abusive and he said, "I know who you are. I know your name. I know where you are located. I know where you live. And I am going to come there with some guys and kill you." My husband was there with me at the time and saw I was really scared, though I said to the man on the phone, "I am not afraid of you," and just hung up. I still don’t know whose husband it was. He never came. Another time, my phone at home rang late at night and a man said, "If you don’t stop, you’d better watch out for your son." This really scared me. I moved my son to my parents’ home for a few months. That was tough for a mother to do.
There are different estimations of domestic violence in Russia. Some say now that 30 to 40 percent of families have experienced it. In 1995, in the aftermath of the Beijing Women’s Conference, the first reliable statistics were published in Russia indicating that 14,500 women a year had been killed by their husbands. But even today, the police do not keep such statistics, yet their official estimates are that perhaps 12,000 women per year are killed in Russia from domestic violence. Some recognition of the dimensions of this problem is finally surfacing.
Under Russian law, however, only domestic violence that results either in injuries causing the person to be out of work for at least two years, or in murder, can be considered a crime. There are no other laws addressing domestic violence in spite of years of effort to have such laws enacted by the Duma. But, in my work and in our fledgling women’s movement, we have on our own expanded the functional definition of domestic violence to include marital rape, sexual violence in the marriage or partnership, psychological violence, isolation, and economic control. This latter area has become perhaps one of the most insidious and hidden forms of domestic violence because women comprise 60 percent of the unemployed population—and the salary of a woman is about 60 percent of a man’s for the same work.
A friend started working with me in January 1994, and by that summer we had trained our first group of women who began to work with us as telephone counselors. In 1995, I started going to other cities in Russia putting on training sessions for other women’s groups that were starting to emerge and who wanted to start hot lines or crisis centers. Next, we started developing programs to provide psychological and legal counseling for the victims of domestic violence.
By 1997, we had also started a new program to train lawyers in how to handle domestic abuse cases. Under present Russian law, the provocation of violence is a defense which can be argued in court to decrease punishment. This is perhaps the most cruel form of psychological abuse, because it all happens in the courtroom right in front of the victim. She is made to look responsible. The victim is blamed openly by the perpetrator. Regrettably, there are still many judges who will readily accept the notion that she was in some way responsible, and let the perpetrator avoid being held accountable for his actions. The final trauma has been inflicted.
At the start of the new millennium, we have over forty women’s crisis centers operating throughout Russia and have recently formed the Russian Association of Women’s Crisis Centers, which is officially registered with and recognized by the Russian government. I am honored to have been elected as its first president.
My parents have been incredibly supportive of my work. My father, a retired military officer, once said to me, "In Soviet times you would have been a dissident, right?" And my reply to him was, "Probably, because the Soviets maintained the myth of the ideal—where domestic violence couldn’t exist, officially." The attitude during Soviet times was that if you are a battered wife, then you had failed as a woman and as a wife. It was the woman’s responsibility in our society to create a family atmosphere. It was up to her to maintain the ideal. That’s why women came to me who had been brutalized for twenty-six years. I was the first person they could turn to openly, and confide something they had to hide within themselves throughout their life. This is still true to a great extent today.
I am not an extraordinary person. Any woman in my position would do the same. I feel, however, that I am really lucky because I was at the beginning of something new, a great development in Russia, a new attitude. Now, everybody is talking about domestic violence. And many are doing something about it.

more on Ka Hsaw Wa

2005-12-23T03:10:00.000-08:00

Ka Hsaw Wa is the founder of EarthRights International, a nongovernmental organization that filed a precedent-setting lawsuit against a U.S. corporation for torture committed by its agents overseas. The suit charges that Burmese government agents hired by Unocal, a U.S.-based oil company, to provide security, transportation, and infrastructure support for an oil pipeline, committed extortion, torture, rape, forced labor, and extrajudicial killings against the local indigenous population. Ka Hsaw Wa knows about the abuses committed by the military regime firsthand. He has spent years walking thousands of miles through the forests of Burma, interviewing witnesses and recording testimonies of victims of human rights abuses. He has taught hundreds of people to investigate, document, and expose violations of international human rights. As a student leader in the 1980s, Ka Hsaw Wa organized pro-democracy demonstrations in Rangoon. He was seized and tortured by agents of the Burmese military regime, in power since 1962 (and renamed SLORC - State Law and Order Restoration Council - in late 1988). When police opened fire on peaceful demonstrators, one of Ka Hsaw Wa’s best friends died in his arms. Ka Hsaw Wa fled into exile along the Thai border. To protect family members he took a new name, Ka Hsaw Wa, which means "white elephant." Ka Hsaw Wa’s meticulously compiled documentation of systemic rape and forced labor is relied upon and cited by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and other international organizations. He has collaborated on several books about the abuses, including School for Rape (1988): "Take over 300,000 men, many of them under the age of seventeen and largely uneducated. Force some of them to enlist at gunpoint and promise all of them a salary they never receive entirely. Give them guns and bombs. Train them to shoot, to crawl through the jungle at night, to ambush. Convince them that their enemies are ethnic minorities, students, women, anyone who disagrees with the government, and that these millions of people are traitors or infidels. Starve them. Withhold their mail and don’t allow them to send any letters. Forbid them from visiting their families. Force them to beat each other for punishment. Abandon some of them if they are too sick to walk. Abuse them verbally and physically every day. Allow them plenty of alcohol and drugs. You have just created the army of Burma’s ruling military regime." Ka Hsaw Wa’s work, at tremendous personal risk, continues in the jungles of Burma.
Kerry Kennedy
I’ve been doing this for eleven years. Most of the time I coordinate fieldwork, collect information, conduct fact-finding missions, and train my staff to do the same, specifically in the pipeline area of the U.S. oil company Unocal. We currently have a lawsuit pending against Unocal. The crux of the case is that a U.S. company is using human rights abuses to further their profit margins.
We interview people inside Burma and ask questions about human rights violations perpetrated by the military government. We hear cases of torture and forced labor, forced portering and rape, and extrajudicial killings. Sometimes I collect information outside of Burma along the Thai border and at other times I collect it in the refugee camps.
The villagers who support us keep in touch secretly or by code. We use radios and GPS (Global Positioning Systems) to find our way through the jungle. It is extremely dangerous. There are a lot of military bases. We listen to the radio in order to track the military’s movements and to avoid being caught. I wear black clothes and carry a backpack. We travel with a maximum of three people at a time. Sometimes, the military walks across the path just in front of us, so close we can touch them. We have to be very careful. I have been shot at twice.
We make our decisions based on the movement of the troops. Normally, we don’t go into the villages because it’s so dangerous. Instead, we ask the people to come secretly to the jungle because we don’t want to expose ourselves to them and also because we might put them in jeopardy. Among the villagers, there are spies for SLORC, the local military organization. Therefore, we must be very, very careful.
There are many human rights violations directly connected to the Unocal pipeline. The most common is forced labor and portering. The latter occurs when soldiers force villagers to carry their ammunition, their supplies, and food. The porters are not paid for their labor and, at times, they try to escape and to report these crimes to the authorities. If they are caught, the porters may be tortured, imprisoned, or possibly killed by members of SLORC. This happened recently to a close friend of mine. He and a group of villagers had been collecting information for me in order to help themselves and to raise public awareness of local human rights violations. SLORC suspected him of these activities and killed him.
Likewise, in the last four or five years, I have heard of twelve to fifteen rapes against local women by SLORC soldiers providing security for the pipeline. Two of these rape victims are plaintiffs in our lawsuit. The whole area is crawling with soldiers and these women were raped while walking between their village and a nearby farm.
In response to abuses like these, I organized a group of students in 1988 to protest against SLORC and to demonstrate for democracy. Though I was living in Rangoon, each student in my group organized a demonstration in the towns outside Rangoon. Eventually, there were protests all over Burma to educate people about democracy and to resist SLORC. During one demonstration in Rangoon, two of my friends were shot. One died there with me; the other was shot through the mouth and jaw. I carried him to the hospital but, in order to escape, I had to abandon him.
I didn’t want to leave Burma and my elderly parents, so I decided to go to an area outside of Rangoon. At that time, I stayed in the jungle and observed the terrible lives of the villagers. In the morning, the villagers took hoes and baskets and were forced to build things for the military. One day the owner of the house that I was living in said, "Tomorrow I have to go and work for the dogs again." "What are you talking about?" I asked. "The villagers refer to the soldiers as dogs because they hate them," he replied. "We don’t have time to do anything we need to do because we always have to work for them. We don’t get any pay." Then, I got a letter from my mum saying, "Son, it’s too dangerous. Wait for me and I will come to see you." My mother came and I said goodbye to her.
I walked through the jungle for five days to the Karen area with another student and a villager. As we neared the village, I saw a sight that I will never forget. I saw a dead woman with a large tree branch in her vagina. I walked to the village and I asked about her. The villagers told me that she was a nurse and that a group of soldiers had taken her to cure one of their comrades who had contracted malaria. Instead, they raped and killed her. It was so sad.
I stayed around the village for quite a while. This totally changed my life. Since no one was doing interviews at the time, I decided to do some. I talked to everyone. I talked to one mother whose son had committed suicide because a group of soldiers had forced him to have sex with her. The soldiers then clapped their hands and called the boy a motherfucker. The son later killed himself out of shame. The mother was heartbroken. It was then that I made the decision to work for these people.
In the beginning, I had neither a pen nor paper to work with. I went to the Karen National Union (KNU) resistance authority and was dismissed as just another young student. The union told me that this kind of incident happened all the time and that no one cared. They told me not to bother, but to take arms and to fight the soldiers. I didn’t know how to go about the work I wanted to do without the necessary resources or support. I kept approaching the KNU and asked them to buy me a tape recorder, paper, and a pen with which to write down and pass along important information to the concerned people. They simply told me not to fool myself.
I made a decision to continue working on the testimonies. All that I could do was to talk with the people and to absorb their stories as best that I could. We were living in the middle of the jungle, so I decided to go to a town to get some paper and a pen. I used these resources to write messages to people, but no one listened and no one even cared. "What am I doing?" I thought. I was so frustrated.
Finally, in the beginning of 1992, I met a man by the name of Kevin Heppner. He was a Canadian and together we started doing human rights documentation. I translated the testimonies to English, he typed them, and we sent them to anyone who might be interested. Kevin primarily sent the information to human rights groups like Amnesty International because I didn’t have papers to cross into Thailand. I got arrested four or five times in Thailand because I was illegal there. They’d put me in jail for seven days and then release me. It was extremely difficult. In the beginning, we were very poor. Finally we met a woman from France who gave us money for paper and mailing. I was so happy that we could finally do something.
In Burma, I was arrested before the student uprising and tortured as well. A friend of mine had had a fight with one of the authorities’ children and then had disappeared. Although I didn’t know where he had gone, the authorities tortured me and insisted that I tell them of his whereabouts.
The torture began with something referred to as the "motorcycle ride," in which I was forced to assume a specific position and to utter the sounds vroom, vroom, vroom. Once I was exhausted, my shins were beaten with a special tool with a tough outside and pure metal core. Next, I was subjected to "the railway." I had to pretend to ride a railway and to call out the name of each stop.
If I didn’t know the name or if I pronounced it incorrectly, I was beaten. They would beat me continuously and let me break, asking me the same question repeatedly. Finally, I couldn’t say anything more and they didn’t believe me. Before I passed out, I was tortured once more. There was a cement floor with a pile of sharp rocks in one corner. These rocks were typically used for roads and construction. I was forced to swing myself across them until I would talk. "I can’t say anything," I said. They continued to torture me until the pain was unbearable. They stepped on my back and asked me whether I was going to talk. Again, I responded that I didn’t have anything more to say and they kicked me. Two of the soldiers, their faces covered, held me and proceeded to punch and kick me. I was so angry but all I could do was to look at them. I finally started to throw up blood and passed out. Although the entire ordeal lasted for about three days, I’ve seen worse. Some of my friends have been shot and killed.
A lot of my former classmates now have their Ph.D.’s in the United States. They are educated and come here with money. I think to myself, "What am I doing?" I don’t gain anything for myself and I can’t seem to do anything to lessen the suffering of the villagers. I see the situation worsening and I blame myself for not being able to do enough. At the same time, I can’t quit. If I turn my back and walk away, there would be no one to address the issue.
In 1994, one of my friends died and I wanted to give up. I decided that I had to do something for myself. I needed an income to be able to give money to the people. "If I turn my back," I thought, "who is going to do this work?" The suffering would never end. Although it was a hard decision to make, I decided not to stop working for the people. I committed myself to poverty, living in the jungle with very little available food. There was a time when I wanted to shoot myself when there wasn’t any water and we had to eat raw rice. We couldn’t cook for fear that the soldiers might see the fire. One of us contracted malaria and we didn’t have any medicine. It was very cold in the hills and all we had was a sheet of plastic and blanket to cover ourselves. Some people felt sorry for us and gave us a hammock. In the rainy season, life was very tough. Although we hung our hammocks to avoid the leeches on the ground, in the morning we realized the leeches had fallen from the trees and sucked our blood.
We knew the difficulty of the situation, but if we wanted to help the people, we had to make big sacrifices. At times we felt dumbfounded because we had committed a great deal of time without seeing significant results. At one point, I saw the documentation in the trash that we’d been working so hard on. It had been scrunched up and thrown away. I felt heartbroken, though I understood that the issue they were working on was different than ours. I had to be open-minded and to understand the situation. It was so difficult for us to get that piece of paper mailed and to document the suffering that the people had endured. We have an ideal goal: we just want people to be treated like human beings.
I don’t know if courage comes from power or from pain. I remember a time that I listened to someone’s testimony and my whole body began to shake. It was the most horrible thing I had ever heard. The wife of a revolutionary had been arrested in an attempt to get to her husband. The soldiers killed their baby and burned it, then forced the mother to eat it because the father didn’t come back. Tales like this repulse me and simultaneously give me courage. The suffering that I have endured is nothing compared to theirs. These peoples’ needs are greater than my own.

read on

2005-12-23T02:52:00.000-08:00

Sometimes it is difficult to imagine how one person can do anything to bring about social change. Of course we have the larger than life icons of human rights and humanitarianism but here are a few names you may not have heard or read about. I like reading about what people have done because it reminds of all one CAN do.

read on...
~peace~

Ka Hsaw Wa
Co-Founder and Co-Director, EarthRights InternationalWinner of the 1999 Goldman Envionmental Prize, the 1999 Reebok Human Rights Award, andthe 2004 Sting and Trudie Styler Award for Human Rights and the Environment
Ka Hsaw Wa is a member of the Karen ethnic nationality in Burma. In 1988 he led peaceful student demonstrations in Rangoon, calling for human rights, democracy and an end to military rule. In the ensuing crackdown by the Burmese regime, he was captured and tortured. Upon his release, he fled the country. Since that time, he has traveled clandestinely to remote areas of Burma to interview witnesses and victims of human rights abuses perpetrated by the junta.
In the course of this investigation, Ka Hsaw Wa realized that his people face another threat—that of transnational corporate investment aimed at exploiting Burma’s resources. He found that the killings, rape, torture, forced labor and relocation of villages were all connected to the exploitation of natural resources in the name of development. In particular, the Yadana pipeline which cuts through the Tennaserim region of Burma has been the cause of widespread brutality and forced labor, compounding the persecution of ethnic minorities populating this area.
In 1995, Ka Hsaw Wa joined two American lawyers to found EarthRights International (ERI), an organization initially conceived in response to the Yadana Project. Subsequently, ERI has applied the earth rights concept to other regions in the world where protection of human rights and the environment is intrinsically connected. As ERI’s co-director, Ka Hsaw Wa has been instrumental in the creation of new strategies for corporate and government accountability as well as innovative training programs aimed at building the capacity of indigenous peoples to protect their rights, restore control over natural resources and conserve the environment.
Ka Hsaw Wa has been honored for his work with the Goldman Environmental Prize, Reebok Human Rights Award, the Sting and Trudie Styler Award for Human Rights and the Environment, and the Conde Nast Environmental Award. In speaking tours around the world, Ka Hsaw Wa has made the international community aware of the oppression his people suffer under the military junta and inspired many new activists to take action to defend Burma.
"We will not let them defeat us. We know the companies and their military partners have lots of money, guns, power and influence. But they do not have what we have. We have truth, we have justice, we have courage, and most importantly, we have each other to protect human rights and the environment. We will win."

Mexico’s first openly homosexual member of Congress, Patria Jiménez Flores was elected in 1998 at the age of forty-one. The ninth of ten children in a conservative Catholic family, Jiménez overcame her own family’s prejudices to confront the bigotry of society at large. She works on issues of homophobic violence, violations of basic rights, sexual and sexuality education, cultural activism, and awareness of AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases. In addition she is a leader on domestic violence initiatives and a supporter of peace negotiations with the Zapatista rebels in Chiapas. As a member of the national legislature, Jiménez works on behalf of sexual minorities, and for the dispossessed and voiceless throughout Mexico. Between 1991 and 1993, some twenty-five gay men were assassinated in Mexico, mostly among the Chiapas transvestite community. Jiménez has been a relentless advocate for justice, pressuring police to reopen the investigations. On the day of this interview, Jiménez was on the phone to Chiapas, hearing from local human rights organizers that authorities had used violence again that morning, and her presence would help prevent confrontation. Could she possibly come in time for the demonstration? Despite the caseload of legislation confronting her, Patria Jiménez was on the next flight.
Kerry Kennedy
Twenty-five transvestites were executed, one by one, in the state of Chiapas. The murders were carried out with high-powered weapons, those reserved for the exclusive use of the armed forces and the judicial police. There was a private party at which someone allegedly made a video, so what the governor allegedly did was to kill all the people who may have had something to do with that. And while violent discrimination is more pronounced in municipalities with a right-wing party in power, other states within Mexico have had their share of human rights violations against gay, lesbian, or transgendered people.
In Mexico City, with the election of the new government (the Party of the Democratic Revolution), we saw a change to greater visibility and freedom of expression. Proposals we made to improve the human rights situation of sexually diverse people included the creation of the first community center for them. We could have done it alone, but it was important to have government support. This is an ongoing struggle.
I have been a lesbian activist for twenty years. I think that not feeling guilty about it, not having to request permission simply to live without hiding, is liberating. I don’t know if it’s a consciousness that you learn. I certainly was strengthened by feminist discourse, by finding groups of women who reflected on everything—sexual roles, the division of labor, violence. What I learned is that you can’t discriminate on the basis of a human condition. You can’t ask a Chinese person to have round eyes, or someone to change their skin color, or a homosexual to be heterosexual. But in my culture this truth is not universally acknowledged.
It starts, of course, in the home, this phenomenon of family violence against children who are gay. It begins with silence, with marginalization within the family environment, with punishment. By brothers, fathers, uncles. In a minor, small way, I felt this while growing up, too. Family conversation was always negative when it came to the issue of homosexuals. And, of course, that’s what makes someone repress the idea that he or she is a homosexual.
Let me tell you one story. At one point, one of my brothers was threatened by my relationship with one of his girlfriends. She had written me a letter, and he opened it before I did—because he was jealous, I suppose. Of course, I wasn’t involved with his friend in any way. I was only sixteen at the time, and he was maybe nineteen. At that point I still didn’t have any idea that I was a lesbian. And this letter didn’t really say anything special, but after reading it my brother spoke to me in really offensive terms. "You fucking lesbian," he said. I responded, "But why ‘fucking’? And I don’t understand—what’s wrong with being a lesbian? Why is it an offense?" I didn’t like his attitude. Furthermore, I knew it showed a lack of respect to read my letter. It was my first experience of rebellion, of responding to the prejudices of the larger society we live in, of personal anger.
You see, I was never in the closet. I left home so they wouldn’t try to take me to a psychologist or psychiatrist. But when I did finally leave home I was out in the streets—literally—marching and proclaiming who I was. The first demonstration I went to I unfurled a poster at the Iranian Embassy, because they were killing women who took off their veils. It was a big sign saying: "Mexican Lesbians Against the Assassination of Iranian Women." People looked at it, and came back to look again. We always took the opportunity to forthrightly declare that we were lesbians protesting this or that. Because I believe it is very important to get involved within social movements as lesbians, homosexuals, and bisexuals, and to work within them, like the indigenous movement in Mexico, for example. That gave us presence, and made us, and them, realize that one is not alone.
In my life I have heard a lot of stories from women. Stories that explain what it means to live a gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered life, with all its disadvantages, in such a heterosexist society. I began late in the 1970s to consider ways to solve problems or, at least, to diminish the levels of anxiety with which gay people lived.
By the time I actually had lesbian relationships, I was already very independent. I left home because I knew I would not be able to change my entire family, and it was always a given that they were going to try to change me. I tried to write them a letter saying I thought I had already learned everything that I could from my family, and everything I had left to learn was beyond the boundaries of our closed world. That was a crisis for them. My sisters told my mother I had a sexual deviation problem. But by the time they actually reacted, I was already gone. Later, I rebuilt my relationship with my mother. She imagined that my world was full of problems, that I would never have a home. But I showed her that I had a house and a job, and that I had continued studying. And when we finally sat down face to face to talk, she said to me that the only thing she wanted to know is whether I was happy. Then she said, "But why can’t you be like your sisters?" And I responded, "Would you really want their lives for me?"
Still, my whole life I always felt my mother’s support, her love. Parents always know if their children are gay. With me, my mother never spoke about gay issues, but she’d buy me a pair of pants, or a particular shirt, as though she knew. And she seemed to understand that what I was doing was right for me.
With being lesbian comes the pressure of tremendous responsibility. There’s always a pressure to show that we’re better. I don’t know if it’s positive or negative, but we strive to be the best we can at work. It’s part of our seeking acceptance and I like to think that through this effort we can support and help other lesbians. Part of my effort is to show that I’m qualified. Though I don’t actively feel discrimination, because I think I’ve done my job well, I recognize that discrimination is impregnated in daily life. It can be felt in the way people look at you.
Here’s one example. In Orizábal, in the state of Veracruz, the mayor decided to detain all transsexuals who are prostitutes. So what did they do? They picked up the prostitutes, and all the gays and lesbians, too. How did they pick them up? By their appearance alone. The prostitutes were liable to be picked up for actions, administrative violations: for selling their bodies, for lascivious conduct. But lots of young gay people were brought to jail solely because of their appearance. Similarly, if young people were caught carrying condoms, they were accused of prostitution.
There is discrimination. In Mexico City and the other big cities, gay people gain strength from being part of a group. But elsewhere in Mexico, people are alone and isolated. When someone in this situation gets our telephone number, they call us; and today, we get hundreds of calls. The movement has done a lot, providing services, creating groups, supporting sexual diversity.
But there is much more to accomplish. What I would like to do through radio and television programs is to get families to know that they should not discriminate against their children. We’re pushing for a climate in which young gay men and lesbians can have positive relations with their families and friends.
But there is an outside world, too, to contend with. It’s still a reality that someone gay could lose their job if it becomes known. A professional, a cardiologist, even someone of real eminence can be fingered as a homosexual by anyone on the street. The professional then might lose his or her job. Still. Today. That’s why we need legislation. This is a process that has been evolving, the understanding that it is important for gay people to know that they have rights. For twenty years that’s been our work—to explain that we are citizens, that we pay taxes. And now that sexually diverse communities understand that they have the same rights as everyone else, our work is to get them to exercise their rights. We’re just at the point where gay people know that we have power. We surprised ourselves when we proposed to march to the center of Mexico City during the annual demonstration. People showed up by the thousands and said, "Yes, we are citizens."
It was an important step in the process we are living now. We can’t reach all gay people in Mexico, but our organization is becoming more accessible all the time. But we have to force the government—it doesn’t matter if it is the National Action Party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or the Party of the Democratic Revolution—to provide equal treatment, to stop discrimination, to respect the right to health care and a job for gays. In order to exercise these rights you have to demand them.
But things are slowly changing—and for the better. We’ve reached agreements related to young people unable to finish their studies because of their sexual orientation, as in the case of transgendered people, who often feel that their only option is prostitution. We’re discussing this with authorities on the district level, so that when transgendered people arrive, dressed however, they are not discriminated against. They should be treated as citizens with access to this type of privileges, scholarships, and services that the government gives to other people, so they can have a trade. And we’ve had a positive response. We’ve also asked on a district level for the establishment of places to sell condoms in public, to help limit the spread of HIV, along with a person who can dispense information, but at this time even basic salaries are not sufficient to purchase condoms.
We succeeded in establishing the office of the Social Ombudsman, who receives complaints from citizens, gives support, investigates complaints, and punishes wrongdoers. They are going to open a window for people to lodge complaints, related to sexual diversity—whether you were fired or kicked out of your school or your apartment, or suffered some physical attack. They’ll work on your case and give you advice—without discrimination. These are the things we have seen on the positive side of the balance.
There have been some interesting developments in working with the men and women members of the Chamber of Deputies. We eliminated the terms "homosexualism" and "homosexual practices" from the legal vocabulary (considered under the criminal code to be aggravating factors in the crime of corrupting minors). Representatives from all political parties accepted this change as natural and normal at the negotiating table. They said it was fine, a good proposal, and moved it forward to the Senate. In Mexico City, it will also be approved. So progress has been made.
The right-wing National Action Party and the Church have led powerful attacks against gays and lesbians. We requested a meeting with Church leaders to ask them to stop discriminating against sexually diverse people. There was no response, so I made a proposal to groups of religious people (who happen to be gay) to make a pilgrimage to the Virgin of Guadalupe. It was a great initiative, because we will reclaim the right to be spiritual, to profess a religion, without having to worry about the religious hierarchy. When I look back on this, I will know I did the best that I possibly could. For my private life, I steal time. I don’t really have time, just little pieces, days, sometimes hours. My work schedule includes lesbian groups, the lesbian-gay movement, my work in Congress, the legislative initiatives on which I work, marches, meetings, protests, publishing a magazine, writing. Plus the congressional commissions on which I sit—which are important for me: equality and gender, human rights, and population and development. But I just don’t have time for everything.
And I will look back and realize the true meanings of many things, like courage. Courage is when, in Chiapas, you ask a general to remove his troops from a community because they are entering houses at night, frightening people. You have to talk to that general, to confront someone with weapons and power, to overcome your timidity and fear. Today they tell me I’m going to Chiapas, to lead the people on a march into the community of La Realidad. When we get to the roadblock, there will be armed paramilitaries. These are the most risky situations: entering communities in which my truck is surrounded by paramilitaries threatening to burn it, saying that they will kill us. It used to make me afraid, but it doesn’t any more. Because I am never alone. Even when people ask me to go in front, to confront the troops or the paramilitaries, they come with me, so we’re a group.
My fear disappears when I begin to speak in these situations, without raising my voice. I just try to explain to people what’s going on. I’m afraid inside, but calm outside. It’s only when I get home that I react. The morning after, I wake up and say, "What did I do?" That could be brave. I don’t know. I’m not someone who takes risks. Others have been beaten up, but this has not happened to me. If that happens to me some day, it will be part of the work. I just hope they don’t hurt me too badly.
But I take courage by realizing that here is an opening, and we have been able to move forward on difficult cases. I’ve gotten a reputation of being a good advocate. But it works because there is openness on the part of the other side. They are small cases, but they are very important, because they have to do with people’s lives—someone in jail, rape victims, a pregnant woman, a person kicked out of work after twenty-five years. Very small cases, but it’s their lives. And it’s so worth fighting for.

Raji Sourani is Gaza’s foremost human rights lawyer, and the founder and director of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights and former director of the Gaza Center for Rights and Law. In the 1980s, Sourani was widely recognized for his effective defense of Palestinians before the Israeli military courts. In connection with his defense work, Sourani was four times held in detention by the Israelis, beaten and subjected to mental and physical abuse. Sourani has represented Palestinians facing deportation and closely monitored detention and prison conditions. Reaching out to Israeli human rights organizations, he formed links regarded with suspicion by fellow Palestinians but which proved to be effective in the pursuit of human rights. He was detained by the Palestinian Authority in 1995, following statements critical of their establishment of a state security court. Since the signing of the Declaration of Principles by the Government of Israel and the PLO, and the establishment of limited Palestinian self-rule, Sourani has advocated strict adherence to international standards for the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority. And despite the danger of repercussions, he is an outspoken critic of human rights violations committed by both sides. In his bold and principled stance, Sourani has won wide respect, and has been recognized by numerous international organizations for his courageous work.

We Palestinians are living in a highly complicated situation, which is unprecedented in modern history. Six years after the signing of the Oslo Accords, what we are experiencing in the occupied territories is a system of de facto apartheid, developed under the auspices of peace. We are nearly a forgotten people, consigned to a second-class existence. We are far from practicing our right of self-determination and independence.
After fifty years of conflict, and thirty years of occupation in the Palestinian Territories, the Oslo Accords were signed nearly seven years ago by the government of Israel and the PLO. These accords were intended to provide a transitional interim arrangement for a period of five years as a means of moving towards a final resolution of the conflict. The basic philosophy behind the accords was that they were designed to serve two main purposes. The first was to develop a setting in which trust could be built between the two sides; the second was to develop a framework in which to resolve the final status negotiations within five years. It is clear that trust between the two sides has not improved, and in fact, in some areas are at an all-time low. Furthermore, the final status negotiations did not even begin within the five-year interim period, which ended on May 4, 1999.
Policies since the signing of the Oslo Accords include aggressive settlement expansion, fragmentation of the Palestinian Territories by the construction of settler bypass roads, military installations, and the establishment of new settlements, and unprecedented levels of land confiscation. Furthermore, the Israeli policy of closure over the entire Palestinian Territories has not only severely restricted the right of freedom of movement, but has dislocated families from different areas. Closure has also cut the Palestinian Territories off economi-cally and socially, both from the rest of the world, and from the other parts of the Occupied Territories themselves. This has led to further economic deterioration and dependence on Israel. In Jerusalem, Israeli policy has been to eject Palestinian residents, through house demolitions, the imposition of Israeli domestic law over Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem, withdrawal of residency permits, harassment, and settlement activity.
House demolitions provide one example of what Palestinian families face in their encounters with Israeli occupation authorities. Homes are demolished as a form of illegal collective punishment against families of whom one member may be suspected of an offense. Alternatively, homes are demolished simply because they were built without the necessary building permit from the occupation authorities—a permit which in many cases is practically impossible to obtain. The outcome of these demolitions is to impose collective punishment and to "ethnically cleanse" the Palestinian population. Palestinian families are often given only twenty-four hours notice to remove their belongings when Israel moves to clear certain areas for settlement. These families suddenly find themselves out on the street, their home demolished in minutes before their very eyes.
Of course, I have to talk about torture. Under international law, torture is absolutely illegal, and we cannot be selective. We have to have one standard for all people, Israeli or Palestinian, regardless of race or religion. But for decades the Israeli General Security Service has been torturing Palestinian detainees with impunity. Recently, a report released by the Israeli Special Controller confirmed what we have been asserting to the world community for years—torture has been widely and systematically used by Israeli interrogators against Palestinian detainees.
After twenty years of struggle against torture, we—Palestinian and Israeli human rights organizations and lawyers—received a decision from the Israeli High Court of Justice in September 1999, finally recognizing that torture is systematically practiced. The Court, however, went on to find that the reason torture is illegal in Israel is simply because there is no law to legalize it. The Court, scandalously, went as far as to suggest that if the government of Israel should decide that they wanted to allow the use of torture, they should pass a law to that effect.
The Palestinian people are impatient to have their state in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, a combined area that composes only a scant 18 percent of historical Palestine. Even so, the current Israeli government has gone even further and has clearly stated its intentions: the complete annexation of East Jerusalem, no return to the 1967 borders, no right of return for refugees, and the continuing existence of Israeli settlements.
Clearly this does not meet the minimum level of Palestinian aspirations. This has become a situation leading nowhere. Some time ago, Israel had a choice between divorce or marriage. Israel chose divorce, represented by the two-state option, in order to preserve the Jewish nature of the state of Israel. But the most basic requirement of the two-state option is that the Palestinian people have their own state. This minimal requirement has yet to be fulfilled. The one-state option (with equal rights for all citizens regardless of race or religion) was rejected by Israel. Instead all we have are fragmented Bantustans of Palestinian control, with the Israeli military occupation continuing over the Palestinian Territories as a whole.
It must be stressed that in the past six years, the Israeli occupation, in its legal and physical form, has remained a very real part of our daily lives. The world may think that peace is on the way here, but the reality on the ground is very different. I can assure you that never before has the overall human rights situation deteriorated as dramatically. The Gaza Strip has a total area of around 165 square kilometers, of which Israel continues to control around 42 percent. Twenty Israeli settlements have been established in the Gaza Strip, housing some five thousand settlers. In the remaining 58 percent of the Strip, 1.2 million Palestinians live in some of the most cramped conditions in the world.
In the year 2000, with the fall of the Berlin wall and the end of the apartheid regime in South Africa behind us, this situation cannot be tolerated. In fact, if the situation continues it will inevitably lead to a renewed cycle of bloodshed and violence. We observe with deep disappointment that the fruits on the ground of the Oslo process could not be further from the stated intention of building confidence between the parties and resolving a final agreement for a just and lasting peace in the region. We also affirm our belief that there can be no possibility of real, just, and lasting peace without respect for human rights.
The Oslo Accords were signed between the government of Israel and the PLO, the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, expressing their aspirations and having led their legitimate resistance against the occupation. We, the Palestinian human rights community, believed from the very beginning that it was essential to both our self-respect as a people, and for the ultimate achievement of our goal of a democratic state, that the practices of the Palestinian Authority, in the very limited areas in which it was granted jurisdiction under the Oslo Accords, be closely monitored. We were, from the outset, committed to the development of a society that would respect the rule of law, democratic principles, and human rights.
We believe that the particular experiences of the Palestinian people, and the consequent development of a strong Palestinian civil society, can enable us to develop a unique state in the region—namely, a truly democratic state. We still hope to succeed in this goal, and many Palestinians remain steadfast in working towards this end.
As local human rights organizations, we thought that the struggle for the development of this democratic society and the strengthening of Palestinian civil society would be easier than the struggle against the Israeli occupation. Now we see we were wrong; it is a deeply complex process and much more difficult than we imagined. We are deeply concerned by certain practices of the Palestinian Authority which violate human rights standards, including restrictions on the freedom of expression and assembly, undermining the independence of the judiciary, and the establishment of state security courts.
Without in any way offering this as an excuse for those practices, we nevertheless deem it necessary to express our concern at the role played by both the Israeli and American administrations in promoting these violations of human rights by the Palestinian Authority. This role is particularly perplexing since the stated strategic interest of both these parties is real and lasting peace in the region. The development of a genuinely democratic system in the Palestinian Territories not only promotes the necessary stability for such peace, but is in fact an essential prerequisite for any kind of true peace. For fifty years Israel has complained that it should not be expected to make peace with dictators. This only makes Israeli and American obstacles to the development of a genuine democratic society in the Palestinian Territories all the more perplexing, while raising serious questions as to their genuine intentions.
No one needs peace—a just peace—more than those who are oppressed. The fact that the Palestinian people have become the victims of those who were once victims themselves only shows how important it is to remember this point. In terms of both political and human history, it is deeply saddening when the victim becomes the victimizer of people who are guilty of nothing except existing in their homeland. The Palestinian people have suffered for the past century, and for the past fifty years have been the victims of Israeli human rights violations. We must all acknowledge the lesson of history—that reconciliation cannot begin without recognition and apology.
True peace must be between people, not simply between leaders. The possibility of this materializing is severely undermined by the Israeli policy of closure, which, as well as violating the basic human rights of Palestinians, also creates a division between peoples by preventing any meaningful contact between Palestinians and Israelis.
We used to have an excellent relationship with our Israeli counterparts, human rights groups and lawyers. They used to come to us, we would go to them. They would invite us to lecture or speak at public meetings. We would work alongside each other on particular cases and causes. This created wonderful chemistry. But now, after more than five years of the closure policy, we are totally disconnected from our Israeli friends. We still cooperate, by telephone, E-mail and fax, but we are no longer able to have the human contact, because we can no longer come and go as we please.
I believe deeply in the need for peace, but my own life taught me that there can be no peace, no justice, without human rights. Witnessing massive and violent human rights violations on a daily basis makes quite a mark on a young mind and heart. In my youth I saw many people killed, arrested, or beaten before my eyes—including my brother, who was arrested, in early 1968. He was in prison for three years. As a kid, at school, I saw the army beat students for participating in demonstrations. Our daily life was really hell. My family is deeply rooted in this place—I’m not, by definition, one of the many refugees in Gaza. But everybody felt like strangers in our homeland.
Our lives were totally controlled by the occupation. When you are as young as I was and see all this happening, it leaves a strong impression. You begin to ask: What’s going on? Why is this happening? Why are these unfair things happening? Why was our neighbor’s house demolished? Why was my brother imprisoned? Of course anyone who feels and begins to understand what is going on wants a better future, a better life, and you want to express it in one way or another.

For me the next stage came after my arrest and imprisonment. I saw the other side of the moon. All I had seen before did not prepare me for the hell I found myself in, even if I, as a lawyer, was treated to the "VIP" hell. When you are being subjected to torture, you want to die ten times a day. And I saw how torture was being used systematically, even on kids as young as twelve.
I thought: all these prisoners, their miserable conditions, the systematic torture and abuse, and nobody knows anything about it. And then I thought of the house demolitions, the land confiscations, the daily beatings. I said to myself: I’m a lawyer, can’t somebody be a witness to these crimes? Can’t we reduce the suffering even minimally, some way or another? I thought that surely it was possible, through sustained human rights work, to let the world know about the practices of the Israeli occupation, and in doing so to help these victims. So that is what I decided to do. And I’ve been doing it for twenty years now.
I’ll never forget one time after being released from administrative detention, having been detained simply because of my human rights work, the Israeli officer said to me, "Raji, this is your last arrest, and I hope you know what that means." It was a threat, but we believed in our work, in our struggle, in human rights. I hate to speak about our own suffering as human rights activists. We have to be strong enough to make people feel, and know, that we can defend them. We have to be strong enough to take care of the real victims.
I simply believe that human rights, democracy, and the rule of law are not luxuries. They are crucial necessities—the oxygen of meaningful life. We see the violations on a daily basis. We see the victims, we know them, we live with them. What keeps us going is the belief that you can do something, even if it is just a little something. And even if we cannot improve the situation, at least we can stop it from deteriorating further.
I believe we must continue to struggle to defend the rights of the victims, we must continue to reject all forms of human rights abuses. We must believe that it is worth it to make even small changes. For the sake of the victims of these abuses and injustices, we must carry out our work professionally. We must be vigorous in our defense of the persecuted and bold enough to never stop opposing their victimizers, no matter who they may be.
I don’t believe in violence, and I don’t think it is a solution. Nor do I believe that Palestinians are the only ones whose blood is sacred. All human life is sacred, no matter which nationality, race, or religion. But we cannot accept the situation as it is. We must do something.
I don’t want to see more suffering. Whatever we do today may bear its fruits tomorrow. Like Martin Luther King Jr., we too have a dream—a dream and a very legitimate agenda, to get rid of the occupation, to determine our own destiny, and to have an independent state—a state where democracy, human rights and the rule of law prevail. As I have said, the obstacles we are now facing are very complicated, much more so than pre-Oslo. But we are determined to go on with the struggle—all the way.

no such thing as breathing room

2005-11-06T11:10:00.000-08:00

This semester has been one thing after another and thus, I've neglected the heck out of writing anything on this page. I'm writing now with the hope of correcting that, however briefly.

That said, there's some fun things coming up this week that I am tremendously exciting about.
First, BSU is hosting a point of view conference on HUMAN RIGHTS!!!! Click on the subject heading for the schedule. The events that I'm planning on attending for sure are:
“Human Rights Definition” with sociology professor Virginia Husting. 1-1:50 p.m., Student Union Farnsworth Room. “The Hague War Crimes Tribunal” with history professor Nick Miller. 9-9:50 p.m., Student Union Bishop Barnwell Room.“The Environment and Human Rights,” with anthropology professor John Ziker and history professor Lisa Brady. 2:40-3:30 p.m., Student Union Farnsworth Room.• “Understanding Globalization: Pros/Cons,” with the Boise State Talkin’ Broncos Debate Team. 4:10-5 p.m., Student Union Farnsworth Room.

Beyond this, I've spent many many hours in the past week researching graduate programs and trying to narrow down an academic career path I truly wish to pursue. My choices, beyond the specific disciplines of English, History or Sociology, are human rights studies (of which, the graduate program choices are QUITE limited) and American Studies. After having researched both hrs and american studies, I'm actually leaning towards Human Rights Studies OR International Relations with a specific emphasis on Human Rights. I want to understand America in a global context and Human Rights in its global applicability. I've spent days now going through various human rights journals, human rights syllabi, graduate programs here and abroad and faculty bios to weigh my options. Graduate Programs in Human Rights include the University of Denver's , Columbia University's MA in Human Rights Studies and a plethora of degrees/programs in places such as Ottawa and Oxford among others. Graduate/PhD programs abound in International Relations however and many of the Universities that I'm seriously considering have both faculty and research fascilities/programs/journals dedicated to Human Rights Studies. I've come across some wonderful human rights journals in this "scavanger hunt" that make me excited about the idea of being a scholar in this field.
Here are the links to those:
Human Rights Dialogue
http://www.carnegiecouncil.org/listpublications.php/prmPubTypeID/39

Ethics and International Affairs Journal http://www.carnegiecouncil.org/listpublications.php/prmPubTypeID/37

Harvard Human Rights Journal
http://www.law.harvard.edu/students/orgs/hrj/

From this research, I've had the pleasure of trying to figure who can be called "Experts" in the field of Human Rights. I have favorite authors and books, certainly, but trying to narrow done particular theorists, theoretical approaches, renowned scholars and academic contributions has proved quite challenging.

I'm also being interviewed this week for the "Women Making History" award at BSU, submitting poems for publication, researching for my senior honors thesis prospectus, researching for my McNair's project, taking a workshop on Understanding Trauma and attending a parent-teacher conference. Researching the professor bios and especially their academic publications is also incredibly exciting, as the idea unfolds: I could work with these people someday. I could have these discussions, review books such as these, publish my own research. I am not ruling out American studies either, just trying to decide on a graduate program that will allow the challenge, freedom and experience to do the kind of work I want to do. More to come later. ~peace~

"Crash" (update of sorts)

2005-10-03T18:44:00.000-07:00

So I'm trying at the moment, to set up a film night to watch and discuss the film "Crash." I've even lined up a faculty member who's volunteered to lead such a discussion. The movie made me think of bell hooks' analysis of the movie "Kids" and of various Spike Lee films. It also made me want to go back and reread her book "Outlaw Culture" and Trinh Minh-ha's book on cultural/critical representations in film as well. I cannot say how much I utterly adore this movie simply because of the fact that every second you think you've stereotyped a character, that you've distilled them down to the hollywood-bullshit essence, the movie turns and you see another layer and then another and then another. I bought this movie because I hope someday to be able to assign unsuspecting students readings such as the ones listed above and have them dissect this film and others, seeing film as a space for critical thinking. "American Beauty" has always topped my list in this regard as has "The Business of Fancy Dancing."

I'm working on my senior project right now for the honors college...of which...I have no clue what I want to do yet so it's a good thing this is just the proposal stage. I'm also researching graduate programs and schools and researching the history of the pride parade in Idaho. I think I would like to find a way to use either my honors project or my interdisciplinary project to truly synthesize all the work I've done so far in human rights studies. So that's where I'm at right now, academically anyhow.

On a side note, I've been assigned to co-present poems by Anne Carson in poetry class and I'm feeling quite privileged at the opportunity to do so. When our professor handed out a list of poets and I realized I hadn't read most of them on there, I felt the need to go browse the library shelves for any poets/books that really caught me. Thanks to this, I know have a lovely selection of poetry books to supplement my assigned readings. These are the books I'm reading right now. Some of which are by authors I have read before but most are not.

Writing Self writing Nation: Essays on Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee
From the Cables of Genocide: Poems on Love and Hunger (poems by Lorna Dee Cervantes)
When Living was a Labor Camp (poems by Diana Garcia)
Coming Close (poems by Helen Chasin)
Glass, Irony and God (poems by Anne Carson)
Hotel Insomnia (poems by Charles Simic)
From The Devotions (poems by Carl Phillips)
New Letters from Hiroshima and other poems (by Alexander Kuo)
Powers (poems by Marisha Chamberlain)
Post-Nationalist American Studies (thanks to Marcy for the suggestion on this one)

and that's about it, beyond reading the fifth Harry Potter book with my son and The Chronicles of Narnia as well. Update finished...wish me luck on getting this whole film thing down. ~peace~

oh my my

2005-09-26T16:06:00.000-07:00

BSU is working through/on/over and then some on a bill which would, according to the Arbiter, designate "a week in October as Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer, (GLBTQ) week."

Can you imagine the type of "discussion" this proposed bill is producing? If not, do follow the link above and see for yourself. I find it interesting that this reminds me of the campaign against "special rights" for gays/lesbians. Do you remember this? Do you remember how that brilliant couching of GLBT human rights as "special rights" made people both supporting and opposing gay rights question the legitimacy of what really should be seen as humanizing initiatives. EQUAL rights not special rights. Human rights. The issue with this bill is that it addresses the issue of visibility. People who identify "openly" as GLBTQ still in this state and many others risk losing their jobs AND as the lovely threads linked above show, are still subject to ridiculously stupid stereotypes based purely on their sexual preference. It is always amazing to me just how much a power language has to manipulate or rather, how easily language is manipulated to parrot a belief system as fact rather than question the logic behind the argument. The problem with saying that "those people" shouldn't have recognition, a week to celebrate the "diversity" the University and the community are supposedly trying to promote and the initiative to recognize the contribution of the GLBTQ community in Idaho is in those two words: "THOSE PEOPLE."

To be perfectly honest, I'm not sure how I feel about the bill which is why I've remained silent up until now on the issue. My reservation on it is only this...will such a week serve to humanize or to further dehumanize and marginalize? I do not know. I want to think it could serve as huge opportunity for people to see one another as people, rather than labels but at the same time, I don't feel that I know enough about the bill to really comment on it. It saddens me to see many of the responses. I'm going to try and find out more about it and post updates here when I can. Until then, peace.

Discussing Racism with Children

2005-09-19T13:29:00.000-07:00

My son and I had a very interesting talk on racism last night. I was trying to explain the difference between race and racism to him and he said, "Well I understand that all of the kids who are the same stick together, like the two Korean kids in my class. Is that what you mean?" I was like wow, how do I approach this in a way that really creates understanding and opens up communication on racism in a way that encourages him to see what is captured in terms such as "privilege" and "hegemony" and yes, even racism? What does it mean that "all the kids who are the same" stick together? Do they? Do all the poor kids and rich kids stick together? What about those kids who don't fit into easy brackets of self-identification? He also brought up a very interesting theory he has...he said that he thinks these two Korean kids are simply "naturally" better at math and science because video games come from "Asian" countries primarily.

So, I thought it wise and timely that he and I learn more about race, culture, ethnicity and diversity together. One idea I have is to take him to a film that BSU/Diverse Perspectives in Film, is featuring Tuesday: Race is the place...which according to the flyer, addresses: How do American artists address our nation's most pressing social issue? Using spoken, sung, and chanted word, African American, Latino, Asian American, Pacific Islander and Native American authors, performance artists, poets and singers explore the pain, frustration and humor of racism in America.

This description made me curious: IS racism the "most pressing social issue?" I mean, can you really address this one issue without having to look at class, without having to look at gender and without including (especially inAmerica) all of those people who are not Christian, English-speaking or heterosexual? I know I harp on this but I think that such a statement really should make you question. I think it will be a great film just to witness how artists and activists are responding to racism and I really am hoping that it helps my son and I to better be able to discuss the reality beyond perceptions of whiteness and what that entails. Suggestions as to books or other films that might be helpful are very welcome. ~peace~

Politics of Silence and Visibility

2005-09-13T16:24:00.000-07:00

This letter ran yesterday in the Arbiter

"The idea President Bush hates black Americans is ridiculous"

You have got to be kidding me. First off, you deserve no credit for the port-a-potties being brought in. Are you so dense that you believe that you were the one that thought of that first? If President Bush is so against Black Americans, please tell me why Condoleezza Rice works next to him? Or are you going to claim he does that for show? Of course our soldiers need to have guns, 10,000 dense ignorant people are not leaving. They need to protect themselves. It's sad that you are an American (at least I am assuming) and you can't thank the troops for exposing himself or herself to disease, or being killed! Give me a break! If people are breaking into businesses and stealing IPODS and TV's something has to be done. People can't think that they can get away with this! The troops are there to help; President Bush has to make difficult decisions while you complain. So I suggest that you do your research before putting your opinion out there for all to see. You give future journalists a bad name! I am going into journalism and I am offended by your ignorance.
Jessica Bruton
Boise, ID

This is my response:

Jennifer Edwards
Boise, Idaho
Major: Interdisciplinary Studies

I am writing to address the very passionate argument Jessica Bruton made in her letter to editor titled, "The idea President Bush hates black Americans is ridiculous." Notice I said address, rather than engage in what could easily become a written ego peeing contest, which is quite boring, and well, useless. First, I'd like clarification. Please explain to me, who the "10,000 dense, ignorant people" are exactly and how Condoleeza Rice's presence in the White House is automatically and unquestionably indicative of an administration's racial equality?
I do not see the connections and I would love for you to help me understand. Also, please explain to me how questioning political decisions, policies and government officials automatically and unquestionably renders one offensive or inept as a journalist?

I did not see the piece critiqued, nor did I find enough evidence in your response to support the points that made you "sad" that someone making these statements is an American. It would be wonderful if we could actually discuss such discrepancies in opinion, not in blanket statements, arguments and posturing, but as critical thinkers and concerned, educated citizens. It troubles me to see someone I think to be very bright, using an emotional argument to silence criticism. To me, the value of a University education IS the encouragement of critical thinking and NOT to serve as a space for sustaining the view of government as shepherd, to a public of happy, unquestioning sheep.

*****************************************
I rarely ever even read the arbiter yet alone respond to letters to the editor but this particular letter really made me think about the politics of silence and visibility. I did not happen to catch the particular piece that she was responding to and as I stated in my response, I did not feel there was enough evidence in her letter to make me understand her points. Instead, reading this made me think of how easily criticism is silenced. Written off. Discouraged. Yet clearly emotional reactionary pieces such as this are used CONSISTENTLY and treated as irrefutable. Maybe they are. After all, how can you truly disprove one's opinion, if they refuse to either use facts to support their views or refrain from the lapse into blanket statements and circular arguments?

What really, really made me want to respond was where admonished the "journalist" for not having done their research "before putting your opinion out there for all to see." Her entire piece completely BLURS the line between opinion and opinion stated (and assumed) as fact, in the same fascinating fashion that FOX news does. Op-Ed's such as this do NOT invite discussion, they silence. They attempt to render opposition invisible and irrelevant. Opposition is relevant. Dissent is relevant. Critical thinking is relevant and I am beyond tired blanket statements used to silence.

I think I might actually build upon this very thing for one of my three projects...the politics of silence and visibility. In this lovely climate of a perpetual war of words, I think it ideal to arm yourself with the most under appreciated weaponry...the ability to listen, to think and to question, to educate yourself and to challenge that "ignorance" first and foremost in yourself as well as in others. ~peace~

how it ends

2005-09-12T21:58:00.000-07:00

This is a poem I wrote about divorce but also about trying to explain to a child how adults can be SO unwilling to negotiate. Some people really must make an enemy or hateful situation out of something rather than see things end peacefully. Some people seem to think that anger is more a normal and "rational" response to frustration than trying to foster love, compassion and understanding. So I wrote this poem after trying to explain to my son about divorce and changes in behavior as adults become less and less friends and more and more strangers bordering on being enemies. I've revised it slightly here. My son calls divorce "Divortion" which I find quite an interesting idea. Sounds more like a process that way, does it not? Divortion? Anyhow, here's the poem.

"how it ends"

adults fight
and buildings fall
years become secondary
to the present
war
and words are shrapnel
bullets
and glass shards
depending upon the amount of time
silence has nurtured
hurt
i can not explain it
to make my child understand
he holds my hands and cries
and i cry with him
couldn't you just say you're sorry?
couldn't you try again?
why do people have to hate?
why does everyone go away
in the end?

Other Voices

2005-09-12T21:29:00.000-07:00

I found it quite humbling today to sit in a classroom where the faculty spoke to the students both in English and Spanish, interchangably as if everyone could understand perfectly. I thought it was great because I think those of us who only know English tend to forget just how unsettling it is to others when "we" expect that "they" speak to us a certain way.

Ealier in the semeter, I found myself wincing in a class where the discussion turned to the infamous candy vagina incident that apparently put BSU in the news for something other than football (that in itself should be cause for celebration). Actually I am happy to be a student here, I would just prefer that this University was better known for its academic endeavors and committment to excellence in education rather than sports. Back to candy vaginas...the discussion brought up very interesting points, namely should a woman be reduced to a body part even if the idea is to promote respect for a woman's body? What if a group on campus were to try selling candy penises? I ended up in a history class with many of the tiny group of men in the gender studies class and they were already quickly labeling the professor (that horrid word) "a feminazi" but added that they'd keep the class because they heard she's an easy instructor.

Sometimes I want to bury my head and ignore everything. Then that image from "The Shadow of No Towers" comes back to haunt me: "The Ostrich Party" and words find their way into class readings again...words such as Adrienne Rich's "Claiming an Education" or Audre Lorde's poetry or bell hooks and I am happily reminded that this rather expensive endeavor of trying to grow into something other than a human cog is more about humanity than those in power like to admit. I really do believe that education is critical for an evolution of consciousness and don't we need that? Don't we need that more than anything right now?

The news scares me. I read more and more and I find myself withdrawing more from the lovely debates on right and wrong because these only seem to cloud the issues. I really do think too the day that the press focused more on what the presidential candidate's WIVES were going to wear and how fashionable they were, the notion of critical thinking in relation to politics and certainly the media hit an all time low. I wanted to hide in the corner with the newest book by Seymour Hersh until I was sure that the illusion of dialogue hadn't really fooled anyone. I am interested more now than ever before in creating communities that work to maintain real conversations with those who are more interested in investing in social/global change beyond thinking of it as an idealistic/abstract concept. Sounds nice, but you know, we live in the "real world." It's so ironic how the reality of the "real world" doesn't necessarily connect with many U.S. citizens beyond the borders of their television screens and yet those two words embody a concept that is consistently used to shut people up. To silence. To disillusion. To breed a very convenient apathy.

I would like to hear other people speak for a change. SPEAK for change.
Speak to one another and to truly listen. That's the insight I had from class today. I walked out of there quite happy to have not known the language I was listening to because it made me think of how wonderful it is to be in a space where power and privilege do not go unchallenged, even if they aren't being questioned outright. I can't think of a better place to first challenge power and privilege than in oneself and in one's own thinking.

~peace~

Differences, authority and learning

2005-09-07T15:44:00.000-07:00

This is part of an assignment for one class and a challenge in another but I want to put it out here just to see what others think...

What is the difference between a scholar and good student? Also, how can one successfully "challenge" the "hegemony" of the learning process/environment? The second question comes from a perspectives of inquiry class and a professor suggesting from day one that we, challenge the authority in every class from questioning how one might actually accomplish the "learning objectives" in a course in any tangible way, to questioning how one truly knows what they know beyond positivism and dualistic thinking/solutions.

I've seen or heard rather, more than one professor go against the "banking concept of education" in favor of creating a participatory (and more egalitarian) climate for learning. I'm curious though how far that goes if students are unwilling to take control of their education, take responsibility for their own learning and NOT expect to play the role of empty vessel or as this professor likes to say, mindless automaton? Also, can you discount other factors that might influence one's in class participation? How does gender, race, class, religious and even sexual preference contribute to "learning" and even more, to who will view themselves as a "scholar" rather than someone who views higher education as a means to a specific (usually career change based) end. Anyhow, if anyone has any thoughts on this, please feel free to share.

Update

2005-08-19T10:45:00.000-07:00

I've been away from this place for quite a while! School resumes Monday and so I thought I should use this blog again for what it was intended...to help process and navigate human rights from an academic perspective. The news offers no shortage of stories regarding rampant violations lately and oh, Bush is coming to Idaho. How pleasant indeed.

This year I'll begin my honors senior project (one of three senior projects I have to do) and I'm in the process of narrowing down what that might focus on. I'm also beginning the McNair's Program at BSU this semester. I'm sure all of this will prove rather fruitful for blog posts. :)

Until then... ~peace~

To Stop the Bleeding of America (or, thoughts on the "feminization of poverty"

2005-04-19T23:51:00.000-07:00

Those "fleecing of America" reports always amuse me. Every new report makes me wonder if this is truly news or simply business as usual for many companies. I would like to use this space though to address a couple of issues.

1st. Behind every statistic is a human being. For some people, having 'no money' means having to forego shopping at the mall or fast food or purchasing something. For others having no money is so literal it hurts. It is hunger that keeps you awake at night and absolute fear that keeps you running all day. It is constant prayer for some people: prayer that their car won't break down, the baby-sitter won't be sick, the day care will accept your child an hour earlier because that's when your shift starts or won't penalize you for being fifteen minutes late because your boss wouldn't let you go. For some people it is the prayer that this ache or that ache isn't fatal. That your teeth won't literally rot out of your head. That your children's clothes will hold up for a little longer. For some people that money you spent on a mocha latte would've meant food or medicine or the ability to pay down old medical bills or extend payments on the obscenely high power bills because their tiny apartment lacks livable insulation.

2nd. Every budget cut that cuts "social programs" as pathetically skeletal as they are, turns another human being into a statistic. That human being could be you. It is a simple fact that most people in America would not survive a "catastrophic illness or accident" such as cancer or traumatic brain injury. In fact, I have personally seen families drain their entire savings and max-out their insurance and still end up on what people who have never had to be on "public assistance" scorn as "Welfare." If you knew how many parents put their children to sleep at night hungry as they themselves go to work hungry, would it change your view of those who receive "food stamps" or "cash assitance" or even "WIC?" If you knew how many parents cannot afford insurance for their children, would you look at your own children or someone else's children any differently, wondering how that might feel? To not be able to afford decent shoes for you or your children. To not be able to see a doctor at $80-100 for a fifteen minute check-up. To not be able to afford "organic, low fat whole foods" from the local co-op. To not be able to pay your electric bill, or put gas into your car, or to own a car that you can choose not to drive for conscience sake. There really are leeches that drain Federal and State budgets but we look for them in all the wrong places and mistake them for all the wrong faces. We do not see the corporations who bilk countless dollars from schools and health clinics to build more prisons and shopping centers. We do not have a condescending phrase or simple stereotype for the corporation that receives "Welfare." Nor do we have follow up stories to those heartwrenching commercials about hunger in America, that show just how many of those on "welfare" are children who CANNOT BY LAW earn a wage, let alone a living wage. Nor do we see hear stories about how the local welfare office won't "go after" those "deadbeat parents" for court ordered child supports due to consistent and relentless budget cuts. We only read the occasional stories about a tiny group lobbying the State to insure everyone within its borders. We do not however, get to read how many of those lobbyists are disproportionately non-white and unthinkably poor. Or how this relates to those countless white-faced, well-fed lobbyists who continue feeding off the those they manage to push into greater economic lows.

Behind every statistic is a human face. Every time some politician claims he or she is answering to their constituents' pressure to cut social programs, I wish they had to stare at the face of every human being who their cuts will cause to suffer hunger, illness and even greater poverty and most likely, even greater discrimination. What tools will succeed in dismantling the myth of "equal opportunity for all" and translate it into reality?

Is there such a thing as a "feminist poem"

2005-04-18T22:38:00.000-07:00

If so, would these poems of mine qualify? Or would they quantify? Or would they simply echo like walls, stone-mute witness...

-Mother-
"You are just a mother"
he said
"you can't understand
how it feels to be me"
beaten on the playground
to be tough
to be tough
"you can't know my embarrassment"
at the first hint of tears?
at losing?
at being called "a girl"
"a pussy!"
"queer!"

I touch his face
catch those tears
but my hands clench in powerlessness
and rage
No.
I don't need balls to comprehend
the threat of punishment
or the push for conformity
when every breath is competition
and every pause is fingered by the accusation and implication:
"What, are you scared?"

No.
I want to wrap my fingers around each neck
and rip from the minds and the tongues
the words than tell my son
Exactly how "To be a man"
I want them to know that I won't let them beat him into hatred
Or beat him down
No.
Because I am his mother
Because I understand how wrong this feels
Protest uttered in brokenness silenced and repulsed by the taste of brokenness
Tears and rage the pieces of glass
stained by the blood of those trying so hard
to beat the man into every boy
and annihilate the woman in him.

*(For my son and any son and daughters too)
*******************************************

-War Poetry-
She said something years ago
joked about the ache in her hip
the constant limp from it
"resulting from a landmine"
shellshocked, her eyes still registered
the imprint of her husband's boot
"Such things bought with a single diamond ring
and a signature and an oath or was it the oath first, then the signature?"

There is no justice
no justice of the peace present
no peace process here woman
pressed in these sheets skin pressed flatter and colder
more rigid than the last leaves of spring
made hard, thin and brittle by relentless snow.

I stood I stared shocked and scared by the whispers of you
swelling into the twisted branches of a tree
the flood the bathtub unasked questions bone calligraphy thread
in the ebb of severed wrist-flesh torn in protest
an ever open toothless angry mouth and no
there is no justice just protest
and no answer that will satisfy
throw another thicker quarter inch stitch over
those eyes
those eyes that could mimic the twilight sky
ready to storm ready to steal another to drown another invisible her
before she reaches the other shore and declares a proclamation of liberation
Written in tears a song for her daughters, her sons, her mothers, her sisters, her lovers, herself
We simply cannot ever fill the demand
Fast enough
Supply
the demand
Well enough
to satiate the need
for newer fresher lambs
with newer fresher blood.

********************************************
-this strange occupation called woman-
did the word you just said stick in your throat
did it sting a little going down
or hurt
coming up
I felt it ripple in my head
cold against my temple
your coldness a loaded gun
and I write you letters with my eyes
rage (disguised as tears) knows its own language
years learn in time, to speak in code
always the same: asking for pardon apologizing for demanding
for failing to succeed in this strange occupation
called woman
when really,
You pull the trigger with every snicker
every time you ignore and pretend innocent oblivious indifference
as if to say, "What did I do to piss you off THIS TIME?"
********************************************
-assumed-
The myth goes:
all women who call themselves feminists
must hate men
because they have been hurt by a few
or are too ugly to "get men"
or are just happier when they are angry
when they can cry: "abuse"

How can I answer with the dirt heaped onto my head
the vines of the past all bloom flowers and fruit for wine
to deaden
to present anger as a garnish
and viable criticism
as an afterthought

"You can either eat it or starve." She said and handed me contentment
as a blue plate special.

*(this poem is NOT about the victimization of "all" women. What it IS expressing and addressing is the lack of language strong and skilled enough to resurrect what many today prefer to see (feminism) as something dead and better left buried.)
******************************************
-complicated-
i do not want you to make peace with me
to conceed without ever hearing or having to hear the demands
to do so is to place forever
however lovingly
your hand across my mouth
whether your lips or your fingers the result is the same
in this silence however long however calm however seemingly beautiful
in this silence it is always
one sinks so that the other can survive
when neither can seem to see nor say
if we continue on this way
we'll both drown.

*******************************************
-Massive head trauma-
Your mouth impales with words and silences sunk so deep they cleave bone
And write me in trace
Brain matter. My head splits apart with the force
Of falling. Of admitting that yes the desire exists but I hate it
And you are a fist and I am a wall and “love” is a force that Life throws us with, ever against, as if babies, just to see what we’ll leave when we splatter.

Dissect this…tissue from bone (you and I, spread thin against unyielding years) someone later can decide which moment can be classified
as “art.”

Need is massive head trauma. And I am in a state of perpetual annihilation...a universe reconfiguring itself within strands of black, identity-weary stars.

*(Despite the heaviness and visceral nature of this poem, it is written as a sort of Dantean divine comedy, which is what love is if you think about it or...if you tend to do what I do and step in it and go ugh, I really didn't have time for this...check please? Beyond that, I love the last line too much not to post it so...it's my way of saying that which is truly beautiful and unique should be left alone, not classified, categorized, calculated, dissected, observed or Othered. Just leave it alone.) :)
*********************************************
-Touch-
Gave birth to hope on a roadside
Redemption in a field far from the city’s eyes and ears
(Dreams and Fears)
There, we taught each other that life had more truth
Than what we’d been offered
That the Lady’s Home Journal roadmap of shit was really just a lie
And that in every body a human is buried waiting to be exhumed
And exonerated

With each kiss, purge this need to prove
There is something more to this life

*(I love hearing what others read in my words. It makes life like less of a one sided conversation and more of what is summed up in the word: Communicate). peace!
*******************************************

"...unless one lives and loves in the trenches it is difficult to remember
that the war against dehumanization is ceaseless"--Audre Lorde

"Say you don't want it, again and again, but you don't
don't really mean it
you say you don't want this circus we're in but you don't
don't really mean it
You don't don't really mean it"--Tori Amos, "Spark"

Beyond the Birdcage

2005-04-14T21:51:00.000-07:00

-Beyond The Birdcage-
*
Non-harm. Ahimsa.
Written on the lips
Not to silence but to empower
Crowning the forehead
To guide thoughts in love rather than hate
Listed on both palms and fingers
So that touch is gentle open receptive
So that every offering is a gift, not something to be taken
Or claimed.

Can you feel, unfolding,
When you let yourself be still,
That which is crossing
Breaking within the shore
Of your chest—it echoes
(I don’t have to put my head there to hear) the
Wings, fluttering as familiar as the ocean waves
Or the rain—The single truth of this life
Chanted in a word
All the poisons and all that can ever heal:
Prajna. Understanding.
Sutra of the heart
Words
To form hands
To hold all that is. Sacred.
To hold all as one’s own
And then to let it all go.

This,
A kiss
Antidote to both
Desire and despair
The illusion of loneliness broken in six words:
Emptiness is Form, Form is emptiness

The words are there and love has written them
But fear won’t let the ink congeal
Until you forsake your preference for blood

These words
Can’t permeate your dreams
Those moments where you declared yourself
A gutted city
In that space where you agreed to pay tribute
Perpetually with the destruction of your soul

Hateful thoughts are merely fantasy
Wings on leaves that won’t guarantee flight
That temple within you bears two truths:
A thousand palm prints staining windows
With regret, loss, violation, anger, and fear
Ten thousand tears offering every time, a cleansing rain
This truth is etched in the smile of every child.

Hope is the call for prajna
Love is the demand for karuna
To love
Yourself and yourself in others
Is maitri, metta, loving kindness,
Can you see?
There is so much wisdom
Whispered from your scars
Visible and unseen,
Those bleeding
And those yet to form

Don’t

Destroy the temple that is you.

Open

The locked doors of your heart

Allow

The frightened and hurt bird within to

Fly free.

Sing.

And fall

Wherever it will.
Whenever it must.
Trust in that which is beyond the bars of thought
Beyond this cage is perfect trust
Perfect love
And perfected understanding.
*

*(the line "Don't destroy the temple that is you" is inspired by the line from a Thich Nhat Hahn poem that reads: "Do not destroy the structure of suchness within you." Thich Nhat Hahn's words have repeatedly nourished both my creativity and my spiritual practice. I wrote this poem for a friend who is hurting and hurting herself. When I sat and listened deeply to her, the words of this were born out of her pain but also out of the space of hope). peace!

Occupying a different space

2005-04-10T22:56:00.000-07:00

Where shall she write it so that it can be seen?
This reservoir of self, ever sinking, small enough to fit behind her teeth
fist-clenched
shaking
with anger.

Today a friend and I had a very deep conversation about self-injury and the strange religion
of violence acted out on the body. She spoke of her friend who has an eating disorder, a problem with her temper, a problem being sexually inappropriate, a problem with abusing substances, with frequent illnesses, and now, she has starting cutting herself too.

We sat on a very cold park bench and watched kids play and I thought about all those words and all those problems as played out in one person. I said, she sounds very angry and hurt to me and it sounds as though she doesn't have a safe space to express that which is silenced by and articulated in pain. And yes, that is exactly what I said. People sometimes don't believe I actually talk that way but I do. Stumbling all over my words quite fluidly. :)

What does it mean when we become that compartmentalized and fractured that we begin to purposefully break our bodies, our minds, ourselves or others? Or allow others to do it for/to us?

I wish I had some profound thought or reflection on the matter. Wordlessness frightens me. I wish sometimes for something that could take the shape of hands or some giant listening body, listening with the whole body, like an ocean that could take all that hurt and just give it a space to exist without causing further harm. How do you create that? How do you sustain it?
Some of the most compassionate human beings I know either a. don't have immediate families to take care of or consider "the world" their family (i.e. spiritual leaders/nuns/etc) or b. they are people like most of us who tend to live rather divided. All of this energy spent fighting "the good fight" either demands immense sacrifice by those closest to them and/or sacrifice and at times vice on the part of the person who is trying to maintain such an exhaustive effort. I like to think that perhaps that fraction of a second spent listening to someone might help more than me talking over, to and around them. I like to think that words can replace and challenge that which is deemed unspeakable so that people like the girl I mention above, can find other ways of coping with emotions rather than hurting herself in so many ways. I think too though that you have to get to the root of the issue and the larger ramifications of silencing to see how you are silenced and where and when and how you silence others and where and when. My silence stems most often than not, from fear. Fear of my anger. Fear of pain. Fear of failure. Also fear of hurting others. I wrote recently about abortion and my anger over that issue is quite strong. Is it fair though in my anger to push someone else into a space where they must defend their views from feeling as though, in doing so, they are defending their selves? One of the biggest difficulties I struggle with is how to relate to an experience or to simply listen, without Othering, patronizing, trying to save or feeling the right to judge? How do you read about genocide, torture, abuse, domestic violence, murder, rape, incest or even self abuse without becoming an unwelcome voyeur into the lives and suffering others are experiencing? I can't step out entirely of this place of privilege that the color of my skin or my access to education affords and truly understand what another is going through that is a different race, ethnicity, gender, class or even religion. So language then becomes a commonplace through which I can try and at least imagine it. Or sympathize. Or empathize. Or get angry, sad, frustrated or motivated. I cannot find ways (with any sort of consistancy anyway) to force my thoughts into your shoes. We seem too small and too large and too awkward for another until whatever good intention or commonality that might've existed is left limping along, cursing every step. This is the way I see efforts of "diplomacy" both in the macrocosmic coccoon of international relations and domestic politics but also diplomacy in the purest sense. Where we bring it home. Where it resides within us as some strange force that says, hey I really want to hear you speak me to me so that I may finally reclaim a voice. A rich wordless space. To occupy a space and not another. To claim an identity rather than having it assigned to you and assumed for you. People talk, but do they listen? People want action and therefore turn words into bullets, podiums, loudspeakers, flags, and foot soldiers but how often does the rhetoric retain any sort of humanistic value? How often does a politican actually speak to you rather than at you or for you? I want to listen. I want to a see a safe space created where people's pain can be heard rather than acted out on themselves or on others. I don't think one person alone can do that though. People have written extensively on creating communities of non-harm, of creativity, but how do you create of truly humanistic socialism of thought? Do you even want to? I'm sure this rant has gone on long enough. I am a wordy soul though and I want to end with some quotes that I've read countless times over the past few days. I wish I had known of Audre Lorde's work before she died and Ginsberg's before he died. I did not. But lately I've found much food for my soul in their words and in their activism and the bridges that they built through their poetry. So these quotes are by Audre Lorde. Thanks for letting me rant. Any thoughts or comments are welcome. I'll try to be less long winded with future postings. peace!

"I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood. That the speaking profits me, beyond any other effect."--Audre Lorde

"For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us." Audre Lorde

"Once we recognize what it is we are feeling, once we recognize we can feel deeply, love deeply, can feel joy, then we will demand that all parts of our lives produce that kind of joy." -- Audre Lorde

quotes from http://www.nedrajohnson.com/audre.htm

Reproductive Rights as HUMAN RIGHTS

2005-04-08T21:34:00.000-07:00

I don't care what your views are on abortion. I don't care if you are "pro-life" "pro-death" "pro-birth" or whatever else you want to categorize yourself as. Just don't assume that you have the RIGHT to choose what is best for others just because YOU occupy a certain space of privilege.
It pisses me off to no end to read stories such as the one linked above that speaks of "religion getting in the way of "abortion" pills." Please think about what pills they are speaking of. The "morning after pill" is EMERGENCY CONTRACEPTION given to RAPED WOMEN. NOT WOMEN WHO ARE SIMPLY SEEKING A QUICKIE, 7-11 style ABORTION. I swear every time I read something like this I want to scream. The other part of the article talks about pharmacists who not only refuse to tell women that this pill is available to them but refuse to refer them to another pharmacist who might not have such overpowering religious leanings.
I don't care if you're against birth control. DON'T USE IT! Fine by me. I think birth control is also well over peddled primarily because doctors rarely alert women to the full side effects of such drugs (such as blood clots that can kill you, unwanted facial hair, unwanted facial blemishing, weight gain, nausea, anxiety AND depression...in "rare cases"). When I was in the military I had doctors issue (I'm NOT JOKING) me birth control pills. I thought, well that's nice. I never took them. Point though is that I don't have the right to choose for another person what is best for their bodies or their health based upon MY spirituality and I truly don't think anyone should limit anyone else's choices through disinformation, failure to provide information and ignorance. To me, this is just as bad as doctors throwing anti-depressant and anti-anxiety pills at a woman every time she comes to them for anything. I firmly believe and will argue readily that the pharmaceutical industry is extremely sexist in its dispensiary targeting of women for "certain lifestyle drugs" and for men, other drugs. What possible good does it do to give a woman a damned zoloft if she is depressed due to a violent marriage? What possible good does it do to give a child prozac for attention deficit disorder if the child is diagnosed from a four question quiz MADE and DISTRIBUTED BY A DRUG COMPANY who markets that particular drug? I think that women should ask the question, has the drug industry simply reformed the notion that all women's problems could be solved by removing the uterus, lobotomy, shock-therapy or by simply throwing a pill at her? These companies make SOOOOOOOO much money off of people's lack of education regarding trial studies, legal cases, side effects and the like thus ignorance is extremely profittable. Also, (back to the religion thing) I wonder if these same people who take issue with dispensing birth control or (god forbid) the "morning after pill" take the same stand on male contraception and male sex drugs? Are they equally turned off by the manipulation of genetics to produce the "perfect" or ideal baby or at the very least, to diagnose potential birth defects? I am so very tired of people using religion as an excuse for discrimination. Health care, especially INFORMED CONSENT, is just as much a human right as is the freedom to worship. I don't care if you feel compelled to refuse to distribute a drug but do not mis or disinform a woman when it regards her body and her choices for her body. Women are not infants. They do not need some institution to care for them as such and certainly not to make medical decisions for them according to the religious preferences of a few. The other big aspect of this that rarely gets addressed is the crazy hipocrasy between the idea of calling policies "pro-life" when really, really they are simply pro-birth. Policies that make no effort what so ever to ensure that these ever important fetuses are actually protected after birth into infancy, childhood and young adulthood are really only pro-birth and even there they fall short. Pro-life is such a misleading label. I am all for life. That is why I don't think that such political encroachments on a woman's choice and control over her body should ever be in the hands of those who wear whatever morality is in fashion or fashion themselves as forces of morality either. For every person that stands and passionately argues about saving a fetus, I would like to offer them an equally powerful image, one from before Roe vs. Wade and that is of the FULL TERM babies left in dumpsters, drainpipes or left to starve to death or left on doorsteps or left permanently brain damaged by a botched back alley abortion. Today there are countless children who are abused, raped, sold into slavery of various kinds (especially sexual), made into "child soldiers" and murdered by disease (often treatable), starvation, power politics, war, the demonization of "universal" healthcare and the ever increasing fleecing of money from social programs to fund prison building and empire building. So...if you really really really want to fight for life, there are plenty of spaces that could definately use your passion. If you want to continue to "fight for the life of the unborn" then please also fight for the right of the life, after it is born all the way up to its adulthood.

Liberate the female (and feminized) body from an age old designation of being the preferred place upon which to wage war. peace!

Multiplicity and Definition as Metaphor

2005-04-08T20:29:00.000-07:00

"There's always someone asking you to underline one piece of yourself--whether it's Black, woman, mother, dyke, teacher, etc.--because that's the piece that they need to key in to. They want to dismiss everything else. But once you do that, then you've lost because then you become acquired or bought by that particular essence of yourself, and you've denied yourself all of the energy that it takes to keep all those others in jail. Only by learning to live in harmony with your contradictions can you keep it all afloat. You know how fighting fish do it? They blow bubbles and in each one of those bubbles is an egg and they float the egg up to the surface. They keep this whole heavy nest of eggs floating, and they're constantly repairing it. It's as if they live in both elements. That's something that we have to do, too, in our own lives--keep it all afloat. It's possible to take that as a personal metaphor and then multiply it to a people, a race, a sex, a time. If we can keep this thing going long enough, if we can survive and teach what we know, we'll make it. But the question is a matter of the survival and the teaching. That's what our work comes down to. No matter where we key into it, it's the same work, just different pieces of ourselves doing it."
Hammond, Carla M. "Audre Lorde: Interview." Denver Quarterly 16.1 (1981): 10-27.

I love this. In an earlier conversation today I questioned the manufacturing of hierarchies of the heart that create a sort of trench warfare mentality. Who creates the decision to love X, Y, or Z only and exclusively as opposed to trying to nurture a sustainable center within yourself that loves equally and with equity? Is this even possible to truly defy categories of differentiation, particularly when "love" is involved? Can you see in your child, the face of any child and all children, even those that have hurt yours or caused yours to suffer? Can you see in your partner or spouse, the love of any and all humanity, extending well beyond the personal
confines of your home, your ideology, your morality and yes, the politics of your bedroom?
Think about how love changes when the person you are with admits cheating on you? Are you still able to love that person in the same way as you did when you didn't know? How too, could you "relate" to another who doesn't have anything in common with you, other than the fact that they are a human being? Where then shall you form your common language? Can you imagine a time in which you learn to harness the power of the words used against you, used to divide and conquer you and rather than reacting, act to reclaim them for the empowerment and validation of all? Just imagine how different things might be.

Regarding the pain of others

2005-04-08T19:46:00.000-07:00

I'm working through Susan Sontag's book Regarding the Pain of Others for my term paper. She has some powerful (and debate-worthy) points in it that I wanted to post here to see what others think of them. Also, because I think they build upon the act of "witnessing" while reading texts and case studies of atrocity but also in studying the history, reading the newspapers and staring at the images of conflict, oppression and occupation.

First, a bit of context. Sontag begins her book with the questions raised by Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas which Sontag explains, "...offered the originality...of focusing on what was regarded as too obvious or inappropriate to be mentioned, much less brooded over: that war
is a man's game--that the killing machine has a gender, and it is male" (6).

From this basis, Sontag questions Woolf's belief that merely witnessing atrocity through pictures of it will unite people against it. Sontag asks, "Who are the "we" at whom such shock-pictures are aimed? That "we" would include not just the sympathizers of a smallish nation or a stateless people fighting for its life, but--a far larger constituency--those only nominally concerned about some nasty war taking place in another country. The photographs are a means of making "real" (or "more real") matters that the privileged and the merely safe might prefer to ignore" (7).

Sontag also argues that "...photographs of the victims of war are themselves a species of rhetoric. They reiterate. They simplify. They agitate. They create the illusion of consensus" (6).

Can one argue that the machinery of war is indeed male? Is this argument fair, given the integration of women into military service and into suicide bombing and torture?
Do you think pictures do indeed "create the illusion of consensus?" Whose consensus? For whom by whom?

Here is another quote from Sontag. She writes, "To those who are sure that right is on one side, oppression and injustice on the other, and that the fighting must go on, what matters is precisely who is killed and by whom. To an Israeli Jew, a photograph of a child torn apart in the attack on the Sbarro pizzeria in downtown Jerusalem is first of all a photograph of a Jewish child killed by a Palestinian suicide-bomber. To a Palestinian, a photograph of a child torn apart by a tank round in Gaza is first of all a photograph of a Palestinian child killed by Israeli ordinance. To the militant, identity is everything. And all photographs wait to be explained or falsified by their captions. ...Alter the caption, and the children's deaths could be used and reused" (10).

Is identity is indeed "everything" to a militant? I wondered when I read this, well who gets to define whom as "militant?" Where is that line drawn between "militant" and ordinary soldier or patriotic citizen or freedom fighter or any other of numerous labels assigned to those who engage in armed combat? I do like her point though that all photographs depend upon captions for explanation or falsification. Last semester we read Edward Said's After the Last Sky which is a pictorial essay about Palestinians and their exile and survival as political refugees but also as human beings in very inhumane situations. I remember one of the students commented that the lack of captions under the pictures left them wide open for interpretation and manipulation. He said, "How do we know that this wasn't taken somewhere else or staged somehow?" Likewise, a fellow student in a class mentioned how the film "The Battle of Algiers" (and the fact of it being in black and white) impacts how one views the acts of torture, war, and terrorism.
How does such knowledge relate to the images on the screen that we know are manufactured for our consumption, of specific conflicts such as the one between Israel and Palestine but also between the U.S. and Afghanistan and the U.S. and Iraq? I read a headline recently that called Afghanistan "one giant U.S. prison." Torture photos from one prison (Abu Ghraib) came and went but did they stop the machinery of war? Did they stop prisoners from being tortured and dehumanized? What can? What will?

One last quote from Sontag I'd like to post regards violence. She writes (the first sentence paraphrases Simone Weil), "....violence turns anybody subjected to it into a thing. No, retort those who in a given situation see no alternative to armed struggle, violence can exalt someone subjected to it into a martyr or hero. ...Photographs of an atrocity may give rise to opposing responses. A call for peace. A cry for revenge. Or simply the bemused awareness, continually restocked by photographic information, that terrible things happen. Who could forget the three color pictures by Tyler Hicks that The New York Times ran across the upper half of the first page of its daily section devoted to America's new war, "A Nation Challenged" on November 13, 2001? The triptych depicted the fate of a wounded Taliban soldier in uniform who had been found in a ditch by Northern Alliance soldiers advancing toward Kabul. First panel: being dragged on his back by two of his captors--one has grabbed an arm, the other a leg--along a rocky road. Second panel (the camera is very near): surrounded, gazing up in terror as he is being pulled to his feet. Third panel: at the moment of death, supine with arms outstretched and knees bent, naked and bloodied from the waist down, being finished off by the military mob that has gathered to butcher him. An ample reservoir of stoicism is needed to get through the great newspaper of record each morning, given the likelihood of seeing photographs that could make you cry. And the pity and disgust that pictures like Hicks's inspire should not distract you from asking what pictures, whose cruelties, whose deaths are not being shown" (13-14).

Sorry that was a long quote but I think a very relevant one. Her question, who could forget those images is especially striking to me given that I can't recall them from all the images I've seen and all the articles I've read. So, if after the crises and blood and horror is removed from our gaze and fades from our minds as "witnesses" to atrocity, what does that mean for those who lived it are living it or are dying from it still?

Also, what does it mean when you read about or view atrocity far removed from it in time, space and context? How do you do this without simply stepping into the world of an Other without ever having to assume what that does to them? For example, many women have traveled into places and cultures in which other women and girls have been subjected to cliteridectomies and have written of behalf of these women and girls to raise global awareness and outrage. What does it mean when you have the power to do something and do not? Or have the privilege to peer into the world of violation and atrocity when you know that you can always leave and others cannot?

Articulate

2005-04-08T17:05:00.000-07:00

(For Kerri)

She learned to speak
when she learned to construct
entire languages of worth
out of the skeletal vocabularies
that had always hung themselves upon her
and from the knowledge that wrecked paths
could mirror, speak, hear, and heal
the wreckage of the body.

She learned to think
only when convinced
her thoughts were no longer anchors
dragging her soul down to unlivable depths
but guides working tirelessly
to help navigate that space
where consciousness is born
from the reclamation
and the reiteration of one's humanness.

She learned to feel
without fear
when her body was finally freed
from psychotherapeutic anesthetics
and the last pain of manufactured guilt
was purged in words
allowed to float in the air

so that others might see stars
where once was only darkness.

*For Kerri, who continues to care and to question
the word "justice" as silenced on the lips of the broken
and written on the bodies of despair and of the hopeful.
You always serve to inspire. peace!

Support the RIGHTS of Everyone

2005-04-07T08:31:00.000-07:00


Marriage is love.

To Marry or not should be something decided by two adults. Not the discriminatory religious leanings of a relatively powerful few. peace!

Sustenance

2005-04-04T23:08:00.000-07:00

Today it rained and was bitterly windy. I loved it. Took a long walk in the rain. Admired the spring trees and the heavy clouds and the snowy mountains. It's taken me nearly six years to truly appreciate the beauty of Boise because I was always comparing it to some other place.

I had the good fortune today to have both a stupid (and I mean stupid) crisis which turned my little world upside down for a bit but also to have that led me back to that which truly nurtures my soul: friends/family, poetry, and Buddhism. Right now I'm reading Audre Lorde's "Undersong" and Pema Chodron's "Start Where You Are." Finished Allen Ginsberg's "Death and Fame" yesterday though I imagine I'll be reading it for awhile. I have a difficult time staying on task. I'm supposed to be reading half a dozen other things but I can't stay focused on any single book at a time. Hence the reason why I'm reading all of these things as well as all of my other books. I'm also writing more. I think my next writing project outside of academics will be a play. I finished a short story over Spring Break and countless poems. Still intend to put together a book of my poetry. I've been saying that though for a few years now. We'll see. peace!

The Comfortable Noose of Thoughtless Words

2005-04-04T00:31:00.000-07:00

Misogyny is not funny. I watched Chris Rock's latest HBO special and much of what he said was quite funny...up to and through the duration of his blatantly sexist jokes. Making fun of rape, pedophilia and murder isn't terribly funny. I'm sure someone will call this "overly sensitive."

I sat with this girl at a study group who kept calling everything stupid or annoying to her, "gay" and I wanted to ask her "Are you ten years old or what?" But I didn't. Silly me.

So many people, often suffering the affliction of "good intentions" like an ingrown toenail, will preface the most idiotic remarks with perfunctory disclaimers such as, "I don't mean to sound" or "I'm not racist, sexist, homophobic but..." or "I don't have a problem with _______, I just wish they wouldn't force their issues on me"

And in these situations I am often silent for fear that my last shred of optimism will run from the room screaming, leaving a trail of obscenities in its wake. I keep hoping that if I work at it long enough, I'll build a vocabulary strong enough to fight such crap logic. Here's hoping anyway.

peace!

Audre, I'm Tired

2005-04-03T23:37:00.000-07:00

of pulling my punches
of forcing words into and out of spaces
dull contortionists
breaking themselves
pieces of a puzzle
I can never make fit the vision of the world
I'd like to see.

Audre, I'm tired
of pushing 'cause this baby won't come
they said, if I chose to have it
I'd have it alone
but have you ever seen a child cut along party lines
scarred by ideology
the fascists pull one arm
the liars pull the other
and everyone else sits laughing
clapping nervously while
eyeing the emergency exit doors.

Audre, I'm tired
and my body fears these memories
I can no longer carry or afford
to leave at their feet.

I wish you would
Take these
Arms from me
that hang by my sides
lynched by regretful tendancies
ache for that which I tried too hard to hold
leaving in this wake
broken hands still foolishly
addictively opening.
As if love (alone) could fix this ruptured world
as if it meant
(giving) anything less
than everything.

*Some people find religion to be a source of refuge. Others take salvation in different ways and words. I find myself running always to poetry as my preferred refuge and opportunity to converse with those I admire over all of those "unspeakable" things and ways of being.
I often feel that reading is its own critical space and I read poets searching to hear them speak, muse and critique this world. I'm currently reading Audre Lorde's The Black Unicorn which inspired me to write this yesterday at 5 a.m.

peace!

"if I believe in you, will you believe in me?
but I have no trust in anything
somehow I always end up falling over me"--VNV Nation "Holding On"

Too many words

2005-04-03T04:39:00.000-07:00

(to S. A.)

too many words
and not enough Indians.

too many Cowboys
and not enough sons.

too much land
but not enough for mailboxes
three car garages
history packaged in museums
sold at Barnes and Noble and Wal-Mart.

too much Hollywood
and not enough bullets
to merit
the proper
romanticism
of
a squelched debate
that made famous
the argument that Churchill, Truman, and Hitler were opposite sides
of the same outdated coin.

"If you want to know genocide, ask a Jew or an Armenian"
said the instructor
who'd obviously never read one of your poems
in all his years of speaking on behalf of

One more thing

2005-04-03T04:01:00.000-07:00

Child-brain-tumors could be an autumn birth thing

Rising Obesity rates in children is a parental responsibility
(9 out of 10 experts agree)

Personals ads lure from every corner of an inbox
competing only with diet and medication ads
promising perfection to the best of the Pfizer-WalMartian capability.

Pontiff dies. Millions mourn. Court denies last attempts to keep one woman on this earth.

Fewer and fewer headlines for the bombed. sanctioned. burned. starved or hacked to death.

Even fewer still, questioning the policies that churn corpses into profits.

No.
It is far more important that we read so we'll fear
and that fear keeps us buying. biting. running. denying.
consuming and feeling guilty. charging but losing bankruptcy.
searching for connection to the face on the computer screen.
filling out quizzes for clues and validations of our own "unique personality"

"Adopt a mile"

"Give the gift of life"

"________ in desperate need of your help"

"Anti-Depressants now linked to increased risk of ________"

"The President promises to fight _________"

"WMD 's apparently prove difficult to find."

"Buy one get one free"

"always the guaranteed lowest price."

Woman-Identified

2005-04-03T03:39:00.000-07:00

(for amy on her 38th birthday)

when a woman writes of breast cancer
as a "survivor"
not "victim"
people pause
to applaud her courage

when a woman writes of motherhood
as a blessing
never a mixed bag, drag, fear or curse
people pause
and trust her authority
and praise her for all the "hard work" such a "noble job" assumes

when a woman writes of heterosexual love
as ideal
but never a case of socially constructed
philanthropy
never as economic necessity nurtured by the fear of God and family
people pause
to worship her
to glorify and befriend her
to market her words and face endlessly

when a woman remains loyal widow
to the relentless ritual slaughter of men and children
and never utter the question of race, class or religion
people pause
to see her as truly "woman-identified"
refusing for her, momentarily at least
title after title: "welfare mom, quota, promiscous, ignorant, lazy"

but

when a woman speaks of anger
speaks anger, forms the words fermented behind her carefully silenced lips

when she dares address the fear-sustained-maggot infested hole
in the center of her chest,
when she puts on display
the expanding shore of a hip, wrist and rib cage
that she has spent a lifetime hurling herself against,

when she attempts to save
this shipwreck of her bodymind
that doctors throw pill after pill at.

She must find herself beyond the words that suggest
they still long for the days that they could simply remove pieces of her
brain
or her uterus or shock her sane or lock her away
put her in her place
put. her. in. her. place.

but should she question all of this
her words become abortions
and her identity takes on aborted shapes
pieces unidentifiable
placed in containers marked:
"discard immediately. toxic waste."

should she do this
her body becomes a vile, defiled space
her anger is named: anything but righteous
her morality is depravity in a world that has no time to hear
let alone comprehend the depth or source
originating and intersecting points
of the tangled roots of her rage.
This simply isn't done. This simply isn't said.

Feminists spelled it out once.

Drug companies swore
under oath
that they alone heard.
that they alone listened.

Trouble is,
They responded with yet another clever way
to leave the woman part womb part doll and part grave
all parts, a prettily prepped and patented

vivisection.

*written to critique the lack of a safe space for or acknowledgement of women's anger and rage. When divorced of her anger and rage she is made less human than the other, more tolerable, emotions allow her. It is all right for her to be sad or anxious because they make pills for that but if she questions the root and dissects from it, the true cause of her depression,
this is unnacceptable. This is EXACTLY what she needs to do. I see this as sort of an evolution of thought beginning with Virginia Woolf's "A Room of her own" to Betty Friedan's "The Feminine Mystique."

Confession of a poetry snob

2005-04-02T11:07:00.000-08:00

I am, among other things, a poet. I say that flinching because I don't care for much of the poetry I read and yet I keep reading it. The way people stare at an accident even though the first instinct is to turn away. I want to see, I suppose, the mangled body of a poem and search the teeth for some sort of identity. A glimpse (or not) of the poet. That is a rather ugly image I've just offered, I know, but really, what do you look for in poetry? And WHY would you torture yourself reading all sorts of hideous poetry looking for that one that sinks its teeth into you and won't let go. The pit bull poem. I don't like flowery words and yet I am guilty of them. So, today I was poetry blog hopping looking to see (like you do) what poems/poetry books/anthologies are being reviewed. One of my favorite sites is Verse and yet, I often come across a review that is worse than the poems. A review that makes me want to run from that book, not read it. I realized then, I must be an absolute poetry snob. I just can't do it. I know my poetry isn't for everyone, particularly the depressed or suicidal as I use alot of visceral images that juxtapose life and death with ideology. I will never be able to sell myself to Hallmark. The thought makes me cringe anyway so...

Anyhow, after having read quite a number of the most recent reviews I felt inspired to write the following poem. It is not directed at any reviewer, simply the act of dissecting poems, pulling out the organs of it. Killer was my attempt at making an indigestable poem. I don't want you to chew this and feel happy having done so. I think poems should be able to stick in your throat or in your gut and make you think about why you think you need these words beyond what you think they might mean. I'm trying out new ways of writing and trying to grow within my own writing style so constructive criticism is always welcome.

-killer-
unable to
dissect the I
from the eye
the lid sticks to the white
a baby to the mother's breast
knowing no milk will come
chewing just the same
chewing just the same

drawing only blood

unwilling to
parade naked beneath paling sheets of verbiage
pissing intention in the direction
of most profit
of a name on a page in a book in the mouth of the world.

a single thought remaining:
how to turn this into a noose
to slip around you
or a knife to slit you
highly decorated stripped bare lines
unfit for consumption
the cracking pus skin
too ugly to commodify

in this insincerity oozing of anthologized worth
a temple built with the bleached and splintered bone
I'm sorry Adrienne
there are no music in these words
just the damp whisper-whimper of ghosts
all straining to avoid the sins
of admitting themselves tormented
poetry.

*a poetry of form defying form. the lust of the label: experimental but what becomes of words detached, floating like retinas? What becomes of words stripped for the purposes of display. This poem was directly inspired as a response to two things: A line from a review of poet Selima Hill by Robin Geddie who wrote: "She effectively avoids the clichés that can afflict tormented poetry;" and having scoured approximately 30 poetry anthologies (within a few hours) looking for something that would really speak to me, shout really, or just smile walk away. I am an impatient reader and a whiny adulterous lover of words. Thus "Killer" comes from that space in me which both loves the poem and wants to rip it to shreds.)

note: the nod to Adrienne refers to Adrienne Rich and in particular her criteria of seeking the perfect poems to anthologize. She wrote that she was listening for the music in them.

New Frames

2005-03-31T23:38:00.000-08:00

Looking through the glass of myself will I ever be able to see you? Or value you? Or validate your right to be/exist/love/live as I wish to? How do we get to the point to which this is impossible? How do we get away from that point? Is this based in language? This ability to distinguish me from you in agreed upon words that form the frames through which I see and process what I see this you I somehow need to categorize?

How do YOU become my OTHER?

How do I become yours?

Are racism sexism and homophobia truly as "old as time" as some argue or are they more like a dead language resurrected when it serves purpose, a chiefly economic purpose, a way of ensuring my right to have more than you or to be and feel differentiated?

What would that mean to you then, if you were the one differentiated?
If you aren't following MY script, what words will you use then? Those I place in your mouth?
Or those you choke down, spit out and formulate from rage, sorrow and fear?

When did I learn to hate and fear you?

When did I learn to need to create a box to put you in?

Where does this mental file cabinet come from and who built it and how,
HOW do we dismantle it? This your issue my issue their issue way of relating is so
suffocating? How does yours become mine and should it ever? Do we even want that?
Is such a synthesis something to aspire to? What is lost to it?

How do you topple the systemic vocabulary of tyranny that is nurtured constantly in so
many minds, without becoming it? Without betraying the taste? Without giving in giving out or giving up power? Can't we have power without needing or having to wield it over another something or someone? Must we wear each other like an armband or experience one another only in the frames of ideology and idealism? The words swell the tongue and starve the mind.
I need a new vocabulary. The words I build with this one are simply sandcastles that wave after wave crash straight through. I want a new way of seeing. A new frame. A new way of speaking that privileges listening over the INSISTENCE of being heard. My prayers are spoken in this muted voice of wish want and wonder. WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY can't this be easier? Why can't it be a given? Understood? Where were you lost in this translation of lovingly human equally deserving of life and love? Where was I lost in the definition of word scribbled upon the shadow of a drying ink stain mentality?

When did the hood slip over my eyes as the money slipped from my hand into the envelope that licked you, case closed? When did my hands grow used to dropping open in helplessness or clenching fingers into fist shrouded by shouts of just how willing I am to hate you, to hurt you, to forget you, to torture and even kill you if needbe? How did you come to see me only as an oppressor by virtue of my country or the actions of my government or the reaction of yours?

How do we erase outmoded words that by mere utterance, hurt? How do we begin anew? In this world that honors the narrowest of vision, the narrowness of heart and the shortest stitch of memory...how do we cut from our hands that which keeps us from reaching for one another touching one another and holding one another as human beings? Please tell me how to remove these stifling words from my mind, that choke, silence and blind.

The perfect drug?

2005-03-31T23:23:00.000-08:00

Is religion the perfect drug? I'm sure most people are aware of or have opinions on or have at least heard that famous Marx quote of religion being an opiate of the people. I'm wondering though that if you could make a purely intellectual argument on the issue of religion and what it does to or for human beings as a drug? How has religion been used as a tool to manipulate the consciousness of masses of people? How has it been used by people to manipulate each other?
How has it been used in struggles of liberation? Does religion have a sort of stimulant or calming power over the mind? How has religion been used to both create and build community and also isolate groups of people and even kill?

Perhaps we'd need to expand the word religion into not only the theological/moral/spirituality realms of which people generally associate with the word and look at various "cults" such as the cult of advertising, the cult of beauty, the cult of propaganda, the cult of capitalism and various political-ideological cults (evidenced by nationalism and State worship) that serve as a sort of religiousity for people in ways that perhaps specific theologies don't. I said cult of capitalism didn't I? Well is there such a thing? Do people really worship money? Or perhaps is it by the very function of living in a capitalist system, one of the sole means by which a person can "transcend" the reality of their lives? I think the key is examining how religion (again, beyond the scope of particular theologies) becomes a sort of opiate, a sort of perfect drug that keeps people either docile and content in the illusions of freedoms and opportunities or angry and on edge. What IS IT that dulls our capacity for critical thought? What nurtures it? There are certainly benefits from belonging that religion offers but is it something that we inheirently want or is it something truly socially constructed and designed to serve varying purposes in a given society? Can you have community without an imposed religiousity of some sort? I'm not trying to say that religion is a drug only to raise the question of the function it serves in both the individual sense but also (and most importantly to my mind) in the larger structures of power.
I'd like to really engage this issue in a non-threatening manner so if you do respond, please don't do so out of the desire to simply attack me. Thanks.

To witness

2005-03-31T22:11:00.000-08:00

What does it mean to witness
something or someone
a birth
a death
a thousand deaths
countless "acts of"

genocide rape and war crimes

Does this make you some sort of guardian angel
or does it mean you're a voyeur
standing staring unable to touch intervene or look away

Does it mean you live in a world without punctuation
where time is split into shards of memory
here a scar
there a still open wound
here a grave
this one for him
that one for you

They want classifications determinations and explanations
They need to know just how many and how much
before that great dinosaur will move
spread itself too thin you see
on the edge, dear, of extinction
they said it was sleeping
and some catastrophe woke it up
but really this is code for planning
hibernating perhaps
but planning the next big show

I'm so sorry
If I let go of your hand
I couldn't say that it was only because my fingers slipped
To be honest, I've been staring too long
from the edge of myself
A bit concerned over when my time will come
and who will be there for me
when the gloves come off
and the dinosaur reveals itself for what it always was

Initiate the Other

2005-03-31T22:03:00.000-08:00

Into myself
into me
but what does that mean
To separate
is to distance. How exactly
do I measure this box to box
to fit in box check box marked
OTHER?

The boundary feels so
arbitrary
like a cut that doesn’t heal smoothly
that leaves the itch of angry skin
as a reminder
that no matter how I move
it doesn't quite move
with me.

Skin of sentences
flesh of you

if I peeled off all of the labels I wear
I could draw such an image
but would you see me
there
beneath the veil and gag of bumper magnet bumper sticker
flag and fist pornography of the how quickly hate sells philosophy
in the lines on faces drawn in on themselves
the voice gone
from years spent choking down screams

if I removed
scraped
cut
excised
and laser burned
all the words used to describe define and categorize me
to differentiate me
to alienate me

if I finally broke from the weight of it
and handed it all back to you
free of my heart
free of my hands and my head
free of you

if I laid all of these words at your feet
What would you do?

How then would you define me?

How then will I define you?

Reclaiming Human Rights?

2005-03-29T23:03:00.000-08:00

The Washington Post offers an interesting challenge to the State department memo insisting that the hallmark of the U.S. foreign policy will be "upholding human rights." As Glenn Kessler (from the post) points out, this does not address the violations caused by "the support of nations with less-than-stellar records on democracy" or the "credibility issue" of the use of outsourcing torture or prison abuse. I wonder though if the bigger issue isn't what the administration touts as crowning achievements in human rights but that they are so very capable of co-opting the rhetoric and posturing of advancing human rights while simultaneously violating them? Is this a sort of Vietnam syndrome in which a U.S. soldier commented (infamously) that they had to destroy a village in order to save it? How does a nation advance human rights by increasing arms trades, increasing weapons manufacturing, increasing debt, underfunding and undermining social programs (here and abroad), waging pre-emptive war (and thus setting one HELL of a precedent), "detaining" indefinately possible terror suspects and sanctioning, bombing and working countless other human beings to death? How does that promote human rights? How does that add up to a viable humanistic diplomacy?

Will the UN be the space in which a universal vision of human rights is realized? Is this possible given the ability of those with the most military, economic and political power to manipulate, use and abuse the rhetoric of human rights in actions that seem anything but humane? What needs to change to reconcile these two "visions" of what human rights means and how "upholding" human rights is accomplished?

Human rights and the "right to die"

2005-03-29T21:26:00.000-08:00

I have been pondering this issue for awhile, particularly given the extensive media focus on Terry Schiavo. I work on an oncology (cancer) ward and have for six years now. Tonight I asked my co-workers what they thought of the whole "right to die" issue and they were pretty mixed on it as well. The framing of this as a "right to die" or "right to live" issue bothers me personally because as others have argued, I think that it is an entirely personal choice and NOT one to be legislated yet alone taken to a "presidential" level. The question to me, is why this case? Why this family? When does one life and one circumstance merit media attention when countless lives go unreported, unconsidered and without remark? Why is it that the media can put out videos which cause passionate debates over a right to live or die while simultaneously censoring news footage of what "smart bombs" are doing on a daily basis or how many "prisoners/detainees" are dying in custody?

I find it more frustrating to think about how this woman's life is being exploited as a politically expediant morality issue. That said, I feel for her family. I've watched many familes (my own included) grapple with the issues of intubation and of when to "pull the plug." To me, this ties in perfectly with the relationship between politics and the quality of medical care, especially how you are (or can be) defined as a human being, by illness, by politics, by life and by death. I can easily list "issues" that are near and dear to my heart such as the treatment of persons living and coping with AIDS (a single example) or those being tortured and held indefinately as potential threats, but I would like to find a way or see a day in which people are less "issues" upon and through which political games are played.

II.
The cases that make the news are rarely the success stories. More often than not they are the horror stories. I had always thought that once you "pulled the plug" on a ventilated patient or removed their feeding tube they simply died. This is not the case for most people. Some nurses will tell you that to do so means that a person "starves to death" or "drowns" in the fluid in their lungs. They also explain that they will do everything in allowed by law (and their own ethics) to help a person die as painlessly as possible. I have watched nurses refuse to administer morphine (asking another nurse to do it) if they thought it might speed up a person's death because it went against their personal beliefs.

I just wanted to throw out a side I don't think the news is really putting out there. Hospice is not just some throw away space where people go to die alone. Much hospice work is done in the person's home or they can be admitted to a hospice care facility as well. The spectacle surrounded Terry's life and her death really feeds off people's fear: RIGHT to LIFE/RIGHT to DIE as if there were no other questions or points to consider. There are always other points to consider. For example, the book I am reading right now, And the band played on, addresses the early stages of AIDS when political expediency and "morality" fueled a crisis which went underfunded, unresearched and in some cases, welcomed as a "gay plague." This to me begs the question, when does a person become less a person because of a disease or an illness or for that matter a socially constructed category of difference? Likewise, when does a person become relevant enough to become the face or "heart" if you will, of a cause? My "understanding" of the AIDS crisis came from Ryan White's battle with the school system, NOT with Rock Hudson. How many people died before Ryan White's face hit my television screen and woke me up out of my little world? How many lives are lost to AIDS minute by minute while political expediancy and those screaming "morality" tie up funding for research AND programs that are not abstinance-only based? Why are these questions not being asked and hotly debated? I wish they were.

Love This!

2005-03-17T03:59:00.000-08:00

As reader of this blog is well aware, I love comics. Alternet ran a great piece today called "The Case for Comics." Here's an excerpt. Do check it out for the rest of the story and some snippets from the comics themselves. peace!

The Case for Comics
By Kristian Williams, Columbia Journalism ReviewPosted on March 17, 2005, Printed on March 17, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/story/21520/

It has been nearly 20 years since comics could safely be dismissed as kids’ stuff. In 1986 three books changed the way Americans saw the medium. Two of them — Alan Moore’s Watchmen and Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns — brought a sense of gloomy realism to the superhero genre. The third, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, used cartoon conventions to tell of his father’s experience in the Holocaust, depicting Jews as mice and Nazis as cats. Magazines were suddenly full of stories about comics “growing up,” and the term “graphic novel” entered the literary lexicon.
Somehow “graphic journalism” didn’t make the headlines. But since the renaissance of the mid-'80s, more and more writers and artists have been producing serious nonfiction comics about current events, from war crimes to hip hop. In the mid-1990s, Joe Sacco’s two books on Palestine were hailed as groundbreaking works and made Sacco the best known of the new graphic journalists. Now comics, or graphic, journalism is turning up in daily newspapers, where its inherent subjectivity contrasts sharply with the newsroom’s dispassionate prose — another round in the debate over what journalism should be in the 21st century.

Dancing on the shattered glass of the peripheral

2005-03-14T12:38:00.000-08:00

So I had a discussion this weekend about why some people might choose to see art and politics as seperate spheres and this has been bugging me. What does that mean for someone who considers themselves a political poet? How does that coincide with people who maintain this view that all language is political therefore all poetry is political and what art isn't political in some way?

Sometimes, the logic of people's arguments feels more like glass slowly shattering. You can't move for the fact that you're weary of being cut.
So you stay still but even this is tiring. Lack of movement. Lack of thought.
And things get pushed to the periphery because everyone has causitis and everyone's causes have to vye for the myopic attention of everyone else's causes.

A fractal existence if you please.

A woman just walked by me carrying the most beautiful baby as if he were a burden. How can you read that just from looking at someone? Well, she held in him on her hip as if he were some sort of appendage, like one hell of a heavy coat or box or something. I think we rarely realize how we appear to others. I'm sure I seem quite scattered to people. Sometimes quite too serious.
Sometimes the air and the heaviness of your thoughts can feel so heavy.
When do we become burdens to ourselves and to one another? When do we move from out of whatever paling virture lies in being human to an existence that feels at times so very empty?

peace!

Violence

2005-03-10T17:31:00.000-08:00

When do children "learn" to be violent? Is this all children or just some children? Bullying isn't something specific to one gender, after all. I was picked on my girls as much if not more than boys. Yet today my son came home and waited until dinner to tell us that some damn "teenage" boy had STOPPED HIS CAR and got out and tried to grab him, punching him in the shoulder and back as he ran. My son is ten and fairly small for his age. Still, he couldn't describe the kid or the car and apparently NO ONE on a very busy street felt the need to stop it or to report it even. My son ran from him and made it to school but told the school nurse he "fell." After we began asking him questions about him he became upset and felt we were "making a big deal out of nothing." This kid had apparently been part of a group of kids who'd thrown rocks at my son and another child as they were coming home from school one day.

I can't understand why some kids would choose to target younger children. This kid is clearly doing this. What worries me more though is my son's reaction to it. Denial. Embarrasment. Anger. I'm glad he even told us about it.

I don't know if girls are targeted in this way by other girls. I know that most of the bullying I endured as a child happened right on the school play ground or in the locker room before or after gym. The issue of bullying has made for very disturbing films recently out of Hollywood such as "The United States of Leland" and "Mean Creek" and documentaries such as "Bowling for Columbine." Is it possible that there isn't an easy answer or an easy solution to it? I mean if I catch this kid, will that guarentee my son's safety or that of some other child? Maybe this kid is being beaten at home. Who knows? I wish I knew.
I suppose it doesn't really matter what I know about it. Bullying nations. Bullying politicians. Mass dehumanization. Mass objectivication. Torture. Abuse. Poverty and Privilege. Boys being taught to be "men" in the most NEGATIVE connotations of that word. Tough. "real men." "real men don't do pussy politics," is that it?

Jesus I'm mad. The crazy parental instinct (in most parents anyway) to try and keep your children safe really goes haywire when you find out that someone has hurt them, purposefully and without remorse or consequence. Should this be surprising though? We live in a nation that does this minute by minute to other people. We live in a society that devalues men and women and the earth. Is this a society that lives in mental wall lockers with the dimensions of a television screen and the aptitude of reality t.v. and centuries of "traditional family values" that still perpetuates the bullshit idea that violence against another human being is not only "normal" but part of growing up? To toughen them up. When does it become assault? When does it become domestic violence? When does it become child abuse? WHEN does it become a POLICY of war and torture? You can dislike these lines I'm arguing all you want. I don't know of any parent that likes the idea of seeing their child beaten like that. Still, I know plenty of fathers and mothers who will tell their children to stop crying when they're hurt or will punch them and "wrestle" as a sign of affection, often the only affection they'll get. Where do you begin to unravel this stupid stupid system?

Here in my head...rage within the machine

2005-03-09T22:43:00.004-08:00

I've been madly slacking when it comes to blogging on this. Sorry.
For what it's worth, I've actually been reading. Voraciously. So much that the school librarian offered me a box rather than a bag to carry my twenty some-odd books out. I've almost reached my checkout limit.

Cool projects I'm working on right now:
a historiography on the scholarly debate over the history on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

a research paper on the word "Holocaust" and how it could, (should) theoretically speaking, apply to what Israel has done/is doing still to the Palestinian people. If you disagree, please before you send me hate mail galore read the dictionary definition of the word and then go read the WEEKLY human rights violations perpetrated by the state of Israel (funded primarily by America) or read the YEARLY findings by the UN that not only view Sharon & co as "war criminals" but that the very creation of that state VIOLATES international law. I wonder who the real trendsetter in that department would be...hmm...

Anyhow, offshoots of these are going to fuel a zine and a mock wall replica (not even anywhere near the scale of the real thing Israel is attempting to build).

Beyond that, I'm reading (for soc theory) the "Fetishism of Sociology" and for my own curiosity
Herbert Marcuse's "One Dimensional Man" and "Critical Theory and Political Possibilities: Conceptions of Emancipatory Politics in the Works of Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse and Habermas."

I'm also working on creative/critical applications of "theory" in the form of art and poetry but also music history. I'm a huge fan of "industrial" music or I suppose it's tagged "EBM" music now. I'm currently listening to VNV Nation's FUTUREPERFECT and earlier to the Android Lust song "Unbeliever." Many people wouldn't call this style of music, music but I find the creative, deconstructive, dissonance of it coupled with rampant socio-political critiques quite worth my money. If you'd like to learn more about these two bands go to http://www.industrial-music.com/and http://www.projekt.com. Learn. Expand. Explore.

Listening to this music made me think about why there are some forms of music I find painful to listen to. I cannot stand country music for example. The "twang" of it makes my head hurt and yet I could listen to techno all day. I'm also not a huge fan of rap or hip-hop. I DO enjoy bands such as Rage Against the Machine who have created hybrids of hip-hop and rock. How far do you think Adorno's critique of pop music applies? Do you think there are no truly original artists anymore? Nothing beyond soundbytes and propagandistic advertising?

One of the other reasons I love "industrial" music (what we USED to call it way back when?)
is the way that many of the artists use their music to address political issues way before "the masses" realized these were political issues. Sort of a sci-fi type analysis exists within alot of the music. Sort of a pre-Matrixy merge with the wild art of man in the machine, man ruled by machine, man becoming machine. The whole cyborg fascination but also the murder of man by way of murdering the earth in the addiction to mechanization. To ease. To thoughtlessness at the touch of a button. Some "Industrial" bands used their videos and songs to raise awareness about other issues as well. Skinny Puppy's "Vivi-sect" comes to mind. Also their c.d. "The Greater Wrong of the Right" is well worth buying for anyone worried about the ever increasing hegemony of that one political ideology (value system?).

I thought it would be really cool to have the freedom (as if!) to do a course where you apply critical theory to varying works of art, film and music, specifically examining the "subculture" genres to see the impact of "independent" artists' efforts. I'm sure no one would be letting me do this any time soon but I would LOVE to eventually offer a course on subversive "art" where you encourage students to analyze why some art is labeled subversive and where that line is drawn and by whom. That's really important to consider. By whom.

Everything threatening is either co-opted, shut down or discredited. People are very good at labeling Michael Moore and even Marilyn Manson as "sell-outs" or "corporate whores" and yet I think if you're going to say that you really need to ask yourself to what extent an artist is capable of remaining truly independent of systems of power. If the Busheviks (I found that on some other website and thought it well worth sharing) decided tomorrow to ban all "potentially subversive" music could they? What about those who critique the government with almost every breath and yet their livelihoods and their "artistic freedom" depend upon the capitalist economic system just as much as everyone else's does. Sure they are probably more able to trade their dollars in for euros then most people but I'm curious with the multiple systems all vying for absolute power over "entertainment" (i.e. the "Culture Industry") how autonomous can any artist hope to be or hope to remain? What about the use of art (I'm including everything here from comics to music to those weird urinal sculptures) as a space of protest and dissent? AdBusters ran a great layout using the cut and pasted heads of Michael Moore and Ann Coulter where she said something like "great job, you won the election for us" or something like that. It's in the newest edition. Pick it up for yourself. My friend borrowed my copy or else I'd have it as an exact quote. Anyhow, at what point does that lovely term "freedom of expression" become an economic/socio-political noose by which the powers that be will let you hang yourself. So to speak...

Do something good for yourself: Read. Question Everything. Grow.
In the meantime, consider this:

"Veal meat, that's what we've become, especially the young 'uns." That's what anyone raised by the corporations, fed their version of "fun," "excitement," and above all, "hip," becomes-
pale, docile, and unmuscled, a creature finely attuned to the aesthetics of its own flesh but incapable of standing on its own legs. Your movement beyond the TV box may be restricted, your opportunity to frolic in uncommercialized fields may be nil, but it's OK, being veal: all your life, the corporate stock feeders bring you sugar food and hormone entertainment. Raised to consume, kept soft in the head and belly-
the modern spirit is slaughtered easily."--Leslie Savan, The Village Voice
(From ADBusters, March/April 2005 edition)

Demarcation

2005-02-25T11:33:00.000-08:00

They're marking territory
with a border of shell fragments

bone blood graffiti

memory

on the latest wall of US. Ours. Theirs. Those People.
Over There. Them. Acts of. Genocide? Bickering over dictionary.
Definitions. Not for the sake of saving what is. Said. But what is.
Implied.

Watchwords are fearless
soldiers forever marching on
digging trenches in the minds
to win more hearts for war. All the same
to those busy
writing history
one razed building
one war
crime

at a time.

Is it a matter of money? Political expediency?
The war against ______
Codifying the RIGHT to victimized primacy
so that you don't ever forget
which side you're really on?

The grand realization that your literary litany isn't flag
enough
to cover the cost
but what's one life to "the bottom line"
How is a last breath measured for a profit
according to global capitalist economics
by people who forgot everything they swore to remember
the last of the last time(s)
preface fought and lost
to pretense.

(Watched "Hotel Rwanda" last night. Wished for words to make any sense of the lack of reaction and the see no evil approach that would really explain the lack of reaction. This was all I could come up with. Fragmented sentences and irritation. A wordless stupor. There is always the promises of never again and of protectionism and humanitarianism and these promises almost always follow the words "last time." Why?)

Dream Classes in a Human Rights Minor

2005-02-21T18:49:00.000-08:00

Currently there are people working to design and implement a human rights minor at Boise State University. One of those people asked me what my dream list of classes would be. I'm sharing this here because I'm really exited about the prospect of seeing these become reality rather than just dreams of mine. I'm also posting it here in hopes of feedback. Those marked with stars (*) are the ones that I am most interested in not only taking as a student but hopefully one day teaching. So without further adieu...

MY Dream Classes for a HUMAN RIGHTS MINOR: (this is the short list by the way, I have a required dream book list that I'll post at a later time) Feel free to post some feedback to this.

Introduction to Human Rights Theory and History : This would be a nice fall/spring sequence ideally or taken simultaneously modeled after the intro to gender studies courses. I think it would be really wise to approach this with a whole year to build a solid foundation for the more advanced courses. I really think the theory and history need to merge or be taught as compliments to one another because without the history you can't really understand the need for the theory or its application.

*Social Movements and Revolution: This could be a regular "core" course taught by different people covering different times/revolutions or geopolitical arenas, examining social movements and revolutions: what works, what "fails," why do they occur, etc etc. Ideally, this would be a very flexible course because it could be taught from a literary perspective, as a colloqium between soc and history, political science and history and so on. It could also be taught as two seperate courses which might be useful given the wide range of social movements and revolutions to choose from.

*Marxism and the HUMAN Economy: Applying Marxism to the "trade" in human beings and humans as increasingly mechanized labor.
You could ground the class in Marxist theory and examine the historical evolution of trade in human beings from slavery and the servitude of children to the status of slavery today. It could also be useful as a comparative analysis of "the human economy" from a "third world" perspective and from a "first world" or Eastern/Western perspective, i.e. to show how slavery still exists as a global phenomenon and how global capitalism and debt bondage perpetuates it.

*Genocide and Humanitarian Intervention: This too could be a survey course...as in examining case studies and asking how does genocide occur, how many deaths constitute genocide, is war a necessary and successful intervention and deterrent and are there ways to prevent genocide from occuring again or it could focus on a specific case or region where genocide has occured (or IS occuring) to examine/analyze and attempt to answer these same questions.

*Law, "Justice" and Human Rights or Legislating Morality: Examining the ways in which the laws in this country (or in Europe vs. America or even internationally) have been used and abused and reformed to both violate people's human rights but also to secure them. This course also addresses the issue of "hate crime" legislation, racist laws, law as "rights" or "privileges" and further exploring the difference between civil rights and human rights.

*Law, War and Human Rights: I really really want a whole semester long class to try and address this one issue. I want to see students puzzle over the same questions I've been puzzling over for some time now, namely what "Rights" do governments and international organizations have in protecting civillians in times of war and in protecting soldiers? What rights do soldiers have to refuse to engage in "unlawful orders" now that the defense of "I was just following orders" has been explicitly rendered useless by the Nuremberg trials?

*Torture and Human Rights: A case study analysis of the use of torture as policy, defining torture, creating exempted spaces and circumstances for torture to occur "legally" and the role of NGO's, activist groups and courts in sustaining or silencing the reality of torture.

*Fascism and Fundamentalism: Exploring two extremes in modern political ideology. This could be exploring various examples of fascism and fundamentalism or the relationship between fascism and fundamentalism or comparing and contrasting the two.

Health and Human Rights: Case studies in health and human rights from around the globe. Could focus on AIDS or on how the privatization of water, natural resources, bombing pharameceutical plants, war, targeting critical infrastructures and the unchecked power of corporate monopolies and debt policies perpetuate worsening health crises worldwide but especially in the "third world" or "global south."

Democide, "National Security" and Human Rights: Examining the ramifications of when governments kill their own citizens, legislate against them, imprison, torture and assasinate them and enact punitive measures against a specific "scapegoat" to ensure "national security."

Democide and Genocide: What is the difference between genocide as policy and democide as policy?

Environmental Policy and Human Rights: Examining sustainable development, corporate responsibility, government violations of human rights through nuclear testing, Agent Orange, use of depleted uranium in weaponry, undermining/ignoring existing environmental policy and the effectivenss of the groups such as greenpeace in promoting environmentally sound policy.

*Critical Theory and Human Rights: Applying theory to the rhetoric of human rights and the manipulation of "humanitarianism" to wage war and "excuse" torture and "military necessity."

The United Nations and NGO's: Examining the role and strengths and weaknesses of non-governmental organizations working to secure a global committment to human rights.

*Bearing Witness: Trauma Theory and Literatures of Trauma

Manufactured Consent: Propaganda, The Culture Industry

Social Inequality and Human Rights: Examine the roots of social inequality, the perpetuation of different theories and religious views that inequality is desirable, natural, normal or a failure of proper socialization. Examine the "interlocking systems of oppression" as described by bell hooks.

Sexuality as a Human Right: Examine and analyze the debates over whether or not reproductive rights, queer rights, the debates surrounding pornography, prostitution, and freedom to marry regardless of sexual orientation are human rights. Examine also the ways VARIOUS governments violate these rights and what responsibility (if any) governments have to protect citizens from religiously motivated/excused discrimination.

Religion and Human Rights: Freedom of and from religion, the relationship (historical and current) between various Churches and various States and the use of religion as a moral counterbalance to or tool of compliance with State or military power. It would be equally useful to use this course to unpack the myths of the morally superior religions such as the prevailing belief in the U.S. that Islam has less of a committment to human rights than Christianity or Judaism.

Civil Rights, Human Rights: Understanding the difference, examining various struggles for civil and human rights and the responses from various governments in the face of domestic and global outrage over human rights violations.

*The Show Trial: The Media and International Criminal Tribunals From Nuremberg to Iraq: Case studies or a comparative analysis of the role of both the media in influencing opinion and understanding of tribunals from Nuremberg to Iraq. It would be highly prudent to examine what "crimes" were deemed worthy of continuous coverage and what crimes and what criminals went unpunished and why.

Methods and Research in Human Rights: Some sort of statistics/research course that would be useful for anyone desiring to go and do field research. OR it could be an introduction to how field research is done, how accurate it is and how influential it is and how "authority and agency" is established by NGO's such as Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International. It could also work in conjunction with the UN and NGO's course listed above.

*Cultural Myopia in Human Rights Activism and Academia: Exploring and unpacking the Eastern/Western debate over what qualifies as a "universal" human right, the co-optation of academics, activists, lawyers and NGO's as supporters of State policy rather than to check and balance the uncontrolled power of the State and the failure of some academics and inability to critique human rights abuses and abusers wherever they occur.

*Failure to Protect?: A course exploring the ways in which both the United Nations, International Tribunals and International Human Rights Law have failed to prevent genocide, democide and the use of rape and torture as instruments of policy. Could examine prosecutorial limitations in the face of "policies of exceptionalism" and that age old issue of national sovereignty. I think too, it would be most interesting to use this course as a spring board for further analysis of the very issue of sovereignty...sovereignty of the body and of the nation.

Colonialism, Imperialism and Democracy

Seeking Justice: Amnesty and Retribution: Examines the legal, social and international human rights precedents set by The Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the Nuremberg trials as both being models for recognizing and reckoning with the atrocity that humans can and have inflicted upon one another.

Moving Beyond Left and Right: Examining the use of human rights as a model for truly progressive political change.

Finally, other courses include topics such as:
Social Justice, Criminalizing and Commodifying "Deviance," Mass-Marketing War, Worker's Rights, The Historic Battle between civil/political and socio-economic "human" rights, Women's rights, Children's rights, Poverty and Human Rights and so on.

Ideally, I'd like to see a minor with two required core:
The intro and the methods course
and then students could choose (because it's a minor) from the remaining classes or any other ones offered but must take a minimum of 3-6 "special topics" courses and would participate in an internship for hands on/"field" experience and culminate their work (research and field experience) in a capstone/senior seminar style course.

Here are some links for anyone with an interest in human rights scholarship/academia.
http://www.hrdc.net/accesshr/
http://directory.google.com/Top/Society/Issues/Human_Rights_and_Liberties/
http://www.stanford.edu/group/Jonsson/hrts.html
http://www.foreignpolicy-infocus.org/indices/topics/rights/index.php

Ironic, yet interesting article considering the "holiday"

2005-02-21T16:28:00.000-08:00

I had wanted to write something about today being considered "President's Day" until I turned on my computer and the main MSNBC article was illuminating the fact that today is also the day Malcolm X was assasinated.

The article was very interesting and I suppose more than anything I was glad to be given a reprieve from the typical propaganda of this day. I was really glad to see Malcolm even being MENTIONED particularly given this being nationally celebrated as "Black History Month."
So in light of that, I'd like to repost the article here. peace!

From: MSNBC.com

Malcolm X: Down for the cause before the cause 40 years after the messenger’s exit, the message still resonates
By Michael E. Ross
Reporter
MSNBC
Updated: 11:35 a.m. ET Feb. 18, 2005

When Malcolm X (El Hajj Malik El-Shabazz) was shot to death at 3:10 p.m. on Sunday, Feb. 21, 1965, at the Audubon Ballroom in New York City, he was perceived as a pariah of the still-burgeoning drive for equality in America — monitored by the police and the government, marginalized by more mainstream civil rights figures, vilified as a danger to the nation.

What a difference two generations makes — and doesn’t make.

Even now, 40 years after his untimely death, many of the issues that dominated the life and career of Malcolm X remain — like the man himself — at the forefront of African-American life, and American life in general.
Today, he inspires black America in particular even as he haunts America in general with a message still seen as hostile, a message that’s spanned five decades and galvanized younger generations more powerfully, in many ways, than more centrist civil rights leaders like the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
From the still-robust sales of his 1965 autobiography to the adoption of his image and oratory by a generation fired by hiphop, the power of Malcolm X has only increased.
The 40th anniversary of his passing comes in an America that has changed, and not changed, in its reception to both the messenger and his message — a nation sometimes angrily sensitized to Islam, Malcolm’s adopted faith.

Power of the word
It’s that power of Malcolm X — not just the power of one’s personal transformation, but also the ability to communicate that transformation to a wide audience — that’s evident in his book “The Autobiography of Malcolm X.” “The Autobiography,” a work whose blazing candor and unflinching self-examination has inspired books from Eldridge Cleaver’s “Soul on Ice” to “Monster,” the autobiography of an L.A. gang member, remains a seminal American work.
By the late 1990s, almost 3 million copies had been sold worldwide, according to the Malcolm X Center at Columbia University. In 1999, Time magazine selected the book as one of the top 10 nonfiction works of the 20th century.

Embracing a native son, or not
Even as Malcolm X has attained broad recognition in the wider American culture, aspects of his identity are still problematic. The state of Nebraska, where Malcolm Little was born on May 19, 1925, has wrestled in recent years with that recognition.
The Nebraska Hall of Fame, established in 1961 to officially recognize prominent Nebraskans, boasts a range of public figures, including Pulitzer Prize-winning author Willa Cather; anthropologist Loren Eiseley; Gen. John J. (Black Jack) Pershing, commander of American Expeditionary Forces in World War I; and William Frederick Cody, the frontiersman and adventurer more widely known as Buffalo Bill.
How the incendiary presence of Malcolm X would figure in that pantheon of Nebraskans, and whether to embrace him as a native son, has been a matter of debate for the state’s Hall of Fame Commission. Malcolm X was considered but rejected by the commission in April 2004.
A bill currently in the statehouse would seek to have ethnic and gender diversity as factors for consideration. The bill also changes the selection process by requiring public hearings.
“When you consider the makeup of the people on the commision — older white people — the likelihood is not the greatest,” said state Sen. Ernie Chambers of the chances for Malcolm’s inclusion.
“Nebraska is a white-dominated, extremely conservative state,” Chambers said. “Most of the people in the state don’t know anything about Malcolm, and some of those who do have more erroneous information than accurate information.”
Chambers, who is Nebraska’s only African-American state legislator, said the matter is now on an indefinite timetable.
If inducted, Malcolm X would be the first African American to be so enshrined.
Maybe the reactions of the Nebraska lawmakers dogging Sen. Chambers are emblematic of wider American perceptions.
Observances of Malcolm X’s death come in an America still painfully aware of the cultural and philosophical gulf between Christianity and Islam — a gulf no doubt widened by those responsible for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
“He was aware of the fact that the Islamic population in the world is growing at an incredibly rapid rate, in the United States it’s growing significantly,” said Howard Dodson, director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, based in New York City.
“That means that Americans will have to come to terms with Islam within the United States and outside, and formulate positions at individual and societal levels that bring the same respect to Islam that people bring to Christianity,” Dodson said. “That kind of respect will be won over time. It won’t happen overnight.”
For Dodson, Malcolm’s place in history is secure. “Malcolm’s right up there with Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela in the pantheon of leaders of 20th century black history,” he said.
“He resonates and continues to be a voice and presence 40 years later, in large measure because of the kind of life he lived,” Dodson said. “He was as hard on black America as he was on American society.”
“He reached a point in his life where he could not not speak the truth, and in a society where we’re still in the process of desegregation,” Dodson said.
“Black men who had the courage — the audacity, quite frankly — to speak their minds were perceived as a threat,” he said. “It’s interesting that he was seen as a purveyor of violence. There’s no instance that I’m aware of in his public life in which he initiated violence against anyone. But he was a proponent of the defensive position — strike back if stricken.”

Not so far apart
Dodson dismissed another old assumption: that Malcolm X and King, the civil rights leader perceived as more palatable both in message and method, were light years apart in their thinking. “The tendency to create polar opposites, which is what media did at that time, doesn’t reflect the struggle,” Dodson said. “Malcolm had shifted into a broader humanistic perspective, upgrading the position of black, Hispanic and native Americans,” he said. “But they were part and parcel of the same program. Malcolm said in so many words, ‘either you deal with Martin King or you deal with me.’" For Ilyasah Shabazz, one of six daughters in the Shabazz household, relationships between the two leaders were both a matter of history and a family affair.
“In American history we have Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. Both men are embraced and respected for what they contributed as fathers of their country. Malcolm and Martin also both contributed, tremendously,” she said. “It’s too bad that African-Americans often pit one against another. Both gave their lives for our cause and both contributed, however differently or similarly, and both gave their lives for what they believed in. Our families have always been close. We share the same pain and outlook on life and joys.”

Growing up Ilyasah
Like her illustrious father, Shabazz took pen in hand to make sense of her past. “Growing Up X” (One World/Ballantine), her 2002 self-described “coming of age memoir,” is at once a tribute to her mother, Dr. Betty Shabazz; an attempt to come to grips with the loss of a father in highly unnatural terms; and an expression of a life in the shadow of one of the 20th century’s most powerful voices.

Ilyasah Shabazz finds that the country has shifted some in its reception of messenger and message.“America has certainly changed in its embrace of brotherhood, in being able to look at humanity and accepting the contributions of all of us. I don’t know how much it’s changed."
Shabazz, who lives in Mount Vernon, N.Y., credits her mother for the spark to write.
The book, she said, “really serves as a tribute to my mother ... just examining her life — while she was in her twenties, her husband was assassinated in front of her, her home was firebombed, [she was] a woman with four babies and pregnant with twins — she accomplished so much while serving humanity.”

Props for her pops
Shabazz, who was only 2 when Malcolm was slain, bears love for her father that’s equally heartfelt. “He was just a young man; that’s what surprises people,” she said. “He was only in his twenties when he burst on the scene.
“This was a regular young man in search of his identity as a man and as a person of African descent and reconnecting us to what we had before bondage … that psychological trauma we see the results of today,” she said.
“He didn’t cower, didn’t compromise his values or integrity. Like Ossie Davis said in the eulogy, Malcolm was our manhood — he was his nation’s manhood. He was unwavering. After a speech I gave once, a young white male student came up and told me, ‘There are only two men I respect in my life — your father and mine.’ ”
“In a sense, Malcolm drove people to King,” said Chambers, the Nebraska state senator. “They would rather contend with someone like Martin Luther King, who said ‘suffer in silence,’ than to deal with Malcolm who said ‘if you hit me, I’m going to hit you back.’ ”
That sense of defiance, a streetwise forthrightness about personal integrity and the need for self-defense, has endeared Malcolm X to the hip-hop generation.
“Hip-hop is not just a style of music, it’s a way of life, a philosophy, and the philosophy of hip-hop comes, in a large part, from the philosophy of Malcolm X,” said Sandeep Atwal, publisher of the political/cultural blog Infernal Press, to the Web site AllHipHop.com.

Full circle at 40

There’s a sense of things having come full circle — or nearly so — for the Audubon Ballroom, the site of the tragedy. On Monday, 40 years to the day of the assassination, the location on upper Broadway in Washington Heights will be where the Shabazz family celebrates Malcolm’s life, at what is now called the Malcolm X and Dr. Betty Shabazz Memorial and Education Center.
The 2005 observances follow efforts to preserve the site announced in October 1997: New York City, through its Economic Development Corporation, had to that time invested more than $19 million in renovating the building, according to the mayor’s press office. Since then, however, efforts to use the location have faced complications but seem to be getting back on track.
The ballroom’s new center will house a multimedia environment containing documents about Malcolm X’s life, including memoirs, notes, speeches and other personal items.
“It preserves an important historic landmark,” Ilyasah Shabazz said of the site. “It’s about not living a life of bitterness and despair, but finding the good and praising it. Each individual has their share of life’s tragedies. You can’t live life as a victim. We would rather smile and stand than to cry and be bitter and broken. This is all a part of life’s journey.”

MSNBC.com’s Darrell Bowling and The Associated Press contributed to this report. Michael E. Ross is author of Interesting Times: Essays and Nonfiction.

ADBUSTERS, ADORNO and Application of Critical theory

2005-02-19T22:31:00.000-08:00

ADBUSTERS magazine, coupled with the SUN magazine really make me smile. Every issue is well worth what you pay for them. I love the SUN because of the quality of the writing and photographs AND for the fact that they have NO advertisements cluttering up their wonderful pages. ADBUSTERS? Well, you'll have to check them out for yourself.

This though came from their latest edition and I thought it was too great not to post here.

NINE Theses AGAINST CORPORATE RULE:
STOP Buying Politics
STOP Fetishizing Growth
STOP Colonizing Neighborhoods
STOP Selling our Thoughts
STOP Selling off the Poor
STOP Demonizing Peace Workers
STOP Consuming Everything
STOP Privatizing Public Space
START Saying Hello and Listen Like Human Beings (ADBUSTERS, BUY NOTHING DAY)
**************************************************************
I especially enjoy the "fetishizing growth" bit. Reminds me of Lukacs "Commodity Fetishism" that we were briefly introduced to in soc theory last week. It was interesting that the teacher put quite a bit of his lecture in the context of education being commodified to ensure that its true purpose remains to produce the best, most efficient assembly line minds that student loans or your parents can buy. Those are my words, not his but that was his basic point.
Because of this lecture, I picked up a copy of "One-Dimensional Man" from the school library by Mercuse and a collection of "Critical Theory" that has Habermas, Adorno, Horkheimer, Fromm and Lukacs as well. I wish in a way that critical theory was actually taught in a way that allowed students and teachers to engage the theorists/theories IN a critical way. Rather than the read-regurgitate method, I would love to actually see a classroom setting where we had to take a theorist and have a little role playing game where we had to know their main theory well enough to argue it and defend it or critique another's work using it. Boy, you couldn't b.s. your way through that. I doubt you'd be so quick to forget what they said either if you had to actually argue Freud or argue Foucault or use Foucault to critique Freud. I think that would be quite interesting. I have never understood the logic of "learning" theory outside of its application. If you can't see how Marx's critique of capitalism is relevant today, than it is little more to you than print on a page...positively pointless. Punch the timeclock and here's your degree sort of thing. It's funny too that the teacher commented in class about how when he was speaking of Adorno's argument on critical thinking and the authoritarian personality that we were all "scribbling furiously" that I was writing it down, not for future regurgitative purposes but because it was actually an INTERESTING argument that I wanted to remember. I had a friend of mine point out recently that even the "meritocracy" is an illusion to keep people in the proper pecking order. SO the meritocracy of the macro is mirrored in that lovely little microcosm of the university. That's what my friend said. I realize that teachers have alot of pressure (and increasing crap to put up with it seems) beyond the classroom and so expecting someone to come in and do something different might be a tall order. I have known teachers though to do this and the suprise of the students is simply amazing to behold. My Comm 101 teacher had us act as trial lawyers one day to work on persuasive speech and it was great. Another teacher had us analyze a modern film using three literary theorists. For this, I chose "American Beauty" and put Foucault, de Stael, and John Keats in a bar together to discuss it using their theories and wrote it in a play format. This was probably one of my all time favorite assignments because it allowed me to be as creative as I wanted to be.

I've often wondered if we could ever have a modern day American "Frankfurt School" devoted entirely to critical theory and its application. How though does one come up with an ORIGINAL theory anyway? Look at the main theorists we've studied. THEY've all built their arguments upon the works/words of others. So regardless of whether you're a diehard leftist or one who considers themselves devoutly RIGHT, how DO you think critically and apply the theories (shortcomings and all) to current events without sounding as though you've memorized the latest FOX news soundbyte or have listened to CHOMSKY a bit too much. Hmm? In other words, if you're seeking to escape the box entirely, how does one go about it when everything you know and are and understand about this world has been defined in varying relation to that box? So if Adorno is right is the choice really mutated GMO ketchup or simply naked, mutated, GMO, fat-tainted and deep fat fried "freedom" fries as advertised repeatedly on the channel, billboard and sports team of the day or is there really no choice at all but the illusion of choice and exercise in supply and demand as understood and made history and science by propaganda and Pavlov's dogs?

In honor of Arthur Miller

2005-02-11T10:54:00.000-08:00

A poem by another playwright. The bold emphasis added is mine. peace!

From A German War Primer by Bertolt Brecht ()
AMONGST THE HIGHLY PLACED
It is considered low to talk about food.
The fact is: they have
Already eaten.

The lowly must leave this earth
Without having tasted
Any good meat.

For wondering where they come from and
Where they are going
The fine evenings find them
Too exhausted.

They have not yet seen
The mountains and the great sea
When their time is already up.

If the lowly do not
Think about what's low
They will never rise.

THE BREAD OF THE HUNGRY HAS
ALL BEEN EATEN
Meat has become unknown. Useless
The pouring out of the people's sweat.
The laurel groves have been
Lopped down.
From the chimneys of the arms factories
Rises smoke.

THE HOUSE-PAINTER SPEAKS OF
GREAT TIMES TO COME
The forests still grow.
The fields still bear
The cities still stand.
The people still breathe.

ON THE CALENDAR THE DAY IS NOT
YET SHOWN
Every month, every day
Lies open still. One of those days
Is going to be marked with a cross.

THE WORKERS CRY OUT FOR BREAD
The merchants cry out for markets.
The unemployed were hungry. The employed
Are hungry now.
The hands that lay folded are busy again.
They are making shells.

THOSE WHO TAKE THE MEAT FROM THE TABLE
Teach contentment.
Those for whom the contribution is destined
Demand sacrifice.
Those who eat their fill speak to the hungry
Of wonderful times to come.
Those who lead the country into the abyss
Call ruling too difficult
For ordinary men.

WHEN THE LEADERS SPEAK OF PEACE
The common folk know
That war is coming.
When the leaders curse war
The mobilization order is already written out.

THOSE AT THE TOP SAY: PEACEAND WAR
Are of different substance.
But their peace and their war
Are like wind and storm.

War grows from their peace
Like son from his mother
He bears
Her frightful features.

Their war kills
Whatever their peace
Has left over.

ON THE WALL WAS CHALKED:
They want war.
The man who wrote it
Has already fallen.

THOSE AT THE TOP SAY:
This way to glory.
Those down below say:
This way to the grave.

THE WAR WHICH IS COMING
Is not the first one. There were
Other wars before it.
When the last one came to an end
There were conquerors and conquered.
Among the conquered the common people
Starved. Among the conquerors
The common people starved too.

THOSE AT THE TOP SAY COMRADESHIP
Reigns in the army.
The truth of this is seen
In the cookhouse.
In their hearts should be
The selfsame courage. But
On their plates
Are two kinds of rations.

WHEN IT COMES TO MARCHING MANY DO NOT
KNOW
That their enemy is marching at their head.
The voice which gives them their orders
Is their enemy's voice and
The man who speaks of the enemy
Is the enemy himself.

IT IS NIGHT
The married couples
Lie in their beds. The young women
Will bear orphans.

GENERAL, YOUR TANK IS A POWERFUL VEHICLE
It smashes down forests and crushes a hundred men.
But it has one defect:
It needs a driver.

General, your bomber is powerful.
It flies faster than a storm and carries more than an elephant.
But it has one defect:
It needs a mechanic.

General, man is very useful.
He can fly and he can kill.
But he has one defect:
He can think.

The Futility of the "Moral" Argument

2005-02-11T10:24:00.000-08:00

I think I've figured out that trying to argue morality with someone who can't think outside the walls of their own, just doesn't work. It becomes a wall between us that the words cannot, despite however cleverly phrased, penetrate. Then again, you must ask, how does a woman "penetrate"?

Much has been written about the feminization and masculinization of discourse. I think you can see a difference even in the words that are chosen or the way, if you watch a person close enough, you'll see that communication is so much more than words. People speak with their hands, their eyes and their silence as well. The way their hands fall, open and closed. The emphasis of a smile. I tried to learn this but I couldn't bring myself to smile when speaking about modern day slavery. The comm teacher commented I should try anyway. I thought, doesn't this make it seem light when it is anything but?

What I wouldn't give for a space in which people simply value LISTENING more than persuasive speech. I've been reading different op-ed's and "how-to's" by and for "activists" on both sides of the political ravine (left/right) and I think you can see each building a budding little arsenal with the intent of assuring their own first, second and third strike capability. And so how can you seem shocked by the war of words (and weapons) that nations so happily wage if the people who shape discourse do so through their ability to "dominate" it?

I'm feeling futile today. Blame the cold that won't go away. Blame depression. Blame my having to spend four hours at work last night sitting with psychotic patients. Blame economics. Blame that eerie feeling of de ja vu at the sight of the new Time magazine cover page with the next "enemy" already in caricature. Already a face of "evil" plastered on a front page, framed by words of "nuclear" "disarm" "threat" and "force." Sometimes you just want be a turtle and crawl back in your self and say, well shit, if the sky falls you can't say I didn't TRY to warn you.

That's so apathetic isn't it? Sorry.

This semester has (as short as it is thusfar) has been both wildly exciting and tremendously pathetic. Moreso than any semester I've had yet in college. It's so hard to be pulled in a thousand different directions. A mental drawn-and-quartering. It's growth I suppose. Shedding old skin for new. I just can't understand how I'm finally getting to take the most lustworthy classes for my brain ("modern" sociological theory, really great literature from the middle east AND an actual HUMAN RIGHTS history course) and I'm so overloaded emotionally that I can't string together a simple reason I feel so apathetic yet alone a solution to it.

Perhaps it's "Senior burnout."

I dropped a class thinking that might help. I'm in the process of trying to find a job that won't leave me injured and depressed. I'm learning to throw off the tyranny of people in my past whose love is most toxic and their hate, downright deadly. This should be good, should it not?
There have been days recently that I have woke up wanting to quit college. This SHOCKS me because I really do love it. I want to teach for crying out loud. I also want my dishes to get washed, my house to be clean, my bills to be paid, my cabinets to have food in them, my health to be somewhat existent and to be able to spend time with those I love. School doesn't prevent this but then again, you can't survive eating your textbook (or perhaps you can, but for how long?)

Lately, I'm more enchanted by the frost on the ground and the amazing colors of sunrise/sunset than I am by Parson's theory on power.

How do you get people to take the time to listen and actually hear/process what you are trying to say without reacting to what little they chose to hear? How do you do this within yourself to give them the same respect you really wish for yourself? I believe deeply that we need a new dyanmic, a new way of communication that is inclusive and centered NOT on persuasion but on LISTENING. On that note, I'm planning a new tattoo for myself. I need to pick between the kanjii for peace or one I'm actually leaning toward, "Listening" which has characters for the ear but also the heart and the mind. Listening with you whole being. There is such beauty out there and I think if we stay inside our little bubble worlds, we'll miss it. Like a blink, it will be gone.
Of course, this is itself a silly, futile "moral" argument. I think something needs desperately to change in the way that "diplomacy" works in the micro and macrocosmic/public and private spheres. When nations behave like children on a playground, some playing the role of bully, picking fights with anyone who seems different or vulnerable (almost always with the help of audience/crowd) and another throwing temper tantrums in the corner (whose punishment is to be ignored) one must ask as a bystander, where are the parents in all of this? Who will play the adult?

peace!

"in your revelation
in the symphony
there you stood in your own delirium
and all your satellites are fragments here
i feel a little crushed and out of control
and all your gravity
it's meant to bring you down
makes me feel so crushed and out of control" --crushed by Collide

Lectures, discussion, dialogue.

2005-02-08T21:36:00.000-08:00

BSU brought Gloria Steinem to campus and her speech was quite cool. Packed room. Even "pro-life" feminists outside holding anti-abortion signs. Very interesting. Most people in the room seemed quite agreeable to the points Steinem raised but some tried to ask questions that appeared (to me) to be attempts at illiciting a specific, defensive response. All of this made me think about what it might feel like if the shoe were on the other foot (oh, however cliche it is to say). I imagine that if I had been sitting at an Ann Coulter "lecture" I would probably feel as defensive and annoyed as the people who called Steinem's words "degrading." Do you think people who disagree with a speaker's views tend to go to listen to them JUST to dispute them or bitch about what they say or do you think there's opportunity there to change or challenge the perception? Gloria Steinem's lecture also made me think about how sometimes people try to use your words (or words in general) against you. Eventually, I would like to see a direct challenge to that whole notion of a seperation between activism and academia. Too many times professors are labeled as "activist" or as having an "agenda" if they merely present an issue contrary to or unfavorable to the status quo. Maybe they do, maybe they don't. A good professor will allow you to figure out the issue for yourself and give you the space to prove your position intelligently if you disagree and to back up your position even if you agree. Or at least that's my understanding of the ideal academic exchange. I would not sit for one minute in a class where a professor would demean my efforts at learning or push an agenda on me. I have had not yet had to thankfully. Perhaps the dynamic shifts a bit when it's a speaker up there for an hour and a half as opposed to sixteen weeks of educational exchange. I imagine too it must be difficult for people to hear someone presenting a view that may feel personally attacking to them or attacking their religious/moral/familial beliefs. I suppose though that at that point you would want to either put aside your biases to examine what is being presented to you CRITICALLY or at least work through your biases with the same CRITICAL THOUGHT that you want to unleash in "defense" of your views. "Curiouser and Curiouser..."

Off to read. peace!

"Have the strength to just sit inside your sadness
even if you're sitting there alone"--"Icarus" Ani DiFranco

Vocab Lesson

2005-02-07T22:57:00.000-08:00

Please explain to me the difference between "virulent" hatred and hatred. We are constantly given (and constantly give) examples of a differentiation between "virulent" hatred and hatred and the subject of which became even more relevant with two words: "hate crime." My point here in questioning the use of such a qualifier/quantifier is that I feel that it allows for a cognitive dissonance of sorts. By arguing Hitler is the epitome of evil incarnate it allows people who might've agreed with his policies and supported him financially and profited off of his wars(hint hint) to somehow be let "off the hook." Because they were not running the trains or the camps, nor were they donning the uniform and the fascist salute, they escape being lumped into the category of "truly evil." I wonder though if people who get labeled today as "virulently" hateful such as the Rev. Phelps and Falwell (among others) are really convenient diversionary tactics from those who make "virulently hateful" policies. I wonder also if their semi-"free reign" allows people to tolerate the smilingly hateful (a sort of razor blade in honey approach) so that they don't HAVE to deal with those who are obviously "extremist" in their views. I suppose I should qualify this. Is there anything less hateful about speeches made by Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity than the shit spewed by Phelps and Falwell? Sure, their targets are "liberals" and "terrorists" rather than gays, America, and liberals and terrorists but is there any real difference? One coats their words and the other doesn't but both have this odd ability to nearly cut the throat of the "Left" and with any radical voice that does escape is labeled "treasonous" and so too dies the opportunity for dialogue and critical thought. Back to my question though (drama aside) I really would like to know what the difference is between "private" hatred that may motivate racist, sexist and homophobic policies and that of "public" hatred which may result in a "hate" crime or a "war of aggression." I find the different words we use quite fascinating. The words "frame" debate and thus our understanding but more often they crush debate. That which doesn't fit within the given frame is simply ignored or made to seem idiotic, evil or questionable at best. Take the words "beating death" and "lynching." People didn't label Matthew Shephard's death a lynching. It was listed in the press again and again as a "hate crime" but also from what I read as a "beating death." How is it not a lynching?
How is it that the actions taken by Israeli soldiers against Palestinians understood as "defense" rather than "aggression?" Or when an individual uses a bomb or becomes a bomb, this is "terrorism" but when nations do it, it is "justice" "war" or even "humanitarian intervention."
All of these words have a specific, significant function in our discourse. The more sanitized the language, the more distance is maintained cognitively, thus "morally" and conveniently enough, politically. This works on so many levels. By maintaining the illusion of a "middle class" in America and the even greater illusion that anyone can become part of the richest 1% if they just "work hard enough" or that all people on welfare are to blame for the economy being in the crapper, it keeps people's attention diverted and their energy divided. We become factionalized. We think it's the "illegal immigrants" faults. Never mind that without those willing (often forced) to work in fields and sweatshops, we would have nothing to eat and nothing to wear. We think "gay marriage" and "abortion" are truly "moral" issues. This keeps people from thinking about and questioning the "morality" of bombing an entire country (two, three or more) into democracy or bombing a pharamceutical plant or ignoring genocide after genocide because we don't want to acknowledge our own war crimes. Carefully constructed PR stifles dissent like duct tape over the mouth, while the chance for actual "discourse" is played out like a role-play game by corporate media monkeys who dance to the tune of the business interests who are REALLY in power. All the while we're told that EVERY action is for the "GOOD of America" or the "Good of the world." How anyone could believe that cutting social programs are going to benefit "ALL" of America, especially the "WORKING CLASS" of America or the YOUTH, OR the elderly. COME ON!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Who is this "We" anyhow?

Your job isn't safe. Your family isn't safe. Your dream of retiring is exactly that and increasingly more so given the push for "overhauling" social security. I think any time you hear a policy maker sugar coat a policy agenda they're pushing you should automatically pause and think WHOA, "overhauling" "Defense of..." "reform," where have I heard this before? Ann Coulter can make an ass of herself slamming the feminist efforts that ALLOW for her to even be able to be misconstrued as an "Authority" (ON WHAT?) and sell a billion books doing so but someone like Arundhati Roy is viewed as "virulent" because her views aren't consistent with the crap spewed on the mainstream media. I think my post is starting to sound rather virulent. It just amazes me how words are so easily turned into weapons. The real danger is in silence and being made silent. Silence in the face of oppression. Silence in the reality of torture. Silence as the bombs fall. Didn't you ever want to ask someone like Phelps, someone who is running around screaming what GOD thinks/knows/believes/loves/hates/condemns and condones: How do you know God isn't up there going, would you just shut up already? I find the arrogance in people's pretense of "knowing" what GOD thinks pretty amazing. I'm a firm believer in karma. What you do comes back to you. So do you think Phelps might be reincarnated into a homosexual then or perhaps he is simply following in the footsteps of such grand souls as Hoover and McCarthy????
Hmm...I need sleep. :) peace!

"Have the strength to just sit inside your sadness
even if you're sitting there alone"--"Icarus" Ani DiFranco

"i'm haunted by my illicit, explicit dreams
and i can't really wake up
so i just drift in between
thinking the glass is half empty
and thinking it's not quite full"--"Slide" Ani (again)

"cuz all the wrong people have the power
of suggestion
and the freedom of the press is meaningless
if nobody asks a question"--"serpentine" Ani (yet again)

"so you see don't believe in the system
to legalize you or give you your freedom
you want rights ask 'em, they'll read 'em
but every flower gotta right to be bloomin'...
stay human..."--"Stay Human" Michael Franti/Spearhead

Rethinking Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery"

2005-02-06T19:07:00.000-08:00

Today we focused much discussion on torture and the big question of how to get people to care about others and not just about themselves, their world, their love, their fear and their well-being. I thought today that a perfect story to get younger people thinking about this would be Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery."

Here's an excerpt:

It's Tessie," Mr. Summers said, and his voice was hushed. "Show us her paper. Bill."
Bill Hutchinson went over to his wife and forced the slip of paper out of her hand. It had a black spot on it, the black spot Mr. Summers had made the night before with the heavy pencil in the coal company office. Bill Hutchinson held it up, and there was a stir in the crowd.
"All right, folks." Mr. Summers said. "Let's finish quickly."
Although the villagers had forgotten the ritual and lost the original black box, they still remembered to use stones. The pile of stones the boys had made earlier was ready; there were stones on the ground with the blowing scraps of paper that had come out of the box Delacroix selected a stone so large she had to pick it up with both hands and turned to Mrs. Dunbar. "Come on," she said. "Hurry up."
Mr. Dunbar had small stones in both hands, and she said. gasping for breath. "I can't run at all. You'll have to go ahead and I'll catch up with you."
The children had stones already. And someone gave little Davy Hutchinson few pebbles.
Tessie Hutchinson was in the center of a cleared space by now, and she held her hands out desperately as the villagers moved in on her. "It isn't fair," she said. A stone hit her on the side of the head. Old Man Warner was saying, "Come on, come on, everyone." Steve Adams was in the front of the crowd of villagers, with Mrs. Graves beside him.

"It isn't fair, it isn't right," Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her.
**************************************************************
That story never fails to give me chills and yet, how farfetched is the "village" mentality?
What do you think? Could such a story, so disturbing and yet powerful, give people pause enough to consider the idea of "sacrifice?" Or what about "justice?" Or perhaps even "security?" I remember reading this story in an English class where we also read "A Tale of Two Cities" followed shortly thereafter by the black-and-white film version. The Guillotine was a very menacing sight but I wonder how any thought of execution or pain could not cause psychological torment? Especially the fear of being killed by children. While children were not performing lynchings, there are many pictures of them at the feet of the dead, usually hanged man and stories of course of picnics by a disembowled (formerly pregnant) black woman. Juxtapose this with the child's understanding of torture and of death. Are most young children capable of understanding/comprehending/contextualizing the murder of someone? Some teens aren't even able to do this. How young do you begin to speak about the consequences of violence and more importantly, the violence of apathy? The apathy of watching people being interned. The apathy of seeing torture photos or watching buildings crumble after being struck by planes? How much should you worry about the violence in a video game when the violence acted out on real people in various countries using various methods of torture, starvation, carpet and cluster bombing or domestic violence, rape and child abuse is ever present? You can't turn that off.

If I teach one day, I want to teach using this story among many others such as "Persepolis," "Things Fall Apart," "The Sunflower," "Ordinary Men," "The Things They Carried," and "Beloved" so that people get to grapple with the "morality" or "ethics" of breaking another's body and/or mind. Why these? Well I think each span various cultures and times. Some deal with war. Some deal with torture. One addresses slavery. All deal with the question of ethics and/or morality and human rights and violation. I would add too, Derrick Jensen's book "A Language Older than Words" and perhaps Kali Tal's "Worlds of Hurt" book as a theory text. Jensen's book deals spans a spectrum of abuse from child abuse to rape of the environment. Tal's book examines the use of literature to speak about trauma (among other things). There are a ton of books I'd like to use but this is where I'm beginning my list. If you've got things to add feel free to do so. Also if you have suggestions let me know. I'm always open to suggestion. peace!

"Morality" and Law

2005-02-06T10:33:00.000-08:00

I'm always torn on the issue of a legislative morality. Do you remember when the Hate Crimes bills surfaced after the murder of Matthew Shephard trying to include in that definition, sexual orientation? I had a nice talk with a professor of mine who is a former lawyer and I remember he said something like the problem is, how do you legislate what is in someone's head or heart? How do you prosecute hate? How is murder any less a murder if the person died because they were in the wrong place/ wrong time or because their death was motivated by their sexual preference? How is changing the law to prosecute their murder as a "hate crime" going to change the fact that despite the motivation, the person is still dead?

I realize laws fall quite short of actual protection but I DO think the wording is quite important.
I think that by adding "sexual orientation" "sexuality" "sexual preference" you are legally validating a group who are still quite marginalized in this "democratic" society, thus still very much subject to discrimination and violence. Still, what to do about the laws...
This whole "oil-for-food" fiasco with the UN makes it seem even MORE inept (if that's even possible) and I just wonder where, when and how the idea of legal protection can trump class privilege, racist practice, power politics and hate? On the one hand, you have carefully worded laws that can actually provide precedence or offer an open door to improving or challenging or overhauling policy but how do you change the practice? Does changing the penalty of a law actually help or hurt the people the law is meant to protect? What about that ever important issue of enforcement? As evidenced by the US/UN relationship which borders on the incestuous in my opinion, the degree to which "law" will be follow really depends upon the capability of either an inner (as in, within the State itself) or outer (as in, with an international court) prosecutorial body that is free enough from the persuasion of that which it is to judge to do so according to the law. Then again, who defines that law? History has shown again and again the constant mutability of international law. There's that saying "Might makes Right" and I think that in this case (or at least in this argument) that is true. Unfortunate, but true. So I think perhaps that the true 'might' to make right has to lie in the hands of the people of a nation and not in the blind trust of their "leadership" or in the romantic notion of a foreign protectorate ready and able to enforce a body of law that is so wonderfully eloquent but so incredibly difficult to enforce.

I watched this film this weekend that I love titled "When night is falling" and in it one of the characters says to the other (who happens to be a lesbian) "Surely people like you have friends right?" I think the best intentions are just as cutting as that stupid phrase. However cautiously said or well-meant, those words isolate and treat the person they are addressing as a subject, an abnormality, a deviant, different, flawed. Some have argued that offering legal protection to those whose sexuality differs from the heterosexist norm is giving those not fitting within that norm, "special rights." The word "Special" suggests something above and beyond what already exists and the sad fact is that the U.S. hasn't even reached the point of "equal" rights so the notion of special rights is absolutely ludicrous. Under GW our nation has regressed in its fancy side step of international law and has kicked whatever legal "teeth" in that the Convention Against Torture may have had. This blog began by asking the question about what an America might look like that actually promoting a commitment to human rights rather than military might. We'll see how this will change for the better or worse in the next six months with Bush, Rice, Rummy and potentially Gonzales at the helm. It is painfully ironic that those who voted for this group are dubbed "the moral majority." This is only further proof that morality is really as abstract a label as any other word we might attach to ourselves or our thinking. You can wear it all you want but that doesn't necessarily make it true.

Finally, I really do think that legal scholars and scholars in general need to demand/shape/create a new language to counter and unpack the rhetoric used to justify/excuse human rights violations. The word "occupied" seems inadequate and innoculous. The word "detainee" seems like someone's just being held for a short while really, never mind what they're actually going through. The words "justice" "democracy" "oppression" "coercion" "freedom" "liberty" "power" and even that lovely word "morality" have all proven quite effective in the war here for hearts and minds. I think those who cringe at the use and abuse of those words really need to either reclaim them or create new ones that are yet to be co-opted. The media may be the mouthpiece of this administration but the indy media and alternative spaces have the power and opportunity to create a much needed (change in) dialogue. Refuse to be silenced. peace!

Happiness in "Verse"

2005-02-04T13:03:00.000-08:00

Happiness, for me, is often something channeled into words. Especially when I read something that just makes me smile. This poetry review did just that. I want this book. I want to shake the poet's hand or buy him a coffee and say, "Rock on!" For now, this will have to do. One thing though, the reviewer explains that some may wonder why the poet is so angry. I always wonder why more people are not. Oh and I agree with Herron, I would take John Lennon anyday but add Jim Morrison as well. So many forget he was first and foremost a poet. peace!

NEW! Review of Patrick Herron
American Godwar Complex by Patrick Herron.
BlazeVOX, $10.
Reviewed by Heidi Lynn Staples

And the just man rages in the wilds / Where lions roam. --William Blake

Some readers simply won't be satisfied with the particular execution of the political agenda in American Godwar Complex. Patrick Herron, surely, is aware of this, and his “Fuck You O Elvis” might be read, in part, as a response to anticipated critiques that demand a front-man of more lyricism and less didacticism:
... Fuck you O Elvis your cloudy pool is airless; the fish float on the surface with marble grin rotated sideways.Fuck you O Elvis your rotted Picasso-sloughed corpse you had no taste for voluminous fervor you absented toiling clam and skinny tie flim-flam spam man.Fuck you O Elvis you are the icon of my gilded excoriation.
Fuck you O Elvis fuck you I'll take John Lennon any day.

The epigraphs by Bertolt Brecht and Allen Ginsberg, two writers who worked from a belief in the poem as relevant site for public discourse, suggest we read the book not as the overheard musing of a solitary speaker but as the openly proclaimed indignation of an angry citizen. American Godwar Complex commences with a bit of revolutionary disturbance: “The Star Spangled Banner” becomes the collection's first poem, “The Blood-Spatter'd Banner”:

Oh, say can't you see, by the bare dangled light,
What so loudly we nailed with our nighttime's armed reaming?
Whose blood stripes and barbed stars, through the one-sided fight,
O'er the ghettoes we watched, were so violently screaming?
Does the vanquished's dead stare, uranium bursting in air, Give proof to our night that our flag is still there?
O say, can that blood-spattered banner yet wave
O'er the land ruled by blind decree, in a world we enslave?

This presents more than bare pastiche; across the collection, Herron employs (not always with sufficient force) the Situationist strategy of d'etournement--the subversion, devaluation and re-use of present and past cultural production to demolish its message while pirating its impact. What Adbusters does to the corporate, Herron sets out to do to the government: “The Star Spangled Banner” becomes “The Blood-Spattered Banner”; “My Country Tis of Thee” becomes “My Country Steals from Me”;“Hail to the Chief” becomes “Hail to the Thief”; “Take Me Out to The Ball Game” becomes “Take Me Out In the Maul Game.” Herron's saucy speaker mouths off in poems of a wide assortment, including skeletals, epistles, definitions, transcripts, and this one-liner:

“Parade”
I used to love a parade.

By evoking a fallen enthusiasm for processions--those actions in which things (words, cognitive patterns, policies, people) move forward in regular formation--Herron expresses disenchantment with, among other phenomena, high-stepping lyricism. Instead of a well-wrought yearn, the reader will find, for example, acerbic political haikus:

Politiku 1

Word from our sponsors:
please place your television
on the ocean floor.

Politiku 2
american re
olution: pollution, de
plete uranium.

solution: dig ahold to permanently keep
armed forces covert.

Sustained anger, a distinct feature of the collection, alienates the reader--perhaps purposefully. As anyone who has been in a good row knows, anger creates distance. Most obviously, anger introduces questions of judgment into the reading experience: What's he so angry about? Should he be this angry? What does he want me to do about it? Such questions interrupt the reader from her dreamy identification with the poem's speaker and ask her to wake up, participate in the making of meaning, and decide the issues for herself, goddammit; however, the best culture jamming--using an enemy's resources against it--is shocking and unexpected. The book's accomplishment in these terms can be unclear, particularly when words rhyme predictably, the syntax goes unsubverted, and the subject and sentiment can be anticipated, as in
“Amurika Eins:”
Follow the bouncing ball
to wherever Osama will fall.

Our might will take it all.
To fill the lives of young soldiers with thrills,
to inspire our leaders to gobble their pills!

There's oil in them thar Caspian hills.

Very likely these lines play better as spoken word, an indication of the collection's inherent theatricality.To everything there is a season. A time to laugh. A time to cry. And a time to tell off the motherfuckers. American Godwar Complex identifies our current epoch as this latter sort.
--from Verse magazine.--

"Stand your ground, this is what we are fighting for. For our spirit and laws and ways
Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war. For heaven or hell we shall not wait.
Shall I think of honour as lies or lament it's aged slow demise?
Shall I stand as a total stranger on this day in this stone chamber?"
--VNV Nation "HONOUR"

"We who build great works just to break them down. We who make our rules so we never fail."
--VNV Nation "Joy"

I LOVE THIS!

2005-02-04T11:08:00.000-08:00

This is too cool not to share. Check out more on http://alse.blogspot.com

.

Gives a whole new meaning to the words: Question authority!

peace!

Continued discrimination?

2005-02-03T21:17:00.000-08:00

Gays Excluded From Auschwitz Commemoration

The only victims not remembered — or invited.
By Tomek Kitlinski

WARSAW, Holocaust survivors and world leaders held a ceremony last week in Poland to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz Nazi death camp by the Red Army. Gay victims were the only ones not remembered, and gay groups the only ones not invited.

*****************************************************************
I've always wondered what the difference is between persecution and prosecution when both assume a sort of criminality?

Lunacy as policy

2005-02-03T18:00:00.000-08:00

I've heard it explained countless times that capitalism as a system of economics is self-destructive...because of overproduction and depletion of resources (natural, non-renewable, labor and monetary) chiefly. Yet I'm still always amazed when we have a repeat performance of the same tired old act: i.e. wage a war when the economy sucks, wage a war when people begin to question why their jobs are all going to thirteen year old girls in "third world" countries, wage a war when people start questioning that the cuts to social programs (poor little bleeding wrists that they are) are really "in the best interest of the "public," the "family" or god help, "the economy." I suppose it shouldn't surprise me. I've always felt that what "we've" learned from Vietnam has really been how better to dupe people. Control the media when you get your war on. Distort the social reality and see how best to convince people not to care about those beyond "our secure" borders. When "we" do it's not "terrorism" it's "exporting" opportunistic democracy. America has an impressive track record of this sort of export, don't you think?

This latest Rice venture, coupled with Bush's "We don't force our style of government on anyone" speech and (oh what a) photo-op in the beautiful pages of HIStory, the bumper magnet mania, what a wonderful exercise in promoting global democracy...

Well if you aren't yet feeling nostalgic enough, read this:

Rice Criticizes Iran on First Trip Abroad
2 hours, 41 minutes ago
By ANNE GEARAN, AP Diplomatic Writer
LONDON - Iran's approach to human rights and its treatment of its own citizens is loathsome, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (news - web sites) said Thursday. While saying Iranians deserve better leaders than "unelected mullahs," America's new chief diplomat stopped short of demanding their ouster.
AP Photo
AFP
Slideshow: Condoleezza Rice

At the start of her first trip abroad since succeeding Colin Powell (news - web sites) at the State Department, Rice also told reporters that last weekend's election in Iraq (news - web sites) vindicates the U.S.-led toppling of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein (news - web sites).
The invasion was broadly unpopular in many of the European capitals that Rice will visit over the next week. A major goal of Rice's trip is to shift the subject in Europe toward the possibility of Middle East peace and other mutual goals.
"I don't think anybody thinks that the unelected mullahs who run that regime are a good thing for the Iranian people and for the region," Rice said en route to London, her first stop. Her itinerary includes visits to Jerusalem and the West Bank to encourage peace talks between the Israelis and Palestinians.
Rice planned to meet on Friday with British Prime Minister Tony Blair (news - web sites) and Foreign Secretary Jack Straw. In stops in Berlin later Friday and Paris next week, she may run into war opposition that still lingers.
Iraq's elections for a national assembly "clearly remind us why we worked to liberate the Iraqi people from that terrible dictator," Rice said.
Acknowledging that "we all know that it's been difficult in Iraq," Rice said she still would "trade anytime" the stability offered under Saddam's rule for the self-determination promised by the election.
"It should just remind us all that those of us who had the good fortune to live on the right side of freedom's divide have an obligation to those who are left on the other side of freedom's divide to try to achieve their aspirations," Rice said.
On that point, she said, even those who "disagree about what we did or when we did it," can unite.
"I don't think there's anyone in Europe or anyplace else that thinks that the Iraqi people deserved Saddam Hussein," Rice said.
It is not clear how much international support there is for any potential action against Iran. The United States has been cool to European efforts to negotiate a halt to suspected Iranian nuclear weapons development, preferring stiffer measures such as economic penalties.
"I think that our European allies agree that the Iranian regime's human rights behavior and its behavior toward its own population is something to be loathed," Rice said.
Asked directly whether the United States supports a change in leadership in Iran, Rice said: "We are engaged in a process with many others that is aimed at making clear to the Iranians that their behavior internally and externally is out of step with the direction and desire of the international community."
During his State of the Union address Wednesday night, President Bush (news - web sites) urged the government in Tehran to "end its support for terror. And to the Iranian people, I say tonight: As you stand for your own liberty, America stands with you."
On Thursday, Iran's supreme leader said Bush's policies toward Iran will fail.
"America is like one of the big heads of a seven-headed dragon," Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in Iran's capital. "The brains directing it are Zionist and non-Zionist capitalists who brought Bush to power to meet their own interests."
At her Senate confirmation hearings last month, Rice said the United States wants "a regime in Iran that is responsive to concerns that we have about Iran's policies, which are 180 degrees" antithetical to America's interests.
Rice said she does not plan to attend next week's Middle East summit meeting in Egypt, although she said it was one of several hopeful signs for peace.
Rice will meet with the Israeli and Palestinian leaders ahead of that summit, but she indicated Thursday that the United States is taking something of a hands-off approach, for now.
"Not every effort has to be an American effort," Rice said. "It is extremely important that the parties themselves are taking responsibility. It is extremely important that the regional actors are taking responsibility."
President Bush pledged $350 million in aid for the Palestinians in Wednesday's State of the Union speech. Rice said it is too soon to say how that money will be spent.
She issued a veiled rebuke to Arab countries that have lagged behind Europeans and others in financial or other support for Israeli-Palestinian peace or have not acted to quell terrorism.
"Some in the region have not been as generous as they might be," Rice said. "I think it is time for everybody to look deep inside and say, `If we want the Israeli-Palestinian peace to be achieved and sustain momentum, what more can we do?'"

It's so fascinating the way they're staging this little (latest) "peace in the middle east" campaign.
"Manufacturing consent" as Chomsky would (has) said. I find it quite ironic that they're also always asking for more money when it was disclosed last week that they're some 9 billion dollars "missing" in Iraq. Hmm...wonder what the "aid" for Palestine will look like and what this will mean for Israel. What do you think?

peace!

"take away my right to choose
take away my point of view
the lunatics have taken over the asylum"--Collide (from their c.d. "Vortex")

Use and Abuse of Power

2005-01-31T11:21:00.000-08:00

The Inquisition Strikes Back

By Jules Siegel, AlterNetPosted on January 29, 2005,
Printed on January 31, 2005http://www.alternet.org/story/21105/

"And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee." – John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, Meditation XVII, 1623

We have by now all seen much of this material before, but reading it all in one piece, told by human voices in this book-length interview, is not easy to take. "Guantánamo: What the World Should Know" (Chelsea Green) – by Michael Ratner and Ellen Ray – becomes a heart-stopper once you cross the line and realize that you could be any of these victims.
Michael Ratner, President of the Center for Constitutional Rights, is co-counsel in Rasul v. Bush, the historic case of Guantánamo detainees now before the U.S. Supreme Court. His interviewer, Ellen Ray, is President of the Institute for Media Analysis, and a widely published author and editor on U.S. intelligence and international politics.
It's hard to say which is more disgusting, the descriptions of the torture or the bone-chilling analyses of how the president of the United States gave himself the powers of an absolute military dictator. Under Military Order No. 1, which the president issued without congressional authority on November 13, 2001, George W. Bush has ordered people captured or detained from all over the world, flown to Guantánamo and tortured in a lawless zone where, the White House asserts, prisoners have no rights of any kind at all and can be kept forever at his pleasure. Despite the at-best marginal intervention of the American courts so far, there is no civilian judicial review, no due process of any kind.
While any military force will routinely violate the civil rights of anyone who gets in its way, Ratner's descriptions of how victims wound up in Guantánamo reveal wanton cruelty and callousness that will nauseate any sane human being.
Ratner writes: "A lot of the people picked up by warlords of the Northern Alliance were kept in metal shipping containers, so tightly packed that they had to ball themselves up, and the heat was unbearable. According to some detainees who were held in the containers and eventually released from Guantánamo, only a small number, thirty to fifty people in a container filled with three to four hundred people survived. And some of those released said that the Americans were in on this, that the Americans were shining lights on the containers. The people inside were suffocating, so the Northern Alliance soldiers shot holes into the containers, killing some of the prisoners inside."
Some prisoners were captured in battle; many others were picked up in random sweeps for no reason at all except being in the wrong place at the wrong time. As usual in these kinds of operations, some were turned in as a result of petty revenge or as an excuse to steal their property. When asked in court to explain the criteria for detention, the government had no answer. There were no criteria, it appears. "The government even made the ridiculous argument before the Supreme Court that the prisoners get to tell their side of the story, by being interrogated," Ratner reports.
Ratner notes that 134 of the 147 prisoners later released from Guantánamo were guilty of absolutely nothing. Only thirteen were sent on to jail. He believes it is possible that a substantial majority of the Guantánamo prisoners had nothing to do with any kind of terrorism. One prisoner released after a year claimed he was somewhere between ninety and one hundred years old, according to Ratner. Old, frail and incontinent, he wept constantly, shackled to a walker.
So what did the authorities get from those who survived? We will never know, but we can guess from at least one incident in this book. Ratner reports that the Guantánamo interrogators showed some of his clients' videotapes supposedly depicting them with Osama bin Laden. At first they denied being in the videos, but they confessed after prolonged interrogation under harsh conditions. Yet British intelligence proved to the American government that the men were actually in the United Kingdom when the tapes were made.
If many of these people who died in custody or were tortured had committed no crime, there is no doubt that they were all victims of crime, whether guilty or not. Despite White House arguments to the contrary, torture is a crime under international and United States law.
Under United Nations Convention Against Torture, an international treaty that almost every country in the world, including the United States, has ratified, torture is an international crime. The United States has made it a crime even if it occurs abroad.
"The Convention Against Torture also establishes what is called universal jurisdiction for cases of torture," Ratner explains. "So, for example, if an American citizen engaged in torture anywhere in the world and was later found in France, let's say, that person could be arrested in France and either tried for torture there or extradited to the place of the torture for trial. To the extent U.S. officials were or are involved in torture in Guantánamo or elsewhere, they should be careful about the countries in which they travel."
He continues, "In addition, torture committed by U.S. soldiers or private contractors acting under U.S. authority is a violation of federal law, punishable by the death penalty if the death of a prisoner results from the torture. Even if one argues that al Qaeda suspects are not governed by the Geneva Conventions, the Convention Against Torture and other human rights treaties ratified by the United States prohibit torture as well as other cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment.
"The convention is crystal clear: under no circumstances can you torture people, whatever you call them, whether illegal combatants, enemy combatants, murderers, killers. You cannot torture anybody ever; it's an absolute prohibition."
While many well-meaning people on both left and right profess to be shocked by the stories that continue to pour out of Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib and other detention centers, they usually fail to understand that these atrocities are
well-rooted in American culture.
"None of what is known to have happened in Guantánamo is alien to American prisoners." says Paul Wright, Editor, Prison Legal News. Sexual assault, long term sensory deprivation, abuse, beatings, shootings, pepper spraying and the like are all too familiar to American prisoners. Coupled with overcrowding, this is the daily reality of the American prison experience."
Perhaps the only real difference is that the White House argues more forcefully than usual that no court can forbid it to arbitrarily detain and torture anyone it designates an unlawful enemy combatant, a definition that it has applied not only to foreigners but also to American citizens. We have seen how the drug exception to the Constitution has nullified basic American rights such a freedom from illegal search and seizure. But the war on drugs was merely a test run. Some rights remained intact. Now comes the permananent war against terrorism in which all human rights are
annihilated.
Rasul v. Bush could be a legal turning point, but it remains to be seen whether or not the White House will respect any inconvenient court decision, no matter how high the bench. Michael Ratner and Ellen Ray could be merely eloquent early witnesses to the inevitable future. Thus ends democracy in the United States. The most hope that one can express is a question mark. Thus ends democracy in the United States?
© 2005 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/21105/

On Racism

2005-01-30T23:58:00.000-08:00

I'm currently working through the book "A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America" by Ronald Takaki and it has left me with the question...how does one define "white" when very few people in American history can truly claim a purely "white" heritage?
I had a funny and embarrassing experience once where I opened my big mouth and a comment came out completely wrong (i.e. made an ass of myself) by saying the word "colored" rather than "of color" (which is what I meant) to an African-American woman. She turned to me and said, "Honey you white people have far more colors in your skin then we do." Well said. She's absolutely right. Then again, I am third generation Japanese and don't look it. My "whiteness" has been unquestioned in some circles and alienating in others so how does one define "white" or choose one's "culture" if blood and circumstance don't exactly align? The lines get a bit blurry.

Stupid questions here but I'm going to ask them anyway:
1. What is the relationship between structures of power and the creation of categories of difference, especially when these categories are visible and impossible to conceal?

2. Do "white people" have a culture? What is it? Is it something that crosses the borders of socio-economics, religion, gender and sexuality? How do you define a "culture" of the dominant (read: normal) group? How are you defined by it? Within it? Because of it? Through it? In relation to it?

3. Is "culture" manufactured (as suggested by Adorno/Horkheimer/Benjamin)...socially and CONSCIOUSLY created and is this creation (at the very least) in part responsible for the categories of difference that we find ourselves in or place others in? Who gets to tell you you're white? Who gets to determine your degree of "otherness"? Who tells you your history? Who or what defines your existence and how does this definition work to your benefit or add to your struggle?

4. How we do change or challenge our understanding of socially constructed difference? How is consensus created/sustained? How do we understand racism as a process and see it when it is institutionalized, commercialized, normalized and even (dare I say) democratized? How do you explain racism to people who see it as someone else's problem or as 'old news' or to those who'll base racial equality on the "successes" of people such as Powell, Rice, and Alberto Gonzales or to those who feel threatened by the "increasing" disappearance of white male faces in the workplace or in the classroom?

bell hooks has done so much work on these issues (as has Cornel West). Someone posted to a discussion board the question "Are whites the only ones capable of racism?" I wonder if the problem with this question (other than the obvious issue of power and privilege) is that the real question, the unasked question, is that why are so few "whites" writing on the issues of racism except as a thing of the past or as something that "minorities" focus on? Why is it that the issue of racism in "white" discourse is only relevant in terms of "reverse racism"? I think whenever you have someone writing on racism or sexism or homophobia, you have to ask yourself: what does this person have to gain from their argument? How are they distant or connected to what they are discussing? Why am I reacting to it in this manner? Is my reaction a result of my personal experience or simply some preconceived idea (or socially constructed notion) of difference?

peace!

"Turn the body language upside down. What does it look like?" --Anne Waldman

"To summarize: (1) in real subsumption all use-value is drawn into exchange value; (2) but with that the external origin of the measure of time (based on the externality of use-value) recedes and measure is flattened onto the process itself" --(from) Antonio Negri's "time for revolution"
(someone OBVIOUSLY thinks I'm smarter than I am by giving me this but hey, I do love a challenge!)

and now for a little wordplay:

summarily speaking
the subsumption of value
is written on the body
the results of worth
are measured in blood
the waste of this
is defined in terms
boldly sterile
staring you down
until you sweat market value
and are sold into slavery
or welded
"wed"
to your spot on the assembly line.
don't worry though
your children will reap the benefits
of this
world-manufactured
bliss.
--assemblage--

My consciousness fell asleep at the wheel
My conscience, unfortunately, is a caffeine addicted
insomniac who has the habit of befriending
thoughts in repetitious exile
all of which of course
is part of a carefully orchestrated
A S S A U L T
on that mad monkey
who plays masturbatory politics
with one hand on the bible
the other in the air (salute!)
All hail the Jester King
and his royal court as well
attending this lovely enacted
mockery of democracy
as their little imaginary world
slowly collapses
upon itself. Spent.
-hope it was as good for you as it was for me-
warring isn't "fucking" though
the difference is often lost
Weakened by the fluidity
of lines on a map
places whose names few can pronounce
and a matter of vocabulary
beyond "exit strategies" and other formalities
such as answering the question
"So what? Who's to blame if the condom broke?
Remember Clinton said it depends on your definition of is
and now we agree so
this...well this...
It's an acceptable risk sort of thing."
--CONFESSOR--

--I don't have an "aversion" to work...just to stupidity. So can I call in sick of you?--

"you are the perfect drug the perfect drug the perfect drug"--NIN from the Lost Highway
Soundtrack

My own "Op-Ed" piece

2005-01-28T17:15:00.000-08:00

Where do you think I should submit this? :)

Does sovereignty of the body only exist in the playground of the mind?

I like to believe that as an American citizen the laws will protect me from torture. Perhaps this is true because of my skin color and choice of religion. However, I am not so sure. I would like to think that as a woman the laws would protect my reproductive rights as well as my access to quality health care. With this administration no one can be sure.
What we have here, as has been eloquently pointed out by others, is a system of “rights” based on privileges not absolutes. Nothing proves this more to me than the torture of “detainees” at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. This administration has worked so hard at creating and sustaining a category of “official others” exempt from protection of international and domestic law. Calling these men “detainees” means that they are not officially “prisoners” and therefore fall in the area outside of the protection of the Geneva Convention on Torture. They are not even prisoners of war. They are simply being “detained” and while they are being detained they are also being tortured. As Lisa Hajjar explains,

"…neoconservatism may help explain much about American military and foreign policy after 9/11, it doesn't account for the legal reasoning that set the conditions for the torture scandal. For that, we need to look to the Federalist Society, an organization established by right-wing lawyers in the early 1980s to redress "liberal bias" in American law schools and the legal profession. The thinking and influence of Federalist Society types who dominate legal positions (and judicial appointments) in the Bush Administration are laid bare in the torture memos, which document the triumph of international law-averse officials in the Justice Department, the Pentagon and the White House over dissenting voices in the State Department and sectors of the professional military. The victors' most egregious mistake was to conflate international humanitarian law--the laws of war--with other bodies of international law, especially human rights law, which they loathe as constraints on US sovereignty (Hajjar, Lisa. The Nation, 1/28/05)."

This quote raises the bigger question regarding torture and sovereignty, namely, what is the difference between persecution and prosecution? Who gets to decide that your body is worth protecting or worth violating? If the responsibility of protection AND prosecution both lie in the hands of any State then who is the State responsible to? Some argue that this is the role and function of the United Nations and particularly the hope encased in the UNDHR. However, the U.N. has proven itself quite impotent in its ability to stand up to the United States, so who does that leave? NGO’s such as the Red Cross or Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International? The International War Crimes Tribunal? The World Court?

It worries me immensely that this administration is so very good at duping people into believing that torturing “detainees” is going to somehow make America and the world safer. It worries me even more that this administration is so very skillful at co-opting the rhetoric of human and civil rights in its call to war. As a feminist, I view the breaking of any body as an extreme violation that should not be excused or ignored. As a human rights activist, I question this war to win hearts and minds when I know that underneath the rhetoric human beings are starving and being bombed to death simply because they live between the borders of a land that America has the power and privilege and arrogance to try and occupy. As an American, I distrust the vocabulary of exemption being parroted out by every mainstream media outlet. As a citizen of this world, I expect war crimes to be prosecuted and acts such as torture, carpet bombing, illegal “detainment,” pre-emptive war and murder to be treated accordingly regardless of who wins and loses this “war.” If I am truly reflective on this, I know that these little labels are no more seperate than these issues. Abuse is abuse. Oppression is oppression. If the standards we choose for ourselves are not the same we expect others to adhere to, then we are choosing an even more dangerous world. If we do not protest the abuse of power then that same abuse can be used against us, regardless of our skin color or religion or even our status as citizens. If we cave to this idea that sovereignty over the body exists only in the “liberal” imagination then we make this a socially agreed-upon truth. Torture should not be excusable any more than genocide or Bush wearing a swastika and praising Hitler. People would not stand for one second of him acting in blatant racism or sexism and yet the fact is that torturing Muslim men and pummeling cities in Iraq and Afghanistan or sneaking into in Iran seems to be somehow less morally outrageous. Many enjoy comparing evil with evil and ranking every evil by comparison of Hitler and Nazi Germany. Above all else, the Nazis gave ample evidence of how dangerous power, excuses of sovereignty and disdain for human rights can be when left unquestioned and unchecked.

Links on abuse of power and torture:
http://www.globalsecurity.org/intell/library/reports/2004/800-mp-bde.htm
http://electroniciraq.net/news/1782.shtml
http://hrw.org/wr2k5/anatomy/index.htm
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050207&s=hajjar
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050207&s=schell

Family Values

2005-01-28T15:03:00.000-08:00

If Bush is indeed the "strong father figure" some people seem to think America needs then surely the U.S. mainstream media is the mommy. Stifling dissent or trivializing it. Spanking wayward children who might actually speak critically of the administration or war or foreign policy in general or secrecy. Is the UN then the little lap dog that is praised when worthy and punished and sent away to cower in the corner when it dares act up? Is the rest of the administration the in laws who really have the power and know when to pull the strings to secure our dancing monkey politics?

I've been revisiting a book of comics by Dr. Seuss called "Dr. Seuss goes to war" which critiques the US for its isolationist stance and especially for its own racism. Doing so made me think about the fact that more often than not the most critical work you'll read in most mainstream newspapers and magazines comes not from the op-eds nor from the main articles but from the cartoons/comics and caricatures. I cringed when I heard Bush said that those who voted for him gave him "the political capital" to do what he felt needed to be done. I cringed at his swearing in ceremony. None of this has to do with him "winning" but rather, because his words and his actions do not mirror my values or my "morality." I see no value or morality in bombing hospitals. I see no morality or value or EXCUSE in torturing Muslim men. I see no morality or value in discriminating against gays and lesbians or anyone for that matter. I see no value or morality in bombing people into democracy. I have a family. I love them very much and when I think about what our values are, I DO NOT for even half a second see them echoed in anything this administration does or says or what the media tries to sell. I also cannot see how others can find value or morality in such hypocrisy. Security can never come from oppressing others or from lies and fear. The film "The Village" offers a great example of this and I highly recommend it. Also, check out the film "Hijacking Catastrophe" by the Media Education Foundation. I really believe you have to find the real news and the very real hope that does not cloak itself in rhetoric stolen from the Left but is instead advocacy of truly progressive views. The real news. The real family values. Ask yourself, does this administration's actions really speak for you or for the America you belong to? Is torture, pre-emptive war, playground politics and the crafting and use of a vocabulary of exemption truly American? Is exploitation, occupation and oppression part of your values as an American? If not, then please stand up and let your voice be heard!

Outrage

2005-01-27T22:22:00.000-08:00

There's so many good stories out right now. Stories, op-eds, essays and whatnot that should make you shudder when you hear words pretty floating in the air like confetti. You shoud feel a little out of sorts if not outright angry. The problem is that so many people simply don't feel a thing at all. Outrage is a space for whom or what? Is it a space for those who think spongebob is a threat to "good family values"? Is it a space for those who cringe with the irony of democracy at gunpoint? Is it a space for those who plaster their cars with bumper magnets and American flags decrying the division in the nation? Is it a space for all of us to possibly think beyond the borders of our own homes, our own states, our own religiosity, our own bodies and the nation?
Outrage is missing in action to me. M-I-A. Or perhaps KIA? I don't know. I wonder when I read story after story why people aren't angry? Don't get me wrong. There is OUTRAGE but it is more the voice of a child whose mouth is being muffled by an overconcerned mother than anything else. Shhh. Don't embarass. Don't cry too loud or too much...

I want to know why people would rather sink into the drama of reality tv and made for tv war then to think about what carpet bombing does to children or for that matter, what the tsumani is doing for sexual slavery or what "AID" really means when stripped bare of pomp and circumstance. I want to know why people aren't screaming out for those who are being tortured and held indefinately and why every time one story makes the news, another meant to counter any negative effects of it suddenly pops up like a hand over a mouth.

I want your anger. I want your outrage. I want to hear people who refuse to shut up or be silenced. I ADORE Barbara Boxer for standing up to Rice. I ADORE Lisa Hajjar for keeping torture from being rendered "old news." I ADORE the progressive news sources that keep fighting corporate media spin. As my friend mentioned today, winning "the hearts and minds" of any people means little if that's all that is left of them. On that note, I'd like to post here something that did piss me off but more importantly, it makes me think. I hope it does the same for you. peace!

Published on Friday, January 28, 2005 by CommonDreams.org

Why the Children in Iraq Make No Sound When They Fall
by Bernard Chazelle

No one said that dying had to be dull. "Screaming with fear, paralyzed children at a shelter for the physically disabled and mentally ill in Galle, Sri Lanka, lay helplessly in their beds as seawater surged around them." The CNN report read like the screenplay of a horror film. A crippled girl grows up destitute in a home for the deaf, the blind, the insane, and, for good measure, the disabled elderly (what more could a kid wish for?) At the end of a short life spent wondering why no one ever looked out for her, the child reaches the final punctuation mark of her blessed existence and drowns glued to a wheelchair.

Tragedy should not be too clever. Mourning embraces the solemnity of death but recoils at an overzealous script. When fate appears to cross the thin line between cruelty and sadism, grief turns to anger. We expect the church organist at the funeral mass to interrupt Bach in mid-measure, look up to the sky, and shout "Come on!"

Voltaire had his "come on" moment in the wake of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, suggesting that God's supreme goodness perhaps was not all it was cracked up to be. Religious irreverence is not much in fashion these days. But piety was not always so docile. History has been improbably kind to all sorts of figures who've had cross words with the Almighty. Think of Job, Jonah, Jeremiah, and Jesus on the cross—and that's only for the J's. Once or twice, the dispute even got out of hand: Nietzsche killed God; and Richard Rubenstein saw in Auschwitz confirmation of his death. Admittedly, to reconcile the Holocaust with a just and omnipotent god is an interesting variation on squaring the circle—or, since Miklós Laczkovich actually succeeded in doing just that [1], let us say, merely a reminder that gods may die but theological debates just never do.
My own reaction to the CNN report was not nearly as elevated. "Why would God behave like Don Rumsfeld?" I wondered. As the crippled child writhed in agony, I pictured God murmuring "Stuff happens."

Woe unto me. To compare God to Rummy is worse than blasphemous: It's unfair. After all, God did not cow the media into decorating our TV screens with the beatific smiles of preening peacocks reassuring us that smart waves drowned the terrorists, spared the innocent, amused the children, and provided much needed water to drought-prone regions. God gets accused of many things, including being dead, but lying is rarely one of them.
Mendacity, on the other hand, is the reserve currency of this administration. Its marketing hook: "You give us your votes; we give you our lies." From the fictitious Saddam-al Qaeda axis to the rosy updates on the Switzerlandization of Iraq, from the bogus tales of WMD to the assurance that democracy is the future of the region (and always will be, would add the cynics), the giving has been, shall we say, generous.

The taking has been no less effusive. Although the hysterical rantings of prowar voices rarely exceeded, in dignity, the yapping of a chihuahua attacking a meatball, they met only the meekest resistance from an oleaginous mainstream media. The war hawks found powerful enablers in The New York Times, which was more than happy to echo the delusory yarn spun by the White House and pimp for Judith Miller's Best Little Whorehouse in Babylon (where bling bling spells WMD).

Pimping being the fickle business that it is, it won't be long before the In-Bush-We-Trust media gets in touch with its inner peacenik and points an accusing finger at the posse of visionary mediocrities who gave us a nasty case of Iraq syndrome. No doubt some of the neocons will balk at going to their graves with the word "loser" carved on a brass coffin plate; so watch for them to pull a McNamara on us and humbly beg for forgiveness. Being good souls, ie, suckers for smarmy group hugs, naturally we'll oblige.

Were it so simple. The abject surrender of the media fed a slew of illusions to the public, none more craven than the belief that he whom we kill must be killed. Yeah, yeah, we occasionally obliterate the wrong house and incinerate its occupants, but that's just "friendly fire." (A lovely phrase if there's one: Let's hear the surgeon who amputates the wrong leg inform his patient of his "friendly amputation.") Minus the friendliness, however, our whiz-bang weapon wizardry never fails to separate the wheat from the chaff, the nursing mother from the crazed beheader. So goes the creed, anyway.

The Lancet—that well-known freedom hating rag—begs to differ. It estimates that our high-IQ, mensa-schmensa bombs have killed 100,000 civilians [2]. Iraq Body Count, which plays the lowballing game by shunning projections, reports the deaths of 600 non-combatants during our latest goodwill tour of Fallujah (by now primed to be renamed Grozny on the Euphrates) [3].
And then there is the Iraqi girl, hands soaked in her dead father's blood, whose little brother does not yet understand that his childhood has just come to an end. Fearing for their lives, US soldiers killed the parents in the front seat of the family car. Demons will likely haunt their nights. Stuff happens. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, bless their souls, will sleep well tonight.

Wars never fail to produce their share of pithy lines. Tommy Franks made sure this one would be no exception. "We don't do body counts," crowed the general, who really meant to say that he does not do "dark-skinned body counts" (he counts the others just fine). Lucky for us that he doesn't run a Swedish newspaper, or it would have splashed the headline: "Tsunami kills 2,000 Swedes—and a few locals." To be fair, Franks remembered the last time he did body counts, Vietnam, and how well that ended. But today's tactical thinking packs a wallop of self-righteous denial. We don't tally the children we kill for the same reason monsters don't buy mirrors:

That's how they go through life thinking they're angels.

We've snuffed out innocent lives in numbers that insurgents and terrorists could only dream of. But we avert our eyes. We bury our heads in the sand and turn a blind eye to our moral cowardice, thus pulling off the amazing feat of being ostriches and chickens all at once. We owe this marvel of ornithology to the inexorable fragility of human illusions. To quote James Carroll, "we avert our eyes because the war is a moral abyss. If we dare to look, as Nietzsche said, the abyss stares back." George Bush, the philosopher, has updated Berkeley's riddle: Do Iraqi children scream when the bombs fall if there is no one in the White House to hear them?

The celebrity of the month, the tsunami victim, has hogged newspaper headlines nationwide with stomach-churning photo spreads of wailing mothers and floating cadavers. Like his unsung Iraqi brethren, the victim has reminded us that calamity always strikes the poor, the sick, and the helpless first. It's invariably those with the least to lose who lose the most. At the great banquet of cataclysms, rich Westerners get served last. Bush would have us believe that we've suffered so much from terrorism the world owes us undying compassion. In truth, our induction into the Misery Hall of Fame is still a long way off. With our sustained assistance, however (coddling Saddam while he was gassing Iranians, slapping sanctions that killed half a million children, and fighting two wars in twelve years), Iraq made it on the first ballot. Who ever said that we didn't have a big heart?

Not Condoleezza Rice: "I do agree that the tsunami was a wonderful opportunity to show not just the US government, but the heart of the American people, and I think it has paid great dividends for us" [4]. And I just can't wait for the next one, our top diplomat might have added.
While watching Colin Powell, pocket calculator in hand, add up the geopolitical benefits of our generosity and tell us how shocked, shocked he was by the tsunami's devastation, I could almost hear the Beatitudes from The Gospel According to Dubya: "Blessed are the children whom the sea swallows, for they shall tug at our heartstrings. / Cursed are the children whom our bombs blow up, for they shall roam the dark alleys of our indifference." We've been Iraq's tsunami. But expect no charity drive, no minute of silence, no flag at half-staff: nothing that would allow shame to rear its ugly face.

With Bush's reelection, America now has the president it deserves. And should you find that Lady Liberty, all dolled up with the latest in fashion from Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, looks a bit like a used up hooker, you won't need to ask who hired her pimp: We did.
The liberation of Iraq began with smart flying bombs crashing over Baghdad. We should have known better. Liberations that start with a reenactment of 9/11 rarely end well.
[1] Laczkovich, M. Equidecomposability and discrepancy; a solution of Tarski's circle-squaring problem, J. Reine Angew. Math. 404 (1990), 77-117.
[2] 100,000 Civilian Deaths Estimated in Iraq, by Rob Stein, Washington Post, October 29, 2004. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7967-2004Oct28.html
[3] Iraq Body Count Falluja Archive, www.iraqbodycount.org, 2004. http://www.iraqbodycount.net/resources/falluja/
[4] Dr. Rice's senate confirmation hearing, Agence France Presse, Tuesday, January 18, 2005. http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0118-08.htm
Bernard Chazelle is a professor of computer science and Princeton University Fellow, American Academy Arts & Sciences, European Academy of Sciences.
© 2005 Bernard Chazelle
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Sponge Bob, the "gay threat" and the issue of "tolerance"

2005-01-20T21:13:00.000-08:00

I almost fell off my chair laughing when I read that Sponge Bob and other cartoon characters starring in a video re-do of "We are Family" is suddenly hailed by some as part of the "gay threat." What's the threat? Tolerance. The issue of tolerance. I really cannot understand what anyone could view as right or righteous about denying others their right to exist. I know, I know, someone's going to say, well in this do you mean murderers and pedophiles and rapists? Should they exist too? My response to this sort of crap logic is that I do not have the right as an individual to say who should live and who shouldn't. What I do have the right and I feel the responsibility to do is to speak out against the rampant and horrid discrimination and dehumanization of those not heterosexual, not Christian, not powerful, not privileged, not white, not male, not American. That is the true idea of tolerance is it not? What is so frightening about actually extending to another human being the same rights you would expect and want for yourself? What is so damn evil about that? Please explain this to me. I'm absolutely willing to listen. And don't chalk it up to God either. Because God knows and I am quite aware of the many times God has been invoked to excuse abuse after abuse of power and I keep hoping people will actually remember that once upon a time, people believed that the mixes of races and slavery itself was also considered God's will. So either God contradicts Himself quite often or else, perhaps, just maybe people really shouldn't take their powers of exclusive holy interpretation so seriously?

Human rights are exactly that...and nothing short of what you want for yourself. Please protect the rights of others and stand up against such fearmongering idiocy. Please.

peace!

Please read these two extremely important articles!

2005-01-20T20:56:00.000-08:00

A Nuremberg Lesson By Scott Horton The Los Angeles Times
Thursday 20 January 2005

Torture scandal began far above 'rotten apples.'
"This so-called ill treatment and torture in detention centers, stories of which were spread everywhere among the people, and later by the prisoners who were freed ... were not, as some assumed, inflicted methodically, but were excesses committed by individual prison guards, their deputies, and men who laid violent hands on the detainees."
Most people who hear this quote today assume it was uttered by a senior officer of the Bush administration. Instead, it comes from one of history's greatest mass murderers, Rudolf Hoess, the SS commandant at Auschwitz. Such a confusion demonstrates the depth of the United States' moral dilemma in its treatment of detainees in the war on terror.
In past weeks, we have been treated to a show trial of sorts at Ft. Hood, Texas, starring Cpl. Charles Graner and other low-ranking military figures. The Graner court-martial and the upcoming trial of Pfc. Lynndie England are being hyped as proof of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's explanation for the Abu Ghraib prison tortures: A few "rotten apples" - not U.S. policy or those who created it - are to blame.
Graner entered a "Nuremberg defense" - arguing that he was acting on orders of his superiors. This defense was rejected in Ft. Hood as it was in Nuremberg 60 years ago, when Nazi war criminals were found guilty of crimes against humanity. A misled American public can choose to see in the Graner verdict the proof of the "rotten apples" theory and of the notion that Graner and the others acted on their own initiative. But what it should see is a larger Nuremberg lesson: Those who craft immoral policy deserve the harshest punishment.
Consider the memorandum written by Alberto Gonzales - then the president's attorney, now his nominee for attorney general. He wrote that the Geneva Convention was "obsolete" when it came to the war on terror. Gonzales reasoned that our adversaries were not parties to the convention and that the Geneva concept was ill suited to anti-terrorist warfare. In 1941, General-Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, the head of Hitler's Wehrmacht, mustered identical arguments against recognizing the Geneva rights of Soviet soldiers fighting on the Eastern Front. Keitel even called Geneva "obsolete," a remark noted by U.S. prosecutors at Nuremberg, who cited it as an aggravating circumstance in seeking, and obtaining, the death penalty. Keitel was executed in 1946.
Keitel's remarks were made in response to a valiant memorandum prepared by German military lawyers who argued that the interests of Germany's soldiers, and the interests of morale and good order, would be served by adhering to the Geneva treaty. Secretary of State Colin Powell, echoing the opinions of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and U.S. military lawyers, sent Gonzales a letter that hit the same notes.
Rumsfeld and the White House would have us believe that there is no connection between policy documents exploring torture and evasion of the Geneva Convention and the misconduct on the ground in Guantanamo Bay, Iraq and Afghanistan - misconduct that has produced at least 30 deaths in detention associated with "extreme" interrogation techniques. But the Nuremberg tradition contradicts such a contention.
At Nuremberg, U.S. prosecutors held German officials accountable for the consequences of their policy decisions without offering proof that these decisions were implemented with the knowledge of the policymakers. The existence of the policies and evidence that the conduct contemplated in them occurred was taken as proof enough.
There is no doubt that individuals like Graner and England should be held to account. But where is justice - and where are the principles the U.S. proudly advanced at Nuremberg - if those in the administration and the military who seem most culpable for the tragedy not only escape punishment but in some cases are slated for promotion?
Next week, the world will commemorate the liberation of Auschwitz. A memorial prayer for the death camp victims will be read at the United Nations. German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer will attend to acknowledge that the depravities at Auschwitz were not the work of a few "rotten apples" but the responsibility of a nation. Such a courageous assumption of responsibility should provide a model for the United States, which can still act to salvage its tradition and its honor.

Scott Horton is a New York attorney and a lecturer in international humanitarian law at Columbia University.

Human Rights Not Hollow Words Amnesty Int. Letter
Wednesday 19 January 2005

An appeal to President George W. Bush on the occasion of his re-inauguration.
Mr President,
In your inaugural address four years ago, you promised to be a leader who would "speak for greater justice". Since then, a much repeated promise of your administration has been that the USA will adhere to fundamental principles of human dignity and the rule of law, including in the context of the "war on terror". The National Security Strategy devotes an entire chapter to asserting that in its pursuit of security, the USA will "stand firmly for the non-negotiable demands of human dignity", including the rule of law. The National Strategy for Combating Terrorism concludes that "a world in which these values are embraced as standards, not exceptions, will be the best antidote to the spread of terrorism". Just last month, on Human Rights Day, you proclaimed that respect for human rights and the rule of law line the route to peace and security. Amnesty International agrees.
Your stated opposition to torture would appear on the face of it to be similarly principled. On 26 June 2003, for example, you issued a statement that:
"Torture anywhere is an affront to human dignity everywhere. We are committed to building a world where human rights are respected and protected by the rule of law...The United States is committed to the worldwide elimination of torture and we are leading this fight by example."
In similar vein, on 26 June 2004, to mark the United Nations International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, you stated that:
"The non-negotiable demands of human dignity must be protected without reference to race, gender, creed, or nationality. Freedom from torture is an inalienable human right, and we are committed to building a world where human rights are respected and protected by the rule of law... America stands against and will not tolerate torture. We will investigate and prosecute all acts of torture and undertake to prevent other cruel and unusual punishment in all territory under our jurisdiction."
Of course, a government should not be assessed on its words alone, but also on its actions. For things may not be as officially described. As you yourself pointed out in your 26 June 2003 statement on torture, "notorious human rights abusers... have long sought to shield their abuses from the eyes of the world by staging elaborate deceptions and denying access to international human rights monitors".
Your administration has as a matter of policy for more than three years denied international human rights monitors, including Amnesty International, access to detainees held by the USA in the "war on terror", in addition to routinely denying detainees access to the courts, legal counsel and relatives. In addition, US personnel have staged deceptions in order to subvert basic human rights protections and the rule of law. Certain detainees, for example, have been moved around or left unregistered in order that they can be hidden from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). The full extent of this practice remains unknown - last September General Paul Kern told the Senate Armed Services Committee that there may have been as many as 100 so-called "ghost detainees" in US custody in Iraq. An unknown number of detainees are believed to remain held in secret locations by the USA or with its connivance, amounting to "disappearance" in some cases. The Pentagon refuses to give precise numbers of detainees held in Guantánamo Bay, raising concern that this imprecision could facilitate secret detainee transfers. In early 2004, for example, approximately seven detainees remained unaccounted for in the official announcements about transfers to and from Guantánamo.
The USA is alleged to have been involved in numerous secret transfers of detainees between itself and countries known to use torture, or to have employed extrajudicial abductions of individuals in order to subject them to executive detention and interrogation. For example, Khaled El-Masri, a German national of Lebanese origin, told Amnesty International in June 2004 that there had been US involvement in his alleged secret transfer from Macedonia to detention and ill-treatment in Kabul in early 2004. He also told the organization that he had learned of detainees in US custody in Afghanistan being hidden from the ICRC. As has been the pattern with your administration - which claims to be committed to working with non-governmental organizations to ensure worldwide respect for international human rights standards, but which routinely fails adequately to respond to such organizations in matters concerning its own alleged misconduct - Amnesty International is still awaiting a reply to the letter it sent to the US authorities five months ago raising the allegations made by Khaled El-Masri.
Your administration’s pick and choose approach to the Geneva Conventions has caused widespread international concern. Amnesty International believes that this selective disregard for international humanitarian law principles has contributed to torture and ill-treatment by US forces and to the degree of lawlessness which has marked the USA’s waging of the "war on terror". It is now known that you were advised by White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales in January 2002 that a determination that the Geneva Conventions would not apply to those captured in the international armed conflict in Afghanistan would free up US interrogators and make their future prosecution for war crimes less likely. Since your decision, allegations of torture and ill-treatment by US forces in Afghanistan and Guantánamo - and the subsequent migration of this phenomenon to Iraq - have been persistent, and such allegations continue to emerge from both detainee and non-detainee sources.
Having taken the decision not to apply the Geneva Conventions to those held in Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, you sought to dispel concern about the treatment of such detainees by saying that they would be treated "in a manner consistent with the principles of Geneva". However, this assertion has always been qualified with the phrase "to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity". The legal concept of military necessity cannot lawfully be used to override the prohibition on torture or ill-treatment, but there is mounting evidence that the USA has violated this principle under your leadership.
A number of detainees in Guantánamo, for example, have been kept from the ICRC on the grounds of "military necessity". One of them is believed to have been Abdallah Tabarak, who was transferred to his native Morocco last year. Since his repatriation, he has claimed that in Guantánamo he was beaten, given forcible injections, and held in a dark cell which has left him with eyesight problems. He said that he suffers from other physical ailments as a result of his confinement, as well as insomnia and nightmares. In the case of another Guantánamo detainee, Mohammed al-Kahtani, a harsh interrogation plan was developed, apparently justified by the US authorities on the grounds of "military necessity". Mohammed al-Kahtani was reportedly put on a plane, blindfolded in conditions of sensory deprivation, and made to believe that he was being flown to the Middle East. After several hours in the air, the plane returned to Guantánamo and Mohammed al-Kahtani was allegedly put in an isolation cell and subjected to harsh interrogations conducted by people he was encouraged to believe were Egyptian security agents. This interrogation technique is known as "false flag" and has been approved by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
The Pentagon’s Working Group report of April 2003 promotes the technique of threatening to transfer the detainee to a third country, "where subject is likely to fear he would be tortured or killed". Released Guantánamo detainee Tarek Dergoul has alleged that his interrogators threatened him with transfer to Morocco and Egypt where he would be tortured. Fellow United Kingdom national Moazzam Begg, subjected to prolonged and cruel isolation in US custody in Afghanistan and Guantánamo, has alleged that he was threatened by US agents with transfer to Egypt and terrified by accounts of what would happen there. He has said that fear of rendition to Egypt was widespread among prisoners held at the US air base in Bagram in Afghanistan.
For Australian detainee Mamdouh Habib, the threat of transfer to Egypt became a reality. According to a motion filed in US federal court in November 2004, he was secretly transferred from Pakistan to Egypt with US agents involved and knowing that he would face torture. He spent six months in Egyptian custody where he was allegedly subjected to electric shocks, water torture, physical assaults, suspension from hooks, threats with dogs, and cruel prison conditions. He was subsequently transferred to Guantánamo in May 2002 and held without charge or trial there for more than two and a half years. A released detainee has alleged to Amnesty International that Mamdouh Habib was subjected to a regime of sleep deprivation in Guantánamo that left him with "blood coming from both his nose and ears".
Even in Iraq, where the Geneva Conventions have been applied, US forces have stretched the denial of ICRC visits for reasons of "imperative military necessity" way beyond "the temporary and exceptional measure" envisaged by Article 143 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Torture or ill-treatment have been the result. In January 2004, for example, US authorities invoked "military necessity" when they refused to grant the ICRC access to eight detainees held in Abu Ghraib. One of the eight, a Syrian national, was being held in a tiny dark cell without windows, toilet or bedding. Around 18 December 2003, he was abused and threatened with dogs. During a visit to the prison in mid-March 2004, the ICRC’s delegates were again denied access to him, and eight other detainees, on the grounds of "military necessity". By then, the Syrian detainee had been under incommunicado interrogation for four months. An interrogation plan for him is believed to have included the following:
"For the segregation phase of the approach, the MPs will put an empty sandbag onto the prisoner’s head before moving him out... During transportation, the Fear up Harsh approach will be continued... Upon arrival at site, MP guards will take him into custody. MP working dogs will be present and barking during this phase. Detainee will be strip searched by guards with the empty sandbag over his head... Detainee will be put on the adjusted sleep schedule for 72 hours. Interrogations will be conducted continuously during this 72-hour period. The approaches which will be used during this phase will include, fear up harsh, pride and ego down, silence and loud music. Stress positions will also be used... in order to intensify the approach."
Into your administration’s "war on terror" detention policy has been added a pattern of dangerous public commentary about detainees by yourself and other officials. For example, repeated assertions that the detainees in Guantánamo are "terrorists", "killers" and "bad people" - has not only undermined the presumption of innocence, but has fuelled the notion that these are people for whom the basic rules of humanity and legality do not apply. It cannot be considered responsible conduct for officials, let alone the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, to inject such labelling of detainees into this would-be unchallengeable regime of executive detentions, safeguards against torture and ill-treatment already lowered.
The struggle against torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment requires a government’s one hundred per cent commitment and constant vigilance. It requires stringent adherence to safeguards and an absolute rejection of loopholes. It demands a policy of zero tolerance. Mr President, your administration has manifestly failed in this regard. At best, it set the conditions for torture and ill-treatment by lowering safeguards and failing to respond adequately to allegations of abuse raised by Amnesty International and others from early on in the "war on terror". At worst, it has authorized interrogation techniques and detainee transfers which have flouted the country’s international obligation to reject torture and ill-treatment under any circumstances and at all times.
Amnesty International takes this opportunity to list some of the detention or interrogation techniques that are alleged to have been authorized or used by the USA during the "war on terror". Some of the techniques appear to have been tailored to specific cultural or religious sensitivities of the detainees, thereby introducing a discriminatory element to the abuse. Neither gender nor age has offered protection. Children, the elderly, women and men are reported to have been among the subjects of torture or ill-treatment. The following list does not claim to be exhaustive:
Abduction Death threats Dietary manipulation Dogs used to threaten and intimidate Dousing in cold water Electric shocks, threats of electric shocks Excessive and cruel use of shackles and handcuffs, including "short shackling" Excessive or humiliating use of strip searches Exposure to weather and temperature extremes "False flag", ie making a detainee think his interrogators are not US agents Forced shaving, ie of head, body or facial hair Forcible injections Forced physical exercise Hooding and blindfolding Humiliation, eg forced crawling, forced to make animal noises, etc. Immersion in water to induce perception of drowning Incommunicado detention Induced perception of suffocation or asyphxiation Isolation for prolonged periods, eg months or more than a year Light deprivation Loud music, noise, yelling Photography as humiliation Physical assault, eg beating, punching, kicking Prolonged interrogations, eg 20 hours Racial and religious taunts, humiliation Religious intolerance, eg disrespect for Koran, religious rituals Secret detention Sensory deprivation Sexual humiliation Sexual assault Sleep adjustment Sleep deprivation Stress positions, eg prolonged forced kneeling and standingStripping Strobe lighting Threats of reprisals against relatives Threat of transfer to third country to inspire fear of torture or death Threat of transfer to Guantánamo Threats of torture or ill-treatment Twenty-four hour lighting Withdrawal of "comfort items" Withholding of medication Withholding of food and water Withholding of toilet facilities, leading to defecation and urination in clothing
As the Pentagon’s April 2003 Working Group report states, interrogation techniques are "usually used in combination". This can be illustrated by the recently revealed observations of FBI agents in Guantánamo. One reported seeing a detainee "sitting on the floor of the interview room with an Israeli flag draped around him, loud music being played and a strobe light flashing". Another wrote:
"On a couple of occassions (sic), I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they had urinated or defacated (sic) on themselves and had been left there for 18, 24 hours or more. On one occassion (sic), the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold. When I asked the MPs what was going on , I was told that interrogators from the day prior had ordered this treatment, and the detainee was not to be moved. On another occassion (sic), the A/C had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room probably well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his own hair out throughout the night. On another occassion (sic), not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room, and had been since the day before, with the detainee chained hand and foot in the fetal position on the tile floor".
Secretary Rumsfeld authorized interrogation techniques including stripping, environmental manipulation, sensory deprivation, stress positions, isolation, hooding, and the use of dogs to inspire fear. A number of detainees have alleged that they were subjected to such treatment in Guantánamo. An FBI agent also tells of having witnessed the use of a dog to intimidate a Guantánamo detainee, who was also subjected to three months of isolation in cell with 24-hour illumination. The detainee was later witnessed to be displaying conduct "consistent with extreme psychological trauma. Secretary Rumsfeld has also admitted to authorizing the exclusion of at least one detainee in Iraq from any prison register. Amnesty International has yet to see a satisfactory explanation of what appears to have been Secretary Rumsfeld’s participation in a "disappearance", which is a crime under international law.
Mr President, Amnesty International also notes that on 17 September 2001 you reportedly signed a Memorandum of Notification granting "exceptional authorities" to the CIA in the "war on terror". Amnesty International is further concerned by reports that you authorized the CIA to set up secret detention facilities outside the USA and to use harsh interrogation techniques. As noted further below, it appears that you have granted an exemption to the CIA and other non-military personnel from a 7 February 2002 directive stating that detainees in US custody would be treated humanely. If so, the ultimate responsibility for any resulting torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment would lie squarely at your door. In addition, an FBI agent’s email sent from Iraq, recently made public, refers to an Executive Order signed by you which authorizes interrogation techniques which should be considered contrary to international law and standards. Amnesty International is aware that the administration has denied the existence of such an order.
The problem with such rebuttals is that previous denials have been shown to be inaccurate. The stock response of US officials during the "war on terror" to allegations of torture or ill-treatment - namely that all detainees in US custody are treated humanely and with respect for human dignity - can now be seen either to have been a stock falsehood or else an indication that your administration’s view of what constitutes humane treatment and respect for human dignity differs markedly from wider understandings of such terminology. With this in mind, the following assertion may be instructive:
"Of course, our values as a Nation, values that we share with many nations in the world, call for us to treat detainees humanely, including those who are not legally entitled to such treatment" (emphasis added).
No detainee can fall outside the prohibition on torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. To suggest otherwise, as this line does, points to a serious gap in a government’s understanding of international law and indicates that it views fundamental human rights as privileges that can be granted, and therefore taken away, by the state. The sentence in question was in your memorandum, dated 7 February 2002, classified as secret for 10 years, and distributed to the main office-holders in your administration.
At the 22 June 2004 press briefing at which a selection of administration documents was made public, White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales referred to your 7 February 2002 memorandum as the "most important" from among them. He repeated aloud to the assembled media your central holding - that the USA would treat detainees humanely, "including those who are not legally entitled to such treatment" - without any apparent recognition of the disturbing message contained in it. Earlier this month, Judge Gonzales’ responses to questions from Senators as your nominee for the post of Attorney General left a similarly troubling impression. Two examples will suffice:
Senator Patrick Leahy: "Do you think that other world leaders would have authority to authorize the torture of US citizens, if they deemed it necessary for their national security?"
Judge Gonzales: "Senator, I don’t know what laws other world leaders would be bound by... I’m not in a position to answer that question".
Senator Richard Durbin: "Can US personnel legally engage in torture under any circumstances?... Of course that would include military as well as intelligence personnel or others who are under the auspices of our government".
Judge Gonzales: "I don’t believe so, but I’d want to get back to you on that and make sure I don’t provide a misleading answer."
As with your 7 February 2002 memorandum, Judge Gonzales’ inability to respond with an immediate and simple "no" to either of the above questions fuels concern that your administration’s commitment to the international prohibition on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment remains less than absolute. Amnesty International urges you to withdraw the 7 February 2002 memorandum and to replace it with an unequivocal public directive against torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. It must contain this full-spectrum phrase and not be limited to torture alone. The directive must apply to all officials, all agencies and all circumstances, including international detainee transfers. For example, as Amnesty International pointed out in its October 2004 report (see below), the existing memorandum only applies to the US Armed Forces - it did not include the CIA or those working with them, and omitted any reference to persons "rendered" to states that use torture for interrogation. In his just-released written responses to questions from Senators at his nomination hearing, Judge Gonzales has reportedly confirmed that officers of the CIA and other non-military personnel are outside the bounds of your 7 February 2002 memorandum.
Your administration recently replaced the now notorious 1 August 2002 memorandum on torture from the Justice Department to the White House Counsel. This had reportedly been drafted following a request by the CIA for legal protections for its interrogators engaged in the "war on terror". Its contents were shocking, and presumably would still represent the administration’s position if it had not been forced to reassess it by the furore that accompanied its leaking and subsequent official release. The 1 August 2002 memorandum drew, inter alia, the following three erroneous conclusions:
that interrogators could cause a great deal of pain before crossing the threshold to torture. Specifically, it suggested that torture would only occur if the pain caused rose to the level "that would ordinarily be associated with a sufficiently serious physical condition or injury such as death, organ failure, or serious impairment of bodily functions";
that even though US law makes it a criminal offence for anyone in an official position to commit or attempt to commit torture against a detainee outside the USA, and even though the USA has ratified treaties prohibiting torture, the US President’s authority as Commander-in-Chief could override these laws; even if interrogators were prosecuted for torture, there were defences available to them by which they could escape criminal liability, such as "necessity" or "self-defence".
At his nomination hearing earlier this month, the White House Counsel stated that the 1 August 2002 memorandum "represented the position of the executive branch at the time it was issued", and presumably this remained the case for the next two years.
The revised version of the 1 August 2002 memorandum, dated 30 December 2004, is undeniably an improvement on its infamous predecessor, and Amnesty International broadly welcomes it as far as it goes. It nevertheless leaves a number of questions unanswered. For example, although it says that it "supersedes the August 2002 Memorandum in its entirety", it sidesteps the question of the President’s Commander-in-Chief power to authorize torture and immunize a US agent from criminal liability for torture. The new memorandum claims that an analysis of this issue is "unnecessary" as you have directed that US personnel will not engage in torture. The 30 December 2004 memorandum gives as an example of this "unequivocal directive" your June 2004 statement against torture quoted at the beginning of this letter. Yet as already pointed out, you made a similarly unequivocal statement asserting the USA’s leadership of the struggle against torture in June 2003, at a time when the then still secret August 2002 memorandum presumably "represented the position of the executive branch". To coin a phrase, one is either against torture or, de facto, one is for it. One cannot have it one way in public and one way in private. Your statements against torture and ill-treatment must be unambiguous, consistent, and matched by actions.
In any event, the spirit of the August 2002 memorandum lives on. Much of it is repeated in the April 2003 final report of the Pentagon’s Working Group on Detainee Interrogations in the Global War on Terrorism. For example, the latter states that "[i]n order to respect the President’s inherent constitutional authority to manage a military campaign, [the US law prohibiting torture]... must be construed as inapplicable to interrogations undertaken pursuant to his Commander-in-Chief authority". The Working Group report is believed to remain in force, and its recommendations were adopted by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, whose memorandum of 16 April 2003 doe not rule out any interrogation method that goes beyond those promoted in the report, as long as he authorizes it personally on a case-by-case basis. Amnesty International urges you to ensure that the Working Group report is also withdrawn.
Of course, the withdrawal of the August 2002 memorandum does not delete it or its effects from history. It was in existence for some two years, during which time US forces allegedly engaged in torture or ill-treatment. In his statement to the Senate Armed Services Committee in September 2004, Dr Harold Brown, one of the members of the Independent Panel to Review Department of Defense Detention Operations, said that the impact of the August 2002 memorandum on the "atmosphere of permissiveness in the field" was "difficult to assess". Certainly, detainees in US custody are alleged to have been subjected to what the memorandum promoted as the "significant range of acts that though they might constitute cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, fail to rise to the level of torture". These include stress positions, hooding, excessive tightening of handcuffs, subjection to noise, and sleep deprivation. Cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment is prohibited under international law.
Reports that late last year the White House pressed Congressional leaders to drop a provision from a Senate bill restricting the use of extreme interrogation techniques by US intelligence agents is cause for concern. In a letter to members of Congress in October, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice had reportedly opposed the measure on the grounds that it "provides legal protections to foreign prisoners to which they are not now entitled under applicable law and policy". On 13 January, your spokesperson, Scott McClellan, explained that the White House "did not view the provision as necessary because there are already laws on the books to address these issues." Yet, in his written responses to Senators, the White House Counsel has reportedly said that the Congressional ban on cruel or inhumane treatment has a "limited reach" and does not apply to "aliens overseas".
Again, what is needed is an unequivocal directive, free of any ambiguity and carrying legal force, holding that no US government agent anywhere, including members of the administration, the military, the CIA, or any private contractor, may authorize, condone, or engage in torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. It must be made clear that there exists no executive power that can override this, and no circumstances it which torture will be countenanced. This must then be followed up by action.
Amnesty International has suggested a framework for action for the USA in a 200-page report, USA - Human Dignity Denied - Torture and accountability in the ‘war on terror’.(1) In the report, Amnesty International makes more than 60 recommendations structured around the organization’s 12-Point Program for the Prevention of Torture by Agents of the State. A compilation of these recommendations is attached to this appeal. Mr President, Amnesty International urges you to give them serious consideration.
Investigation and prosecution are two basic components that a country committed to eradicating torture must follow. It has recently been announced that the Justice Department’s Inspector General will investigate allegations raised by FBI agents of the military’s use of torture and ill-treatment against detainees in Guantánamo Bay and Iraq. While Amnesty International welcomes this development, it does not believe that this and the other investigations and reviews initated and conducted will be enough. They have offered or will offer only a series of snapshots, not the overall picture. Many questions remain unanswered: For example:
None of the investigations have had the power or the independence to be able to investigate into the highest echelons of government, including the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the White House.
Alleged secret transfers of detainees between the USA and countries with poor records of torture have not formed part of the investigations.
The activities of the Central Intelligence Agency remain shrouded in secrecy.
The extent of the role of military doctors in abuses remains unclear but has already raised serious questions of professional ethics.
Numerous interrogation techniques which violate the USA’s international obligations, but which have nonetheless been authorized, have not been denounced by the military reviews, let alone by the administration itself.
The United Nations Principles for the investigation of torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, adopted by the General Assembly in 2000, state:
"In cases in which the established investigative procedures are inadequate because of insufficient expertise or suspected bias, or because of the apparent existence of a pattern of abuse or for other substantial reasons, States shall ensure that investigations are undertaken through an independent commission of inquiry or similar procedure. Members of such a commission shall be chosen for their recognized impartiality, competence and independence as individuals. In particular, they shall be independent of any suspected perpetrators and the institutions or agencies they may serve".
Since 19 May 2004, Amnesty International has been calling for an impartial and independent commission of inquiry to be set up by the US Congress to conduct a thorough investigation into the USA’s "war on terror" detention policies and practices worldwide. Such a commission, composed of credible experts, could be appointed by Congress, but must be independent of government. Such a commission should consist of credible independent experts, have international expert input, and have subpoena powers and access to all levels of government, all agencies, and all documents whether classified or unclassified. Amnesty International urges you to support the establishment of such a commission, and to cooperate fully with it when it is established.
Your administration has chosen to release only selected documentation, and those documents have only been released reluctantly, either under court order or after unauthorized leaks into the public domain embarassed officials into action. The degree of public scepticism that has inevitably been generated by this secrecy and lack of transparency is one more reason why a full independent commission of inquiry is required to get to clarify what has occurred and on whose authorization, and to show the world that the USA is serious about its human rights commitments.
Along with the rule of law, another of the "non-negotiable demands of human dignity" to which you have made repeated reference is "limits on the absolute power of the state". Yet, more than six months after the US Supreme Court ruled that the federal courts have jurisdiction over the detainees held in Guantánamo, your administration continues to argue for any review of their detentions to be kept as far from a judicial process as possible. Hundreds of detainees remain without access to lawyers. Human rights organizations are still denied access. Precisely what interrogation practices and policies remain in force in Guantánamo or elsewhere is unknown. Secret and incommunicado detentions are continuing. Yet full judicial review, as well as access to lawyers and independent human rights monitors, are basic safeguards against arbitrary detention, torture and "disappearance". The USA’s continuing penchant for secrecy in the field of detentions betray a lack of genuine commitment to its international obligations on human rights and the rule of law.
Amnesty International has spoken to many relatives of detainees who themselves are in deep distress from the lack of transparency and information about their loved ones. In November 2004, for example, the sister and brother of Kuwaiti Guantánamo detainee Abdullah Al Kandari told the organization of how their parents "are not the same people they were three years ago" because of losing their son to the black hole of Guantánamo. Earlier in the year, the brother of Yemeni detainee Jamal Mar’i related how his mother has developed high blood pressure and sinks into bouts of depression from the strain of not knowing what is happening to the son she has not seen for more than three years. In other contexts, the suffering of the relatives of the "disappeared" has been found by the UN Human Rights Committee to amount to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. Similar cruelty is inflicted upon the relatives of people held in indefinite virtual incommunicado detention without charge or trial. It is notable that numerous relatives of the Guantánamo detainees have referred to their loved one as having disappeared.
Khalid Al-Odah, father of Kuwaiti Guantánamo detainee Fawzi Al-Odah has appealed to you "from father to father". "It’s almost three years now we have been suffering and living in misery", Khalid Al-Odah says, and pleads for you to ensure justice for his son.(2) Again, Amnesty International recalls the promise you made in your first inaugural speech to be a president who would speak for "greater justice and compassion" and urges you at this time of your re-inauguration and beyond to consider the distress of the families of detainees held without charge or trial by the USA.
Amnesty International believes that the USA’s detention and interrogation policies in the "war on terror" have flouted hard-won principles of human rights. Individual detainees and their families have suffered, the rule of law has suffered, and the reputation of your country has suffered. The USA’s policy and practice have set a bad example to those governments looking for justification to employ their own repressive conduct.
Mr President, Amnesty International urges you to make the eradication of torture and ill-treatment by US agents, and the USA’s full compliance with international law and standards for the treatment and trial of detainees, a hallmark of your second term in office.
Amnesty International’s recommendations to the US authorities based on the organization’s 12-Point Program for the Prevention of Torture by Agents of the State
Condemn Torture and Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment
The highest authorities of every country should demonstrate their total opposition to torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. They should condemn torture and ill-treatment unreservedly whenever it occurs. They should make clear to all members of the police, military and other security forces that torture and ill-treatment will never be tolerated.
The US authorities should:
Provide a genuine, unequivocal and continuing public commitment to oppose torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment under any circumstances, regardless of where it takes place, and take every possible measure to ensure that all agencies of government and US allies fully comply with this prohibition;
Review all government policies and procedures relating to detention and interrogation to ensure that they adhere strictly to international human rights and humanitarian law and standards, and publicly disown those which do not;
Make clear to all members of the military and all other government agencies, as well as US allies, that torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment will not be tolerated under any circumstances;
Commit to a program of public education on the international prohibition of torture and ill-treatment, including challenging any public discourse that seeks to promote tolerance of torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.
Ensure Access to Prisoners
Torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment often take place while prisoners are held incommunicado — unable to contact people outside who could help them or find out what is happening to them. The practice of incommunicado detention should be ended. Governments should ensure that all prisoners are brought before an independent judicial authority without delay after being taken into custody. Prisoners should have access to relatives, lawyers and doctors without delay and regularly thereafter.
The US authorities should:
End the practice of incommunicado detention;
Grant the International Committee of the Red Cross full access to all detainees according to the organization’s mandate;
Grant all detainees access to legal counsel, relatives, independent doctors, and to consular representatives, without delay and regularly thereafter;
In battlefield situations, ensure where possible that interrogations are observed by at least one military lawyer with full knowledge of international law and standards as they pertain to the treatment of detainees;
Grant all detainees access to the courts to be able to challenge the lawfulness of their detention. Presume detainees captured on the battlefield during international conflicts to be prisoners of war unless and until a competent tribunal determines otherwise;
Reject any measures that narrow or curtail the effect or scope of the Rasul v. Bush ruling on the right to judicial review of detainees held in Guantánamo or elsewhere, and facilitate detainees’ access to legal counsel for the purpose of judicial review.
No Secret Detention
In some countries torture takes place in secret locations, often after the victims are made to "disappear". Governments should ensure that prisoners are held only in officially recognized places of detention and that accurate information about their arrest and whereabouts is made available immediately to relatives, lawyers and the courts. Effective judicial remedies should be available at all times to enable relatives and lawyers to find out immediately where a prisoner is held and under what authority and to ensure the prisoner’s safety.
The US authorities should:
Clarify the fate and whereabouts of those detainees reported to be or to have been in US custody or under US interrogation in the custody of other countries, to whom no outside body including the International Committee of the Red Cross are known to have access, and provide assurances of their well-being. These detainees include but are not limited to those named in the 9/11 Commission Report and in this Amnesty International report as having been in custody at some time in undisclosed locations;
End immediately the practice of secret detention wherever it is occurring, and under whichever agency. Hold detainees only in officially recognized places of detention;
Not collude with other governments in the practice of "disappearances" or secret detentions, and expose such abuses where the USA becomes aware of them;
Maintain an accurate and detailed register of all detainees at every detention facility operated by the US, in accordance with international law and standards. This register should be updated on a daily basis, and made available for inspection by, at a minimum, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and the detainees’ relatives and lawyers or other persons of confidence;
Make public and regularly update the precise numbers of detainees in US custody specifying the agency under which each person is held, their identity, their nationality and arrest date, and place of detention;
Either charge and bring to trial, in full accordance with international law and standards and without recourse to the death penalty, all detainees held in US custody in undisclosed locations, or else release them;
Comply without delay with Freedom of Information Act requests, and related court orders, aimed at clarifying the fate and whereabouts of such detainees;
Make public and revoke any measures or directives that have been authorized by the President or any other official that could be interpreted as authorizing "disappearances", torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, or extrajudicial executions.
Provide Safeguards During Detention and Interrogation
All prisoners should be immediately informed of their rights. These include the right to lodge complaints about their treatment and to have a judge rule without delay on the lawfulness of their detention. Judges should investigate any evidence of torture and order release if the detention is unlawful. A lawyer should be present during interrogations. Governments should ensure that conditions of detention conform to international standards for the treatment of prisoners and take into account the needs of members of particularly vulnerable groups. The authorities responsible for detention should be separate from those in charge of interrogation. There should be regular, independent, unannounced and unrestricted visits of inspection to all places of detention.
The US authorities should:
Immediately inform anyone taken into US custody of his or her rights, including the right not to be subjected to any form of torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment; their right to challenge the lawfulness of their detention in a court of law; their right to access to relatives and legal counsel, and their consular rights if a foreign national;
Ensure at all times a clear delineation between powers of detention and interrogation;
Keep under systematic review interrogation rules, instructions, methods and practices, as well as arrangements for the custody and treatment of anyone in US custody, with a view to preventing any cases of torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment;
Ensure that conditions of detention strictly comply with international law and standards;
Prohibit the use of isolation, hooding, stripping, dogs, stress positions, sensory deprivation, feigned suffocation, death threats, use of cold water or weather, sleep deprivation and any other forms of torture, or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment as interrogation techniques;
Bring to trial in accordance with international fair trial standards all detainees held in Guantánamo, or release them;
Ensure compliance with all aspects of international law and standards relating to child detainees;
Ensure compliance with all international law and standards relating to women detainees;
Invite all relevant human rights monitoring mechanisms, especially the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, the Committee against Torture, the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances (1980) and the Working Group on Arbitrary detention to visit all places of detention, and grant them unlimited access to these places and to detainees;
Grant access to national and international human rights organizations, including Amnesty International, to all places of detention and all detainees, regardless of where they are held.
Prohibit Torture in Law
Governments should adopt laws for the prohibition and prevention of torture incorporating the main elements of the UN Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (Convention against Torture) and other relevant international standards. All judicial and administrative corporal punishments should be abolished. The prohibition of torture and the essential safeguards for its prevention must not be suspended under any circumstances, including states of war or other public emergency.
The US authorities should:
Enact a federal crime of torture, as called for by the Committee against Torture, that also defines the infliction of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment as a crime, wherever it occurs;
Amend the Uniform Code of Military Justice to criminalize expressly the crime of torture, as well as a crime of infliction of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, wherever it occurs, in line with the Convention against Torture and other international standards;
Ensure that all legislation criminalizing torture defines torture at least as broadly as the UN Convention against Torture;
Ensure that legislation criminalizing torture and the infliction of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment covers all persons, regardless of official status or nationality, wherever this conduct occurred, and that it does not allow any exceptional circumstances whatsoever to be invoked as justification for such conduct, or allow the authorization of torture or ill-treatment by any superior officer or public official, including the President.
Investigate
All complaints and reports of torture should be promptly, impartially and effectively investigated by a body independent of the alleged perpetrators. The methods and findings of such investigations should be made public. Officials suspected of committing torture should be suspended from active duty during the investigation. Complainants, witnesses and others at risk should be protected from intimidation and reprisals.
US Congress should:
Establish an independent commission of inquiry into all aspects of the USA’s "war on terror" detention and interrogation policies and practices. Such a commission should consist of credible independent experts, have international expert input, and have subpoena powers and access to all levels of government, all agencies, and all documents whether classified or unclassified.
The US authorities should:
Ensure that all allegations of torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment involving US personnel, whether members of the armed forces, other government agencies, medical personnel, private contractors or interpreters, are subject to prompt, thorough, independent and impartial civilian investigation in strict conformity with international law and standards concerning investigations of human rights violations;
Ensure that such investigations include cases in which the USA previously had custody of the detainee, but transferred him or her to the custody of another country, or to other forces within the same country, subsequent to which allegations of torture or ill-treatment were made;
Ensure that the investigative approach at a minimum complies with the UN Principles on the Effective Investigation and Documentation of Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment;
Ensure that the investigation of deaths in custody at a minimum comply with the UN Principles on the Effective Prevention and Investigation of Extra-legal, Arbitrary and Summary Executions, including the provision for adequate autopsies in all such cases;
In view of evidence that certain persons held in US custody have been subjected to "disappearance", the US authorities should initiate prompt, thorough and impartial investigations into the allegations by a competent and independent state authority, as provided under Article 13 of the UN Declaration on the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance.
Prosecute
Those responsible for torture must be brought to justice. This principle should apply wherever alleged torturers happen to be, whatever their nationality or position, regardless of where the crime was committed and the nationality of the victims, and no matter how much time has elapsed since the commission of the crime. Governments must exercise universal jurisdiction over alleged torturers or extradite them, and cooperate with each other in such criminal proceedings. Trials must be fair. An order from a superior officer must never be accepted as a justification for torture.
The US authorities should:
Publicly reject all arguments, including those contained in classified or unclassified government documents, promoting impunity for anyone suspected of torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, including the ordering of such acts;
Bring to trial all individuals - whether they be members of the administration, the armed forces, intelligence services and other government agencies, medical personnel, private contractors or interpreters - against whom there is evidence of having authorized, condoned or committed torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment;
Any person alleged to have perpetrated an act of "disappearance" should, when the facts disclosed by an official investigation so warrant, be brought before the competent civil authorities for prosecution and trial, in accordance with Article 14 of the UN Declaration on the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance;
Ensure that all trials for alleged perpetrators comply with international fair trial standards, and do not result in imposition of the death penalty.
No Use of Statements Extracted Under Torture
Governments should ensure that statements and other evidence obtained through torture may not be invoked in any proceedings, except against a person accused of torture.
The US authorities should:
Ensure that no statement coerced as a result of torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, including long-term indefinite detention without charge or trial, or any other information or evidence obtained directly or indirectly as the result of torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, regardless of who was responsible for such acts, is admitted as evidence against any defendant, except the perpetrator of the human rights violation in question;
Revoke the Military Order on the Detention, Treatment, and Trial of Certain Non-Citizens in the War Against Terrorism, and abandon trials by military commission;
Expose and reject any use of coerced evidence obtained by other governments from people held in their own or US custody;
Refrain from transferring any coerced evidence for the use of other governments.
Provide Effective Training
It should be made clear during the training of all officials involved in the custody, interrogation or medical care of prisoners that torture is a criminal act. Officials should be instructed that they have the right and duty to refuse to obey any order to torture.
The US authorities should:
Ensure that all personnel involved in detention and interrogation, including all members of the armed forces or other government agencies, private contractors, medical personnel and interpreters, receive full training, with input from international experts, on the international prohibition of torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, and their obligation to expose it;
Ensure that all members of the armed forces and members of other government agencies, including the CIA, private contractors, medical personnel and interpreters, receive full training in the scope and meaning of the Geneva Conventions and their Additional Protocols, as well as international human rights law and standards, with input from international experts;
Ensure that full training be similarly provided on international human rights law and standards regarding the treatment of persons deprived of their liberty, including the prohibition on "disappearances", with input from international experts;
Ensure that all military and other agency personnel, as well as medical personnel and private contractors, receive cultural awareness training appropriate to whatever theatre of operation they may be deployed into.
Provide Reparation
Victims of torture and their dependants should be entitled to obtain prompt reparation from the state including restitution, fair and adequate financial compensation and appropriate medical care and rehabilitation.
The US authorities should:
Ensure that anyone who has suffered torture or ill-treatment while in US custody has access to, and the means to obtain, full reparation including restitution, compensation, rehabilitation, satisfaction and guarantees of non-repetition, wherever they may reside;
Ensure that all those who have been subject to unlawful arrest by the USA receive full compensation.
Ratify International Treaties
All governments should ratify without reservations international treaties containing safeguards against torture, including the UN Convention against Torture with declarations providing for individual and inter-state complaints. Governments should comply with the recommendations of international bodies and experts on the prevention of torture.
The US authorities should:
Make a public commitment to fully adhere to international human rights and humanitarian law and standards - treaties, other instruments, and customary law - and respect the decisions and recommendations of international and regional human rights bodies;
Make a public commitment to fully adhere to the Geneva Conventions, and to respecting the advice and recommendations of the International Committee of the Red Cross;
Ratify Additional Protocols I and II to the Geneva Conventions;
Withdraw all conditions attached to the USA’s ratification of the UN Convention against Torture;
Provide the USA’s overdue second report to the Committee against Torture, as requested by the Committee;
Withdraw all limiting conditions attached to the USA’s ratification of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights;
Provide the USA’s overdue reports to the Human Rights Committee;
Ratify the Optional Protocol to the UN Convention against Torture;
Ratify the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child;
Ratify the American Convention on Human Rights;
Ratify the Inter-American Convention on Forced Disappearance of Persons without any reservations and implement it by making enforced disappearances a crime under US law over which US courts have jurisdiction wherever committed by anyone.
Ratify the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.
Exercise International Responsibility
Governments should use all available channels to intercede with the governments of countries where torture is reported. They should ensure that transfers of training and equipment for military, security or police use do not facilitate torture. Governments must not forcibly return a person to a country where he or she risks being tortured.
The US authorities should:
Withdraw the USA’s understanding to Article 3 of the UN Convention against Torture, and publicly state the USA’s commitment to the principle of non-refoulement, and ensure that no legislation undermines this protection in any way;
Cease the practice of "renditions" that bypass human rights protections; ensure that all transfers of detainees between the USA and other countries fully comply with international human rights law.

(1) Available here.
(2) Interview with Khalid Al-Odah is available here.
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On Martin Luther King Jr. Day...

2005-01-17T04:00:00.000-08:00

This is taken from an article titled "Martin Luther King Jr. in his own words" from http://www.alternet.org

From "Beyond Vietnam," April 4, 1967, Riverside Church, New York City.

As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men [in the ghettos] I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked – and rightly so – what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today – my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.
... Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over.
... Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours.
In 1957 a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. ... I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. ... A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.

.

Let's not forget Martin or Malcolm and the countless others who fought for civil and human rights or that what they fought and died for is still worth fighting for today. A different vision indeed.
peace!

Should Harry visit Auschwitz?

2005-01-16T17:11:00.000-08:00

In light of the global media onslaught surrounding Prince Harry's Nazi costume, I would like to pose a few questions.

One, where do we draw the line between blatant and agreed upon symbols of racism (such as the Nazi uniform) and those that are not so obvious and in their ambiguity are perhaps even more degrading, dangerous and offensive. A small example of which is from this Saturday's SNL show which depicted two African-American emergency workers refusing to work on "their holiday...Martin Luther King day." The show went on to demonstrate their apparent ignorance of their own history, which their white male boss knew more of than they did. This may seem just as much "harmless humor" as what Harry might've thought his costume would be. Who's to say exactly? What distinguishes an "atrocity" from "business as usual" in war and power politics? Is "destroying a city in order to save it" somehow undeserving of the term genocide or the term terrorism? Who gets to decide which is worthy of that label and which is a struggle for freedom and democracy? Who gets to determine when "evil" is Evil and when evil is good or accidental or excusable? Where does consensus figure in to understanding racism when few can agree on what events and policies are racist? For example, Marcy's article on "symbols of racism" sparked heated argument on her viewing the confederate flag as racist. So where do we draw the lines?

Secondly, I'd like to ask if the issue is really about him being a potential future leader or at the very least a figure head making light of an obvious atrocity? If it is a matter of representation and leadership, why doesn't Bush visit Abu Ghraib or even Guantanamo Bay or even attend the trials of those accused of prisoner abuse and torture? Why isn't the media worldwide and particularly here, calling for our leader to visit the site of modern day atrocities where known violations have occurred and continue to take place? What differentiates atrocity and abnormality from that which is deemed normal, "progress" or a necessary evil?

Third and final question, why, with genocide happening still to this day, do we not look at the many examples of, what bell hooks has termed "interlocking systems of oppression" and critique global leaders and figureheads (the "royals" included) not only on media blitz examples of transgression but also on colonialism, patriarchy, racism, elitism and sexism? Is it wrong to call the policies of the WTO and IMF racist? Can one call the Bush administration's media manipulation of AIDS funding racist? Where do we draw these lines as individuals and as a collective society, when people can shake their heads over Prince Harry and his advisors prompt him to try and save face by visiting Auschwitz but the acts occurring at Abu Ghraib are considered the works of "a few bad apples," isolated and undemonstrative of extremely questionable "moral" policies and practices?

What will be demonstrated by Harry visiting Auschwitz? Bush visited Africa and spoke of great American leaders (all African-American CHRISTIAN leaders) who'd fought for civil rights. Does visiting a place automatically reverse the mindset that privilege grants? This issue is complicated. We need to ask the questions that aren't going to make the news. What qualifies as racist policy, racist practice, racist ideology when the lines seem quite blurred and interconnected?

"She said it's time to open my eyes
Don't be afraid to open my eyes
Maybe she's right. Maybe she's right.
Maybe she's right."
--"The wrong band" Tori Amos

Bleached

2005-01-16T01:36:00.000-08:00

My skin is white
and I've never marked
otherwise
on any box
or questionnaire.

It has been bleached
by fear
history
and ignorance.

All traces of "Jap"
"slant eye" or "Oriental"
have magically
disappeared.

I have pictures of my heritage.
My family hangs them as decoration. It's okay to be "Asian"
on wall art, apparently.
It's okay to eat "Japanese" just don't speak it
don't think it
don't be it. Don't think it is something
YOU
can claim.

My brother knows an amazing amount of Japanese history.
He wants to learn to speak the language of a grandmother
he never knew.
I too romanticized and fantasized
wishing to look more like her
less brown haired, white skinned and eyes
as large and blue as miniature swimming pools.
Blind from years spent wishing
I could be that damned adopted Karate Kid.
Funny what movies
will tell you that history can't
and parents won't.

[Remember in the second movie how Daniel goes to Japan
with Mr. Miyagi he fights, he suffers, he saves the girl.
What happens to the people who remain, who survive?
What happens to those who have to clean up
after the "heroics" of others? Where are they in the sequal?
Are they brown or are they white? Rich or poor?]

My father said once that he used to tell everyone he was Hispanic
so that they wouldn't hate him
so that he could fit in. I wonder now though, what box does he check
for he has smaller eyes than I
and lovely tan skin.

For all his years of trying
he hasn't been able to remove
its earthy
"yellow"
tint.

"Judge not lest ye be judged"

2005-01-16T01:09:00.000-08:00

How do you measure the true weight of a threat or of difference? What is so threatening about listening to someone else's view when it contradicts yours? What is the danger in using "humorous" stereotypes? Isn't all free in love and comedy after all?

Two things influence these questions.
1. Tonight's saturday night live episode where they had two African-American emergency workers "refusing" to work on "their holiday: Martin Luther King day." The "joke" didn't stop there though. Instead they were criticized for not knowing "their" history and portrayed as lazy, uneducated, self-absorbed and hypocritically political. What is the point exactly of such "humor" anyway? This really should piss people off, not make them laugh. The show also made it a point of using "dumb redneck" trucker stereotypes and a joke about a newscaster who has both many "husbands and a tv wife." Perhaps I am too "thin skinned" but I do think that this sort of "humor" isn't funny at all, it's troubling.

2. Reading the enormous (and angry!) response to Marcy's letter to the arbiter titled "Symbols of Racism." You can read it on her blog: http://bodyontheline.blogspot.com.
Just reading the letters of response, there's so much anger and defensiveness, offense at her "ignorance" and "bigotry" and people can't tell apparently whether or not she's a professor or a student because they address her as both despite the fact that her preface clearly says she is a professor. Anyhow, the responses made me think...how do you change such things if you can't even speak your mind without evoking such blanket hatred? How do you encourage thought, respect for diversity and discourse on a subject such as racism if people aren't willing to even acknowledge their own biases. Some of the responses had some interesting questions though, for example a couple of people asked how the Confederate Flag is any more "racist" than the American flag, the cross or other symbols people don or display every day?

Lastly, I'm wondering what people will think or if I'm going to get some hateful responses on the pictures I've put on here in the last few posts. I wonder why an image of two men embracing might make people angry or if words about feminism might create certain mental boxes to try and put me into. One of the most intriguing comments from Marcy's blog/arbiter article is the one that quoted Ann Coulter. I could say, gee imagine that, you're quoted a woman who has made a career feminist/leftist/liberal bashing but do you ever wonder why you agree with her and where she would be if it weren't for the leftist/liberal/feminists? Hmm???

When will it become a serious matter to think about power and the abuse of power and priviledge? Authenticity? Agency? Authority? When can we (or can we) just sit down and have a discussion...human to human...about humanity?

peace!

"Always hold firmly to the thought that each one of us
can do something to bring some portion
of misery to an end"--from a card someone gave me for the holidays.

.
...question the weight of the gaze...
just what do you expect to see?

A few (just a few) of my favorite female authors

2005-01-16T01:00:00.000-08:00

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--bell hooks--

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--marjane satrapi--

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--arundhati roy--

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--carolyn forche--

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--edwidge danticat--

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--Sahar Khalifeh--

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--Sandra Cisneros--

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--trinh t. minh-ha--

Others I found a heck of a time coming up with images for include:
Alice Walker, Wang Ping (poet), Elizabeth Kim (author of "Ten Thousand Sorrows"), and Adrienne Rich.

...There's something magical that happens in a perfectly written line. Something that transcends and erases time, space, difference and despair. All of these authors have that magical ability to reach out to readers and grab them, transporting them to a childhood in Iran, a classroom in Harlem, a film about Vietnam, a poem, a play, a novel, a single word...

peace!

More images to reflect on

2005-01-15T21:36:00.000-08:00

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I love each of these because they make me think about where I fit
into the categories I put others into
every day.

peace!

Images can speak louder than words...

2005-01-15T20:46:00.000-08:00

but without each of us
they will never be
strong enough
to break the silence alone

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Hate must surely be one of the most intricately linked chain of oppression or at least a root system of sorts but what is at the root of hate...fear? This semester I'm taking a modern german history class and the teacher has told us over and over to divorce ourselves from the idea that everything we'll learn there will somehow "explain" how the Nazis came to be or that German history somehow spawned this unique evil and that it was somehow organic and inevitable. I think she's right. Besides that, fascism has certainly been a border crosser and an insidious little virus not exclusive to Germany. There's a shirt from one of my favorite places on the planet...syracuse cultural workers that reads:
"Fascism Sucks" on the front and on the back:

Early warning signs of fascism:
Powerful and continuing nationalism
Disdain for human rights
Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause
Supremecy of the military
Rampant Sexism
Controlled mass media
Obsession with national security
Religion and Government are intertwined
Corporate Power is protected
Labor Power is supressed
Disdain for intellectuals and the arts
Obsession with crime and punishment
Rampant cronyism and corruption
Fraudulent elections

Makes you think does it not? It should, anyway...

Visit syracuse cultural workers and support their ultra-cool efforts at social change! Buy a shirt!
http://www.syrculturalworkers.com/

The mind you change may be your own.

Keep speaking out every way you can. peace!

No right to wrong

2005-01-15T18:41:00.000-08:00

Recently, I've had the good fortune to come across a blog I just adore. I have for a long time been an advocate for queer rights, including the legal right to marry and to be free from persecution. Yet this site taught me alot and is one of the MOST well linked, comprehensive blogs I have found. Please check it out. The link again, is http://transdada.blogspot.com

Calling myself any specific "ist" is a bit difficult. I find such disclaimers and categories to be quite exclusive. Yet I've also had the interesting luck of being caught in a conversation with a fellow student on what "feminism" actually is. I should phrase that differently. He looked at me and said, "Hey I've got these folders and they're quite girlie. I want folders like yours. Do you want to trade?" I said, "What do you mean by girlie?" He said they had pictures of dogs on them. DOGS? I said. "What about dogs is girlie?" He said, "Well they're cute and I'm a man and I need folders that aren't cute."

I had to bite my tongue to keep from laughing at that comment. I thought, oh boy, did you pick the wrong person to approach on this one. I said, "Well I suppose you could draw tanks and dead people and guns on the folders and perhaps then, they'd be manly enough for you." He laughed.
I asked him then, "So are you going to see Gloria Steinem in February when she comes to BSU?"
He said, "Who's that?" I said, "She's a feminist." He blushed and backed up a bit, saying "Are you a feminist?" I said, "YEP." He said, "OH. Well I'm not." I said, "Obviously."

Funny thing though...he's a very small guy, almost effeminate, extremely intellectual and very nice. I thought to myself, why would this guy feel the need to prove so hard, that he IS a MAN?
What is so threatening to him about appearing anything otherwise? Why did the word feminist shut him up and what did it mean to him after I said I was one? Did I suddenly change in his eyes as he had in mine? My first reaction was one of irritation. After thinking about it though, I felt actually rather sorry for him. I could imagine him as being one of those boys shoved into a high school locker simply because he's so small or beaten up because he's so quiet. I could be wrong on that too. Who knows? Certainly though, this guy has some sort of preconceived notions about what masculinity and femininity are and especially about what constitutes a feminist.
If he'll talk to me again...if...I plan to ask him to define that word for me. It took me an awful long time to call myself a feminist because I too had preconceived notions about what that word meant. I too thought it had something to do with women who hated men fighting for a cause that didn't include other struggles such as those against racism, class discrimination or even human rights and one that didn't necessarily include lesbians and transgendered people in their ranks. Historically speaking, the last two points are true to a point. Yet, the first one, I believe is entirely a socially constructed gross misunderstanding and misrepresentation, thanks in no small part to the hateful backlash of such buffoons as Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern.

It has taken me alot of reflection and the good fortune to have studied feminism from a variety of disciplinary perspectives (namely sociology and history) to see that my pereceptions were wrong and that the feminist struggle is truly a human struggle not only for women but for men as well. I have no "right" to wrong him by thinking him stupid or uneducated even or a bigot.
He may well be these things but I have no "right" to think myself better or smarter or somehow in a position to "put him in his place." What I can do and plan to do is try to approach him on the issue a little more delicately and respectfully and inclusively to see if he can at the very least see me as a human being rather than just a word, just an "ist," just a cause waiting to be explode
all over someone's smallest transgression or vocalized objection.

The page I mentioned earlier and linked in this post is so very worth your time and worth your effort. Please check it out. I don't think we can accomplish much as individuals or as individual fault lines waiting to erupt. We need to find new and more imaginative ways of bringing about change that makes people feel equally relevant and not excluded from the "cause." As bell hooks' (one of my favorite authors on the matter) has said: "Feminism is for everybody." We all have a stake in making the world a better place for everyone not just for ourselves or for just our nation or for just our way of life. peace!

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Men make angry music and it's called rock-and-roll; women include anger in their vocabulary and suddenly they're angry and militant. Ani Difranco

Abortion/Pro-"life"/Pro-"Choice"

2005-01-11T08:50:00.000-08:00

On Alternet today they have an interesting article (originally from Bitch magazine) on the t-shirt controversy. The t-shirt apparently says "I had an abortion." I personally would never wear a shirt like that nor have I had an abortion. I take issue with the whole wording/framing of 'pro-life' and 'pro- choice.' These phrases have become those obnoxious orange cones meant to keep you in the lines of a pre-determined discourse. Not every woman (or man for that matter) who is pro-choice is "pro-abortion" as many on the "right" would like you to believe. Not every person who is "pro-life" are anti-abortion either. Think about it. Think harder. Think broader. Think about what these words actually mean. For example some who call themselves pro-life consider medically necessary abortions (i.e. to save the mother's life and in some states/religions/cases to abort a child that would be born dead or born so severly ill that the quality of life would be nonexistent) perfectly acceptable whereas they object to the "idea" of abortion as a low-income form of birth control. That's what it boils down to for many many people who have no understanding or education on the statistics of who's having abortions, at what rate, at what cost etc. etc. Likewise, you have some people who are pro-choice (i.e. they support whole heartedly a woman's right to choose to have the child or not) who would not choose to have an abortion themselves OR have not been put in a situation where they have HAD to choose. The little obnoxious orange-cone-phraseology becomes problematic because it takes a very personal issue (namely morality) which is quite grey and assumes it is a cut and dry/black and white issue. You are either this or that period. There are no exceptions to the rule.

The difficulty though, is that there ARE exceptions to every rule. The rules come from consensus. Consensus is determined by the way this issue is framed and it is significantly framed by the media which in turn controls/creates public perception. If YOU have not had to make the decision or even contemplate it, what possible right do you have to determine the morality of it for someone else?

Another example is that of rape. I've known many women over the years who've given birth to "rape babies" (i.e. children sired from the fact of their having been violently raped). Every one of these women have ended up having to raise that child on Medicaid or with state assistance. Would someone pro-life view a baby produced by rape and in hate differently if they knew that the child might end up becoming a "welfare" child? We have (thanks again to the media and politicians) such a skewed, laughable public perception of who ends up on welfare that the reality of the pro-life/pro-choice dichotomy is one, really, of pro-birth. What happens to the child after it is born, neither side really accounts for. The "pro-choice" camp better acknowledges the reality of classism, racism, sexism and sexual violence because it grounds the belief in a woman's sovereignty over her own body (AND her future for that matter) in the real understanding of what having a child, having to support that child, having to responsible for bringing a child into the world really means.

Does the pro-life camp do that? Do policies made by such strong pro-lifers support women and children? What a stupid question. If you don't know...NO, they don't. I think we need to drive those little cones flat and come at this from a new angle, a human angle, a responsible adult angle. Think about it. Men and women have a stake in this. The bulk of those on "welfare" (which is truly subsistence even in this country) are women and children. This is true worldwide. The bulk of those who can barely survive from day to day are women and children. The majority of those sold around the world into sexual slavery also happen to be women and young girls. So, who should be the one to decide what rights they have over their bodies? A white, male, moneyed politician with often questionable moral leanings or the women themselves?

If those who are so virulent in their pro-life stance claim to be concerned about the wellbeing of innocent children (unborn, that is) then why do they not make, support or improve policies that allow for women to better support themselves, better protect themselves and their children against violence, and have access to quality healthcare and health insurance. Why not make policies that protect life rather than just birth? Why are they instead constantly cutting the funding and programs that do serve women and children? We need to get beyond the rhetoric and the stupidity of allowing others to think for us or frame how we think on certain issues.

Here's a poem I wrote on the prolife/prochoice issue: (notice it really deals with hate and ignorance? These are the real killers in my opinion.)

"Speechless"
It was a perfect line

coiled

embryonic

waiting for the trip
from thought on pause
to life
bursting screaming
out of my mouth.

Then I saw the sticker
on the bumper of your truck
your fist in the air
the weight of your words
your hatred
god
your righteousness is everywhere

hit me so hard
my choked silence
aborted the thought
letter by letter
forming
an indistinguishable blob
of bone
metaphor
and blood
purged
by gasping sobs

...on a street corner
no one came to help
no one came to hold me up
they just walked quickly by...

This could've been a beautiful baby
if only you could've let it be
born
perfect except for the one fatal flaw:

its humanity.

peace!

Gathering shells (my poem/work in progress)

2005-01-04T01:52:00.000-08:00

This poem is from my other blog (reliquary in a wall of silence). The address is linked above.
I'm posting it here as well, though slightly revised because I'd like some feedback/constructive criticism and responses to both versions. So please do respond. Peace!

"Gathering shells"

The sand winks
its countless eyes
softly inviting

hypnotizing
in the heat.

The ground winces
whimpers
moans
as it is trampled
by heavy
tired feet
rotting in boots.

This is the feel
of shrivelling
rusted hope.

This is the sound of a letter home
received two years too late
as time is punctuated by phone calls
and condolences
lives on hold
waiting, wondering
tortured by every dial tone
and wishful thinking:

are they sure?

are they sure?

Every new witness wall
begs the question
Where will all of these new names fit
when the land tires of so much blood
and need

for monument?

Stories
survivors' tales
memoirs and poems
speak of the sea made metal
of ships swallowing the ocean whole
as Israel waged a holy war
raining bullets
upon Lebanon.

Some have remarked
that this was the time
mice became cats
who turned others into mice.

Movies depict shrapnel tattoos
bouncing betty infections
and landmine lovers that could make one man two.
But they cannot quite capture
the sight
(burned into your head through the holes
that were your eyes)
of men picking the pieces of their friend
out of glistening sunlit branches.

And musical scores?

Symphonies?

What possible songs
do the dead have left to sing?

What poetry shall fingerless hands compose?

What comfort can war offer
a wife whose husband has come home
but in his dreams, sees her as the enemy
transforming her skin into brown black or red
his fists into a grenade
her cries, a woman's bones, all
become ribs of a concrete house

of a world
about to implode.

Words gather shells
of memory
in trembling childlike palms.

Saltwater strips the shore
yielding more and more bleached bone
but who will take these memories home?
Who cares to collect them?

How does a voiceless body speak?

No one listens
with ears of stone
to heads exploding
into fields

dripping

red carnations.