Monday, February 08, 2010

Quote of the Day

"Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed unless it is faced." ~author unknown

Tuesday, February 02, 2010

Thank you, Howard Zinn

It's obvious our government is no longer "Of the People, By the People and For the People" but is beholden only to their puppetmaster globalist banksters who are really pulling the strings. ~Ann Minch, Revolt Starts Now!

Got news for you, Ann: Our government has never been "Of the People, By the People and For the People"...that is the irony of our democracy. If you read Howard Zinn's A Peoples History of the United States, you will learn that our founding fathers were ELITES who endeavored to preserve the elite class in America on the backs of the rest of us.

The "People" they created "our" government "Of, By and For" did not include women, children, non-whites and white non-landowners.

The "People" they created "our" government "Of, By and For" included only the white men who owned property and controlled the means of production in this "new" land, with the intention of continuing the enslavement of all others - either through the slave trade or indentured servitude (which kept all "non-slaves" essentially enslaved for life)...and in today's society, through minimum-wage jobs that never go anywhere, and the out-sourcing of jobs to other countries where people are so poor they're grateful to be exploited.

Our Declaration of Independence was written as a means for uniting the masses against England so that the elites of America could replace the British crown:
Around 1776, certain important people in the English colonies made a discovery that would prove enormously useful for the next two hundred years. They found that by creating a nation, a symbol, a legal unity called the United States, they could take over land, profits, and political power from favorites of the British Empire. In the process, they could hold back a number of potential rebellions and create a consensus of popular support for the rule of a new, privileged leadership. (Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States)
After that independence was won, it was left to those same elites to frame our Constitution...which, by the way, would not include our Bill of Rights if it were not for a protest by the common people. Women would not be able to vote, children would still be forced to work and the slave trade would not have been abolished if it were not for subsequent protests by the common people.

It was inevitable that we would find ourselves in our current state of the union...gridlock in Washington while our people cry out for educational, financial, environmental, and health care reform. It isn't Republicans vs. Democrats...it's us vs. the elites. Gridlock is good for them - it sustains the status quo and keeps US subservient to THEM.

Their greatest talent is talking the talk, keeping us under their spell so that we continue to vote for them. It's all an illusion, designed to keep the elites in power.

They have talked their talk for over two hundred years, propped up by a public education system limited by a socially approved (elitist) version of history. As children we're told how wonderful Christopher Columbus was to discover America, that the Puritans invited the Indians to share their food at the first Thanksgiving, George Washington could not tell a lie when he chopped down the cherry tree, and Abraham Lincoln's primary reason for engaging in the Civil War was to free the slaves...slivers of truth, not the whole story. Never are we told the whole story, at least not in our publicly funded school system!

Why? ...because the elites don't want us to know about what really happened.

The elites created a myth of America and sold it to us as historical fact, complete and unabridged. They tell us just enough to let us think we're included, without usurping the power they wield.

Take for example the story of Columbus. We learn very early in life about the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria...memorize the rhyme "In fourteen hundred and ninety-two Columbus sailed the ocen blue". But where in our education do we learn the rest of the story?
Arawak men and women, naked, tawny, and full of wonder, emerged from their villages onto the island's beaches and swam out to get a closer look at the strange big boat. When Columbus and his sailors came ashore, carrying swords, speaking oddly, the Arawaks ran to greet them, brought them food, water, gifts.
He later wrote of this in his log: They ... brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks' bells. They willingly traded everything they owned... They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features... They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane... They would make fine servants... With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.
These Arawaks of the Bahama Islands were much like Indians on the mainland, who were remarkable (European observers were to say again and again) for their hospitality, their belief in sharing. These traits did not stand out in the Europe of the Renaissance, dominated as it was by the religion of popes, the government of kings, the frenzy for money that marked Western civilization and its first messenger to the Americas, Christopher Columbus.

Columbus wrote: As soon as I arrived in the Indies, on the first Island which I found, I took some of the natives by force in order that they might learn and might give me information of whatever there is in these parts.
The information that Columbus wanted most was: Where is the gold? He had persuaded the king and queen of Spain to finance an expedition to the lands, the wealth, he expected would be on the other side of the Atlantic-the Indies and Asia, gold and spices. For, like other informed people of his time, he knew the world was round and he could sail west in order to get to the Far East. ...
In return for bringing back gold and spices, they promised Columbus 10 percent of the profits, governorship over new-found lands, and the fame that would go with a new tide: Admiral of the Ocean Sea. He was a merchant's clerk from the Italian city of Genoa, part-time weaver (the son of a skilled weaver), and expert sailor. He set out with three sailing ships, the largest of which was the Santa Maria, perhaps 100 feet long, and thirty-nine crew members.

Columbus would never have made it to Asia, which was thousands of miles farther away than he had calculated, imagining a smaller world. He would have been doomed by that great expanse of sea. But he was lucky. One-fourth of the way there he came upon an unknown, uncharted land that lay between Europe and Asia-the Americas. It was early October 1492, and thirty-three days since he and his crew had left the Canary Islands, off the Atlantic coast of Africa. Now they saw branches and sticks floating in the water. They saw flocks of birds.

These were signs of land. Then, on October 12, a sailor called Rodrigo saw the early morning moon shining on white sands, and cried out. It was an island in the Bahamas, the Caribbean sea. The first man to sight land was supposed to get a yearly pension of 10,000 maravedis for life, but Rodrigo never got it. Columbus claimed he had seen a light the evening before. He got the reward.

So, approaching land, they were met by the Arawak Indians, who swam out to greet them. The Arawaks lived in village communes, had a developed agriculture of corn, yams, cassava. They could spin and weave, but they had no horses or work animals. They had no iron, but they wore tiny gold ornaments in their ears.

This was to have enormous consequences: it led Columbus to take some of them aboard ship as prisoners because he insisted that they guide him to the source of the gold. He then sailed to what is now Cuba, then to Hispaniola (the island which today consists of Haiti and the Dominican Republic). There, bits of visible gold in the rivers, and a gold mask presented to Columbus by a local Indian chief, led to wild visions of gold fields.

On Hispaniola, out of timbers from the Santa Maria, which had run aground, Columbus built a fort, the first European military base in the Western Hemisphere. He called it Navidad (Christmas) and left thirty-nine crewmembers there, with instructions to find and store the gold. He took more Indian prisoners and put them aboard his two remaining ships. At one part of the island he got into a fight with Indians who refused to trade as many bows and arrows as he and his men wanted. Two were run through with swords and bled to death. Then the Nina and the Pinta set sail for the Azores and Spain. When the weather turned cold, the Indian prisoners began to die. ...

Now, from his base on Haiti, Columbus sent expedition after expedition into the interior. They found no gold fields, but had to fill up the ships returning to Spain with some kind of dividend. In the year 1495, they went on a great slave raid, rounded up fifteen hundred Arawak men, women, and children, put them in pens guarded by Spaniards and dogs, then picked the five hundred best specimens to load onto ships. Of those five hundred, two hundred died en route. The rest arrived alive in Spain and were put up for sale by the archdeacon of the town, who reported that, although the slaves were "naked as the day they were born," they showed "no more embarrassment than animals." Columbus later wrote: "Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold."

But too many of the slaves died in captivity. And so Columbus, desperate to pay back dividends to those who had invested, had to make good his promise to fill the ships with gold. In the province of Cicao on Haiti, where he and his men imagined huge gold fields to exist, they ordered all persons fourteen years or older to collect a certain quantity of gold every three months. When they brought it, they were given copper tokens to hang around their necks. Indians found without a copper token had their hands cut off and bled to death.

The Indians had been given an impossible task. The only gold around was bits of dust garnered from the streams. So they fled, were hunted down with dogs, and were killed.

Trying to put together an army of resistance, the Arawaks faced Spaniards who had armor, muskets, swords, horses. When the Spaniards took prisoners they hanged them or burned them to death. Among the Arawaks, mass suicides began, with cassava poison. Infants were killed to save them from the Spaniards. In two years, through murder, mutilation, or suicide, half of the 250,000 Indians on Haiti were dead.

When it became clear that there was no gold left, the Indians were taken as slave labor on huge estates, known later as encomiendas. They were worked at a ferocious pace, and died by the thousands. By the year 1515, there were perhaps fifty thousand Indians left. By 1550, there were five hundred. A report of the year 1650 shows none of the original Arawaks or their descendants left on the island. (Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States)
Granted, this is not a story to tell our children in kindergarten...but to exclude it entirely from our education, to keep it secret from the masses, is to keep us enslaved by the elite.

As Howard Zinn wrote:
My point is not to grieve for the victims and denounce the executioners. Those tears, that anger, cast into the past, deplete our moral energy for the present. And the lines are not always clear. In the long run, the oppressor is also a victim. In the short run (and so far, human history has consisted only of short runs), the victims, themselves desperate and tainted with the culture that oppresses them, turn on other victims.

Still, understanding the complexities, (I am) skeptical of governments and their attempts, through politics and culture, to ensnare ordinary people in a giant web of nationhood pretending to a common interest.
I will try not to overlook the cruelties that victims inflict on one another as they are jammed together in the boxcars of the system. I don't want to romanticize them. But I do remember (in rough paraphrase) a statement I once read:
"The cry of the poor is not always just, but if you don't listen to it, you will never know what justice is."
I don't want to invent victories for people's movements. But to think that history-writing must aim simply to recapitulate the failures that dominate the past is to make historians collaborators in an endless cycle of defeat. If history is to be creative, to anticipate a possible future without denying the past, it should, I believe, emphasize new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes of the past when, even if in brief flashes, people showed their ability to resist, to join together, occasionally to win. I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past's fugitive moments of compassion rather than in its solid centuries of warfare.
What we're talking about here, whether it's in reference to Ann Minch's credit card revolt or social inequality across the board of ethnic diversity, is cultural hegemony:
Cultural hegemony is the philosophic and sociological concept, originated by the Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci, that a culturally-diverse society can be ruled or dominated by one of its social classes. It is the dominance of one social group over another, i.e. the ruling class over all other classes. The ideas of the ruling class come to be seen as the norm; they are seen as universal ideologies, perceived to benefit everyone whilst only really benefiting the ruling class. ...
In a layered cultural hegemony, personal "common sense" maintains a dual structural role. Each individual utilizes this "common sense" to cope with their daily life and explain to themselves the small segment of the social order they come to witness in the course of this life. However, because it is by nature limited in focus, common sense also inhibits the ability to perceive the greater, systemic nature of socio-economic exploitation that cultural hegemony makes possible. People concentrate their attention upon their immediate concerns and problems in their personal lives, rather than upon the fundamental sources of their social and economic oppression. (from Wikipedia, emphasis mine)
Please join me in carrying the torch of enlightenment that Zinn ignited. Bear witness to the whole truth of our country's history. Read A People's History of the United States and investigate other sources of truth as well.

The whole TRUTH shall set US free!