BroadSnark

Over the weekend, a friend of mine posted a video (below) about a Fox news report that was squashed.

Several years ago, Fox reporters were working on a story about Monsanto and rBGH.  Monsanto, upon getting wind of the story, had their attorneys send Fox a letter threatening to sue.  Fox wanted to squash the story, but were afraid the reporters would tell the world.  So instead, Fox management beat the story into a form that Monsanto would like better.

The reporters were eventually fired for not being willing to lie in their news report.  The Fox station attorney sent them a letter confirming that is why they were fired.  The reporters understood this to be a retaliation claim.  They believed they would be protected under the whistleblower statute.  But the courts ruled that a news show lying on the air was not illegal and therefore there was no whistle to blow.  Ergo, no protection for the reporters.

All of us discussing the post agreed that it was appalling.  The poster suggested that we start a campaign to make lying by the news stations illegal.  It was an instinct I understood, but all I could think of were the potentially disastrous consequences.

If we want to see what happens when it is easier to sue a news organization, look no further than the United Kingdom.  Libel laws there are much different than in the United States.  And corporations are taking advantage of those laws to sue newspapers and bloggers.

News organizations afraid that they are going to be sued are likely to self censor.  In fact, this very Monsanto incident is the perfect example of the kind of self censorship that news organizations are practicing.  Monsanto threatened to sue them, presumably for libel.  And rather than risk the expense of a court battle, Fox’s response was to cave to the threat of a lawsuit.

While this Monsanto case is disgusting, how would yet more laws that people can be sued under help rather than cause even more self censorship?  And even if there was no danger from self censorship, how could we be sure that honest mistakes were not prosecuted?

This is not just an issue of a free press or of free speech.  It is about how we are handling all of our society’s problems.  Our first instinct is – We must do something!  We must pass a law!  It has gotten to the point where we can’t walk out of our house without breaking a law.

Every time we try to resolve a problem by passing a law, we give up that much more of our power.  And we tip the scales that much further in the direction of the wealthy and specially educated.

Access to the justice system, and results from the justice system, are dependent on how much money you have and how much understanding you have of legal codes, precedents, rules of procedure and a million other pieces of specialized knowledge that most of us do not have access to.

When we turn everything into a law, we turn everything into something that requires an attorney and a judge.  We empower those people at the expense of our own power.  If every solution proposed requires a law, then availing yourself of that solution requires an attorney.  Can you afford an attorney?  I can’t.

This post isn’t about bagging on attorneys.  I worked for attorneys for a decade.  And some of the attorneys I worked for were fighting the good fight.  They worked on civil rights cases and sexual harassment cases.  (I’m talking quid pro quo – you can keep your job if you suck my dick kind of cases, not ooh I don’t like the bikini calendar cases.)  I even did a millisecond internship with the ACLU.  But even the attorneys fighting the good fight cannot deny that the courts, for all the publicity that those few breakthrough civil rights cases get, are all too often on the wrong side of history.

There is no way to craft laws that can only be used for good, that cannot be exploited by those with the power and money to exploit.  The solution does not lie in empowering more attorneys and judges.  It lies in addressing those inequities of power and money directly.  It lies in taking back our own power.  It lies in coming up with solutions and problem solving mechanisms accessible to all of us.

Let’s set aside for just a moment the horrors of war.  Ignore the cost in human lives, the suffering, the destruction.  Ignore the repercussions that are felt for generations.  And let’s ignore any debates about what it means to declare “victory” in a place like Iraq, where people continue to fight and die long after we supposedly won.  Ignore questions about whether or not there can ever be a winner when millions die.  Ignore all of that and just ask yourself this:

How do you win a war?

You win a war through strategy.   You win a war by controlling supply chains and by having access to more energy (oil).  You win a war by controlling transportation and mastering communications.  You win a war by having more people on your side.  You win a war by propaganda.  You win a war by being willing to keep fighting after your opponent has quit.

In other words, you win a war by being smarter.

People who scoff at the idea of non-violence do not stop to consider whether or not the side willing to be the most violent and ruthless is the side that wins in a war. If they did stop to think about it, they would have a difficult time making the argument that England was more ruthless than Germany in WWII or that the colonists were more ruthless than the English in the American revolutionary war.

The reason military strategists study prior wars and battles is to learn tactics.  The reason that our military focuses so much on psychological operations is because they know that force is often impossible.  The government needed to trick us in order to get people to support invading Iraq.  The military strategy in Iraq is to “win hearts and minds” because they can only stop fighting if the citizens of Iraq let them.

So if wars are won through strategy, through tactics, through smarts – and not through ruthless violence – why not focus on the strategy without the violence?

I am so tired of hearing about kids being beat up and criminalized.  Are you prepping them for life or prison?  (That was a rhetorical question.)

Racialicious has a really beautiful and brave post by A. Rahman Ford called Race, Disability and Denial.

Far be it for me to tell Americans that they should be more French.  But if we had a little more of this, we might have a little less of this.  And just for kicks, maybe we could throw in a little protest Brussels style.  I do love a good foam party.

Two interesting posts on elections in the last couple weeks.  Jeremy writes an excellent post tackling anarchists ideas about voting.  And Charles points out the amount of wasted resources that go into elections.

Db0 tackles the issue of how anarchists handle crime in the present without compromising their anarchist principles.

Finally, on Trust is the Only Currency, a A Socratic dialogue between a Buddhist Lama (BL) and a Mainstream Economist (ME).

Picture an anarchist in your head.  What do you see?

For most people the image is of a black clad, pubescent boy throwing rocks through a store window or spray painting an anarchist symbol.  People with a better sense of history might picture a slightly older, wild-bearded man making assassination plans.

And it is true that those images have some reality behind them.

There have been anarchists who have participated in violence.  Anarchists fought in the Spanish civil war.  Anarchists have claimed responsibility for political assassinations and other “propaganda of the deed.”  And there are certainly anarchists who have participated in symbolic acts of property destruction.

But does that make anarchists especially violent?

How many philosophies have not been used as an excuse for violence?  We fight wars in the name of democracy.  Assassinations are committed in the name of democracy.  Entire cities have been leveled in the name of democracy.  And yet few supporters of democracy believe their philosophy is particularly violent.

It makes little sense that a few violent acts and some (arguably) violent property destruction warrant anarchists getting such a bad rap.

Then, of course, there are the many anarchists who are/were also pacifists.  Some, like Tolstoy, derived their pacifist anarchism from Christianity.  Gandhi, who was inspired by Tolstoy, meshed his philosophical anarchism with Hinduism.  Anarchists from Howard Zinn to Alex Comfort were pacifists.  Even Emma Goldman, who once supported “propaganda of the deed,” changed her mind after seeing the effects of violence.

Clearly, we have a case of selective, collective memory.  How did that happen? Why are people only associating anarchists with violence?

Perhaps it has something to do with the way media selectively covers anarchism.  The coverage of Howard Zinn’s death is instructive.  An Associated Press story picked up by the New York Times and Washington Post says that Howard Zinn wrote about anarchist Emma Goldman, but doesn’t describe Howard Zinn as an anarchist.  Bob Herbert’s New York Times op-ed doesn’t mention “anarchist” once.  In article after article he is referred to as “left” or “radical,” but not as an anarchist.

Lest you get the idea that the media are loathe to use the word anarchist or anarchy, just try to search news coverage with those words.  The New York Times is happy to associate anarchists with al-Qaida or with Lenin.  Even if no anarchist claims responsibility for a bombing, they are almost certain to get credit for it.   And that doesn’t even begin to cover the times that newspapers try to scare the crap out of their readers by labeling catastrophes as scary anarchy.

Newspapers like the Times and Post are staunch defenders of the establishment.  And the establishment has every reason to try and make anarchists look bad.  As Howard Zinn said,

No doubt that anarchist ideas are frightening to those in power. People in power can tolerate liberal ideas. They can tolerate ideas that call for reforms, but they cannot tolerate the idea that there will be no state, no central authority. So it is very important for them to ridicule the idea of anarchism to create this impression of anarchism as violent and chaotic. It is useful for them, yes.

That doesn’t mean that every lowly reporter is consciously trying to to vilify us.  As a former media person told me, “they have a script” and they are playing it out.  They are writing the narrative that they have been brought up to write, the narrative that will get them promoted, even if that means conjuring up imaginary conflicts while ignoring real ones.

So the question is, what can we do to make it more difficult for the media to vilify us?

It seems like I have spent my entire life trying to fight off the irrational fears that people have tried to instill in me.

I was advised not to ride the bus in Ft. Lauderdale or I’d get robbed. I was told if I went to Liberty City, I would get beat up. Before I went to Mexico, Estadounidenses told me it was too dangerous. When I was in Playa Chacala, they told me I would be mugged in Guadalajara. When I was in Guadalajara, they told me I would get mugged in Mexico City. In Mexico City, they told me I’d never survive Guatemala.

If I let myself be afraid every time someone told me horrible things about a place or a people, I would never go anywhere or talk to anyone.

The people who were trying to make me afraid weren’t fearful from experience or reliable knowledge.  It was all just rumor, sensationalist news reports, and general fear of the OTHER – especially if that other was poor and black or brown.  People are so ready to believe negative things about poor people of color that you have to assume they want to believe those things, need to believe those things.

Why?

What if that fear went away tomorrow?  What if we all assumed, just for a day, that everyone was doing the best they could to get by.  What if we assumed, just for a day, that poor people aren’t poor because they are less worthy, less smart, less hard-working, or just plain less?  Where would that leave us?

It would leave us with a lot of questions.  It would leave us asking how things got to be this way and what forces are at work keeping them this way.  It would leave us wondering about how those inequities relate to accidents of geography, skin color, and birth.  It would leave us wondering if those inequities aren’t accidental at all.  And it would leave us asking who benefits from us distrusting each other so much.

It’s easier not to think about those things.  Thinking about those things, for many of us, leads to questioning our privileges, our world views, our lives.  And we would rather not do that.  So we just live in fear and try to avoid looking at the everyday tragedies.

But every once in a while, a tragedy unfolds that is so catastrophic that we cannot ignore it.  So Katrina hits New Orleans or an earthquake hits Haiti and willful ignorance becomes impossible.  That’s when our schizophrenia takes hold.

We watch the tragedy unfold on the television and our hearts break.  We imagine the horror that those people are going through.  We send millions of dollars to relief organizations and stay glued to the news reports.  We ask ourselves, why?  How could something so horrible happen?  And we want to know if it could have been prevented.  Most importantly, we want to know if it could happen to us.

Before long, the news reports turn from rescue to rioting.  A little scuffle over some desperately needed food is played on a continuous loop.  Report after report conflates appropriation of the means to survival with, not just theft, but violence.

And all these scary reports happen just in the nick of time.  Some part of the back of our brains had begun to wonder if there was more to the story than just an “act of god.” Perhaps someone mentioned how poor Haiti was and we wondered for a moment why.  But before we had to take any trouble looking into it, those “journalists” showed us what dangerous people we were dealing with, incapable of organization or development.

So you see, this couldn’t happen to us.  We can rest assured that we deserve our privilege.  No need to examine history or economic systems.  No need to wonder why these “acts of god” are so much more destructive when they happen to poor people.  Just pat ourselves on the back for our generosity and move on.

And when the United Nations and the U.S. government prioritize “security” over medical supplies, leaving doctors to find saws in hardware stores in order to perform amputations, there is no need to question that decision.  These are dangerous people.  You are sure of it.  You’ve been told over and over your entire life.

There is no need to read about the history of Haiti.  There is no need to seek out journalists who are actually talking to the people we are supposed to be so afraid of.  There is no need to listen to people on the ground who tell us over and over and over and over and over again that the reports of violence are a lie.

Ignorance is bliss.

I’m not saying that there is no real danger in the world.  I certainly wasn’t going to volunteer to drive a bus through Zona 18 in Guatemala.  But isn’t it time we were a little more skeptical about the daily vilification of poor people of color?  Why is it that so many people found my blog looking for information about which non-profits are trustworthy; yet so few people show anything like that kind of skepticism when it comes to news reports making survivors out to be criminals?

So long as we allow fear to substitute for fact, the status quo will go unchallenged.  And that suits some people just fine.

I feel very lucky that I had the opportunity to see Howard Zinn at Busboys and Poets last year.  I wish I had a recording of his talk.  The gist of it was that no politician is going to bring us the change we need.  We have to make the change happen.  Here is an amazing interview (and critique of voting) with Walter Mosley (who I also love).

You may have heard about a conference coming up in San Francisco called Libertopia.

Its purpose is to create a worldwide movement of individuals who choose their own form of governance – a voluntary society based on mutual respect for each individual’s dignity and ownership of his/her own body and property.

Sadly, it appears from looking at the list of speakers, that this voluntary society is going to be made up exclusively of men (men who can afford the cost of the conference registration, hotel, and cruise).

I tweeted a few complaints about the all-too-typical invisibility of women at anything remotely libertarian and ended up in a convo with @solidadrocks about these kinds of conferences in general.

Long story short, there are tons of women out there who aren’t just sitting around talking theory.  They are doing amazing things to “create the new world in the shell of the old.”  But we never hear about them.  And women rarely take the time to step back and talk to each other about what we are doing.

So, I thought, why don’t we have a conference/gathering/meeting/whatever focused on anarchist/libertarian/anti-statist/whatever women who are doing amazing things?  We could learn from each other and find potential collaborators.  I’m thinking it would be:

• Women focused – I don’t think that means men should be banned, just that women, and what they are doing, would be the focus of the sessions.
• Activity focused – That doesn’t mean that we can’t talk theory at all, but I want to hear about actions.  I want to attend sessions on organizing, cooperatives, alternative currencies, radical art…And I’d like to walk away with all sorts of ideas and plans.
• Inclusive and diverse – Transgender, intersexed, straight, gay, bisexual, young, old, differently abled, black, white, Latina, Asian, Native American…And massive effort would be made to make sure everyone would be included (outreach, accessibility, childcare…).
• Cheap – As close to free as humanly possible.

As far as location goes, I am in Washington, DC.  I’d be willing/able to travel pretty much anywhere in North America.  I’m thinking we can see who is interested and then decide which location makes the most sense based on that.  (If there is a lot of interest, maybe we can plan on doing more than one for different areas.  But now I’m getting ahead of myself.)

Step one is gaging interest, so what do you all think?  Share your thoughts in the comment section.  And, if you are interested, send an email to mel@broadsnark.com and let me know:

1. Where you are (city,state, country)
2. If you would want to be on a listserve for general info.  And, if so, what email address to use.  (Clearly, your email would not be sold, published, shared…)

Let’s see where this goes.

People often complain that I’m cynical and pessimistic.  I’m always looking for the catch, the ulterior motive, the dark side.  Every new plan, from health care to tax reform, I am immediately poking holes in.  Many of my friends are liberal, nonprofit types who are very attached to these plans.  And they get pretty frustrated with me.

And maybe I am cynical.  Certainly, I question people’s motives.  But I prefer to see it as being honest.  I see what happens with each of those grand plans and new policies.  I see how putting our future in other people’s hands leaves us feeling lost and powerless.  I see every person who gets power abusing it.  I see the “solutions” to problems causing more problems than they solve.

Willful blindness isn’t going to make those problems go away.  It isn’t optimistic to put all your faith in a charismatic leader and cross your fingers.  It isn’t optimistic to ignore the hypocrisy, backroom deals, corporate giveaways, ethical compromises, obstructionism, and usual screwing of the public.

On the contrary, the pessimists are those people who think that is the best we can do.  I think we can do better.

I know there are some people who really believe that enforcing anti-prostitution laws will help women, but it is really hard to have patience for those people when I read things like this.

On a more inspiring note, these women in South Korea are bad asses.

Howard Zinn recently spoke about the myths of Americas three “good wars.” It is most definitely worth a listen.

Great article on Tranarchism called Why I am Still an Anarchist.

Amazing article by Amy Hamilton called Why I Broke Up with the Anarchist Community.

And finally, how about a little old school Kropotkin on prisons.

Many people believe that some injustices are so heinous that violence is not only necessary, it is obligatory.  But they rarely take the next step.  They rarely imagine what would happen after the violence stops, assuming it can be stopped.  Who among them is going to create a better, more just world?  A soldier?

A soldier is not trained to create.  He is trained to destroy.  Military training is about smashing a person’s ego until they are willing to obey without question.  It is about instilling hierarchy.  It is about learning to dehumanize the “enemy.”  It is about suppressing pangs of conscience.  It is about becoming a killer.

When the soldier returns from whatever horrors he has to see and participate in, he brings the horrors back with him.  Returning soldiers have mental health problems.  They are more likely to have drug and alcohol problems.  Many are suicidal.  Some are homicidal.  Is that soldier, with all his problems, the person who will be able to create a better way of life?

Contrast the training of a soldier with the training of a non-violent resister.

Imagine the inner strength, patience, and command over your own emotions it takes to face down dogs without responding with violence?  Imagine the vision that comes from that kind of discipline and self awareness.  How could that not be better preparation for building a more just world?

When James Baldwin and Malcolm X debated each other (recordings below), Malcolm X asserted his right to defend himself.  He claimed that the black man’s freedom rested on his willingness to do “the same thing that Patrick Henry did to make this country what it was for white people.”  And in doing so, he called out the hypocrisy of idolizing the actions of one person and vilifying those same actions when another claims the right to them.

That hypocrisy is indisputable.  So is the fact that Americans idolize violence and violent heroes.  But while Baldwin did not dispute Malcolm X’s facts, he did dispute his conclusions.

“Patrick Henry is not one of my heroes…I don’t see any reason for me, at this late date, to begin modeling myself on an image which I’ve always found frankly to be mediocre and not a standard to which I myself could repair…the only thing that really arms anybody when the chips are down is how closely, how thoroughly, he can relate to himself and deal with the world…I don’t think that a warrior is necessarily a man…It is very difficult to be a man…What it involves, for me anyway, is an ability to look at the world, to look at whatever it is and to say what it is and to deal with it and to face it.

A soldier will have a very hard time looking at the world and seeing it for what it is.  A soldier has to lie to himself.  How could a soldier stand not to?  You can’t make a better world by creating people who can’t look into their own hearts, who have to live in denial of their actions.

We all have the right to defend ourselves, but we also have the obligation to examine what we will become by exercising that right.  If, in the process of becoming the victor, you have to also become a monster, what have you really won?