BroadSnark

There is no justification for the actions that the Israeli government took this week.  There is no justification for the blockade on Gaza.  There is no defense for allowing settlers to invade Palestinian land, eating it up piece by piece.  The apartheid in Israel/Palestine is immoral, unjust, inhumane, and repugnant.  Everybody knows it.  Even Israel’s defenders know it.

The typical response from defenders of Israel, when faced with Israel’s actions, is something like this one that I read on Facebook this week

And we all know what martyrdom means to Muslims – it is an honor they often seek.

Muslims, you see, are particularly irrational.  (The fact that not all Palestinians are Muslim doesn’t seem to matter in the slightest.)  That’s why, when butted up against a moral wall, an Israeli I spoke to defended his country by saying “Palestinian women strap their kids with bombs.”  What that Israeli meant was – Yes, our actions are crazy, but it’s because we are dealing with crazy people.

Even people who recognize the immorality of Israel’s actions still vilify Palestinians by erasing their actions and ignoring their movements.  Take this video from the Young Turks. (Thanks to Mariana E. for posting it.)

Once again, someone is lecturing Palestinians about nonviolence.  Once again, someone is telling Palestinians that they should learn from Gandhi and Martin Luther King.  Which is infuriating.  Because there has always been nonviolent, Palestinian resistance.

the reality is that Palestinians have consistently chosen nonviolent resistance before arms – from the general strikes of 1936, to the consistent appeals to international legal bodies, to the weekly demonstrations against the wall. It has been the continued dispossession at the hands of Israel, and the silence of the international community despite these nonviolent efforts, that has led some Palestinians to view violence as the only option.

As Yousef Munayyer describes in the article quoted above, if there is a Palestinian Gandhi, he or she is most likely languishing in an Israeli jail.  Just because the New York Times doesn’t report on the nonviolent movements or pretends as though they are new does not make it so.  Like most U.S. media, they prefer not to contradict the image of Palestinians as irrational, inhuman, crazies.

So below I am linking to videos, articles, and websites that show a different picture of the Palestinian people than you get on the U.S. mainstream news.   Next time someone gives you the “they’re all crazy and violent” response, feel free to provide them a link.

You can read about past and present Palestinian nonviolent movements in Tikkun, Peace Magazine and especially this article in The Holy Land Trust.

Here is the trailer to a new film about the protests in Budrus. (Note: I haven’t seen it yet.”

Democracy Now often does interviews with Israeli and Palestinian activists, including this one of three women who toured the U.S. together and this one with two members of Combatants for Peace.

You can find links to Palestinian peace and human rights organizations here and here.

And if you want to get news on Israel/Palestine, forget the New York Times.  Read Electronic Intifada or Mondoweiss.

Even the Daily Show interviewed Anna Baltzer and Mustafa Barghouti about nonviolent movements.

I had a post all ready to put up tonight, but I just watched the video of U.S. soldiers mowing down people on an Iraq street and I can’t think about anything else.    It is so cold, so monstrous.

If you haven’t seen the video yet, it is below.  And remember, as you watch it, that about 32% of your tax dollars go to pay for war.  Remember that at least half of those killed in war are civilians.  Remember that this is still happening in Iraq.  It is happening in Afghanistan.  It happened every place that we have ever sent our soldiers or weapons.  And it will keep happening so long as people continue to be deluded into thinking war can ever be just or moral or righteous or even tolerable.

“In war, the means–indiscriminate killing–are immediate and certain; the ends, however desirable, are distant and uncertain.” Howard Zinn, A Just Cause, Not a Just War.

One of the blogs I follow religiously is Womanist Musings.  Renee always makes me think.  This week she had a guest post by Kola Boof that set off a bit of a kerfuffle.  Renee then challenged her readers to respond with their own post, which I did.

Below are links to all the posts (and comment streams), the last being my guest post.

With a couple rare exceptions, all the comments on here have been respectful.  But I still want to take a moment to request that, should any of you decide to jump in, please be constructive.  Don’t be like the nasty person who actually made a death threat.  (I mean for fuck’s sake.)

Dishonesty About Race – An American Social Reflex

The Third Eye Report: Israel vs. Palestine

Re: Kola Boof

On When to Speak

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?

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.

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?

Monica at TransGriot explains the history of the Transgender Day of Remembrance here.

For a powerful and amazing spoken word performance that really gets to the heart of how our society fears and terrorizes transgender people, check out this video of Julia Serano

I find myself in a rather awkward position.  I’m about to (sort of) defend the “gun nuts.”  It freaks me out too, but what can I do.

It started when I noticed Senate bill 1317.  The bill got my attention because it mentioned terrorists.  And whenever a bill mentions terrorists, I start wondering what new civil liberty someone is trying to take away from us.  I think of illegal spying and an end to habeas corpus.  The bill says it is meant

S. 1317
To increase public safety by permitting the Attorney General to deny the transfer of firearms or the issuance of firearms and explosives licenses to known or suspected dangerous terrorists.

Now that sound reasonable. No sane person wants terrorists to get their hands on weapons.  There is that word “suspected” though.  We all know what happens when “suspected” is sufficient to take away someone’s rights.

In a nutshell, this hinges on how much you trust the Attorney General’s idea of “reasonable belief.”  For me, the verdict is not yet in on this particular attorney general.  I can say with certainty that the last couple did not have an idea of “reasonable belief” that came even close to mine.  Who knows about the next ones.  And let me remind you that our government already has a history of labeling innocuous student groups as terrorists.

Now, you may say “So what. People shouldn’t have guns anyway.”  I understand that sentiment.  I’m not a fan of guns.  I am a pacifist after all.   But the truth is that most gun owners aren’t out killing people or joining racist militias.  And given what our food industry does to animals, hunters are often a hell of a lot more humane than the people who put our meat in pretty little packages.

All of the above made me think about the two essential claims that the “gun nuts” make.  The first is that the right to bear arms is in the constitution.  The second is that there are people (democrats mostly) who want to take their guns away.  I have to admit that both of those claims are true.  I happen to be one of the people who has wanted to take their guns away.

I won’t pretend to understand gun owners love of their guns.  And I think the idea that having a rifle will protect you from your government is a bit insane at this point.  The government has bombers and nukes.  Shooting your gun up at a bomber might make a good scene in the new Red Dawn remake, but it ain’t going to do a whole lot to protect you.  Then again, those Iraqis had a pretty low tech arsenal and managed to kick our asses, so…

Much as I hate to come out on the side of the gun lobby, here I am. Do we want to give the DOJ the power to start designating people as “suspected terrorists” and then assigning their rights (or lack thereof) based on that designation?

If people are plotting to use those weapons to commit crimes, we need to investigate.  We have RICO statutes and criminal conspiracy charges that can be brought against them. We have an imperfect, but functioning, judicial system where they should be tried.

There may be people who don’t think there should be a right to bear arms.  That’s a perfectly legitimate opinion.  They should be honest about it and say that they want to amend the constitution.

(Note: I’m going to relate much of the storyline in this post.  While I don’t think that really spoils the movie, if you haven’t seen it yet you might want to wait to read this.)

Quentin Tarantino makes films about film.  He examines, exaggerates, and worships our most iconic film genres.  And in doing so, he examines us.  There is no genre more central to the American mythology than the war movie, particularly the World War II movie.  All the cliches are present.

There is a small band of elite fighters led by a sexy leading man.  There are victims to be saved.  There are beautiful women in danger.  There are good guys and there are bad guys and we all know who is who and who we are supposed to cheer for.

It is a Tarantino movie and so it is, of course, violent and funny.  There are beautifully shot scenes and there is intense dialogue.  But what makes the movie truly interesting are the ways in which Tarantino challenges the genre and the American mythology that goes with it.

Jews are Made Fully (In)human

The movie begins with a beautifully shot scene in the French countryside.  A dairy farmer (brilliantly played by Denis Menochet) and his gorgeous daughters are visited by the Nazis.  As the scene rolls on we discover that the dairy farmer is hiding Jews from his village.  These are the Jews we are expecting, victims hiding in a cellar.

Every war movie needs an elite group of soldiers to follow and this movie is no different.  Except in this movie the elite group is made up of Jews.  The actors who play these soldiers look more like rabbinical school students than warriors who are going to scalp Nazis.  Tarantino’s Jews are heroes, but they are sick, murderous, psychopaths and terrorists as well.

During the holocaust, it was the Nazis who marked Jews so that they could more easily pick them out for destruction.  But I don’t recall seeing a single yellow star in this movie.  In Tarantino’s world, it is the heroes who mark people.

Women Are Smart and Men are Destroyed by Their  Sexism

Like all war movies, most of the central characters are men. Unlike most war movies, the two central women characters are the ones who engineer the ultimate destruction of the bad guys. Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent) and Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger) both design separate and eventually interconnecting plots to destroy a movie theater filled with Nazis.

Most interestingly, it is men’s continual underestimation of women that causes their own destruction.  The main Nazi villain, Colonol Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) lets Shosanna get away once.  He doesn’t do it out of compassion.  (He has none).  She just isn’t important enough to go after.

Colonol Landa prides himself on being able to read people, break people, and hunt down Jews.  Yet, when he questions Shosanna, he reads nothing.  He does not see that she is a Jew.  He does not see that she is terrified and full of rage.  He just orders the adorable blonde girl some strudel and milk.  And that same blonde girl will engineer the destruction of his people.

When things go wrong for Bridget, there is a stand-off.  The stand-off is between a Nazi soldier and our hero, Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt).  The Nazi must decide whether or not to trust Raine (who wants to rescue the injured Bridget).  It never enters the Nazi’s mind that the danger could come from the woman.  He does not live to regret it.

And then there is the scene where Tarantino turns the story of Cinderella on its head.  The man who is coming to find you with that shoe is not a prince, but a psycho.  Sexism destroys the men, but the men still destroy the women.

The Bad Guys are More Human than the Good Guys

We see Nazis playing drinking games and celebrating the birth of a young soldier’s first child.  Fredrick Zoller (Daniel Brühl) is a Nazi hero who single-handedly killed hundreds of the enemy and who stars in a movie about his exploits. Yet he is humble and charming. And he is conflicted about having killed so many people.

Our hero, on the other hand, is not conflicted at all.  Raine has completely dehumanized the enemy.  His only mission is to kill Nazis.  He sees the world in black and white, good vs. Nazi.  He doesn’t care for rules.  He experiences no remorse.  He has no desire for diplomacy.  We  never see him being kind.  We hear nothing of his family.  There is nothing to humanize him.  Tarantino relies solely on the likability of Brad Pitt and our willingness to see the world in the same good vs. Nazi terms he does.

The Audience is Put Under the Microscope

Tarantino rubs our willingness to overlook people’s humanity in our faces.  A theater full of Nazis watch their hero as he kills person after person.  The audience cheers and laughs at the carnage.  We are disgusted by them.  And while they sit in the theater cheering, we do the same.

We cheer our heroes as they execute a terrorist plot to kill a theater full of people, not just soldiers but wives and girlfriends and anyone else.  Not only are we, the audience, laughing at merciless violence, we are rooting for men with bombs strapped to their bodies.  We are rooting for suicide bombers.

And when Shosanna shows a moment of empathy, when she recognizes the anguish of her enemy, it is a fatal mistake.  We accept, even expect, that the people who show the least amount of humanity survive, while those who show a moment of it perish.

It Asks Important Questions

It would be a mistake to read too much into the movie.  We won’t ever know what the maker’s intent was.  Still, the movie left me asking questions:

• Why do we accept simplistic answers?
• Why is it so easy to dehumanize people?
• Why do we accept the idea that recognizing others humanity is dangerous?
• Is it better to become a monster and live or keep your humanity and die?
• Why do the most peace loving of us cheer violence?
• Are any group of people more or less capable of violence?
• Does “terrorism” depend on which side you’re on?
• If we had been in Germany, would we have cheered on the soldier?  (Well, I would have been in a concentration camp, but those of you who aren’t Jewish, Gay, Black, Gypsy, disabled….  Do I know anyone who isn’t Jewish, Gay, Black, Gypsy, disabled…?)
• How much of our support for the Israeli government depends on the myth that Jews aren’t capable of grotesque violence?