November 2016 – Engaging Peace

THE STANDING ROCK PROTEST: GENOCIDE, ECOCIDE, & CHANGE, Part 3

Posted on November 30, 2016November 30, 2016 by kathiemm

by Anthony J. Marsella, November 26, 2016

JUSTICE VERSUS THE POLITICAL-ELITE SYSTEM

Standing Rock is more than a protest of an indigenous population struggling to claim and reclaim its rights to exist. It is a confrontation between good and evil! Harsh words? No! Constructing an oil pipeline across Native American Indian lands will have tragic consequences for people, land, and nation. “Fracked” oil and tar-sands oil from Canada will be transported across thousands of miles, a portion transported under the Missouri River and tributaries, all of it at risk of pipeline ruptures from faulty technology and protests. And when a rupture occurs . . . .

Where are the self-righteous voices who supported either of the corrupt political parties in our election; these political parties made a mockery of governance, the USA Constitution and our treasured Bill of Rights! Neither of you were respected or wanted. The events at Standing Rock happened on your watch! Do you get it? You made it happen! You, the corporate-government-military complex! Standing Rock is about justice! Standing Rock is about retribution. Standing Rock is about resurrection! Woe to you elite, choosing to demean Standing Rock’s consequences.

To the current USA political elites, cabals, and global-order members (e.g., Davos Factions, Bilderbergs, National Banks), I say, how dare you claim moral authority? How dare you claim wisdom as you engage in self interests

Standing Rock and the Dakota Pipeline happened on your watch. You did nothing! We were all betrayed by your endless condemnations of political opponents, attacking one another with foolish blather. You are the opponents of life! You have no right to impose your will and interests upon the world’s citizens. Your concentration of wealth, power, and position, carefully calculated to insure exploitation is a crime!

Will “Big Oil” fund your libraries, philanthropies, and luxurious houses? Will you gather at Davos, Bilderberg, Bohemian Grove, Skull & Bone reunions, and celebrity events honoring one another? Will any of you gather at Standing Rock, protest signs in your hands, taking blows from truncheons and pepper spray? No! Because you benefits from the oppression occurring at Standing Rock!

Standing Rock will endure with honor and dignity. It will be recalled a hundred years from now, if our nation and our land exist. Standing Rock will be treasured by those who saw through the lies of the political elite and their sycophants. Historians will write Standing Rock was the pivotal point in USA history when a few Native American Indians and their supporters, stood against the corporate-government-military Leviathan, claiming justice, denying genocidal efforts to eliminate them, and ultimately, at great cost, won a victory for humanity.

The actions of the political elite, their lies, propaganda, deceit, betrayal, smiling faces, cannot escape history’s judgment. You had the opportunity, and you chose betrayal. None of your faces will be carved on Mount Rushmore. Your libraries will be maintained by your minions, but your stature will be demeaned because you represented special interests at the cost of the people of the world. Your money can no longer guarantee your image. You could have helped but you did not!

AN UNFOLDING STORY . . .

And so, the Standing Rock protest will continue until a wave of public criticism and outrage rises across the land in support of Standing Rock as more than a specific event, but in support of the timeless values of justice, peace, honor, dignity, and morality. Standing Rock will enter history books and classrooms as an example of “people power,” but more important it will enter history books, classrooms, board rooms, think tanks, as an ignored iconic event that changed the course of USA history.

Anthony J. Marsella, Ph.D., a member of the TRANSCEND Network, is a past president of Psychologists for Social Responsibility, emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Hawaii, and past director of the World Health Organization Psychiatric Research Center in Honolulu. He is known nationally and internationally as a pioneer figure in the study of culture and psychopathology who challenged the ethnocentrism and racial biases of many assumptions, theories, and practices in psychology and psychiatry. In more recent years, he has been writing and lecturing on peace and social justice. He has published 15 edited books, and more than 250 articles, chapters, book reviews, and popular pieces. He can be reached at marsella@hawaii.edu.

THE STANDING ROCK PROTEST: GENOCIDE, ECOCIDE, & CHANGE, Part 2

Posted on November 29, 2016 by kathiemm

An 1899 chromolithograph of U.S. cavalry pursuing American Indians, artist unknown. Source: Werner Company, Akron, Ohio. Published before 1923. In the public domain.

by Anthony J. Marsella

PATHWAYS TO GENOCIDE

I do not know what actions the Trump presidential administration will take regarding the energy-genocide-ecocide tradeoff in which “Oil” always seems to win. I do know, however, what actions the existing Obama administration has taken! Oil trumps people! Oil trumps pollution! Oil trumps reason! It is ecocide! All aspects of nature are at risk: water, air, land, animals, and people. It is genocide! Do we forget the man-made disasters associated with oil production? Imagine the consequences of a pipeline rupture for the upper Missouri River! Remember! It is lawys after fact apologies and inadequate compensations. Too late!

Standing Rock now is symbolic with “cide.” It is ecocide, genocide, suicide, and nationcide. (See www.fun-with-words.com, for a list of hundreds of words ending in “cide.”) In all instances, “cide” refers to the act of killing.

Yes, it is Genocide! This traumatic frightening term has been commandeered by so many others across the world, justified in all instances, but now reluctantly assigned to the destruction, violence, and war characterizing centuries of abuse against the Native American Indians. It is a final battle, apocryphal in proportion.

Genocide　is a term coined in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin　to describe the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group. It is defined in Article 2 of the　 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide　(CPPCG) of 1948 as “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the groups conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. (Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Note: “ethnical”, although unusual, is found in several dictionaries) (Wikipedia Website).

The pathways to Genocide are many; each pathway carries with it the potential for destruction of a people and a way-of-life. The push is always the same! “You are either with us or against us,” demonic leaders cry as they seek total control. Homogenization is sought; a world of total agreement and conformity to a catastrophic vision in which protests must be subdued, even if it requires the destruction of lives and ways-of-living.

Anthony J. Marsella, Ph.D., a member of the TRANSCEND Network, is a past president of Psychologists for Social Responsibility, emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Hawaii, and past director of the World Health Organization Psychiatric Research Center in Honolulu. He is known nationally and internationally as a pioneer figure in the study of culture and psychopathology who challenged the ethnocentrism and racial biases of many assumptions, theories, and practices in psychology and psychiatry. In more recent years, he has been writing and lecturing on peace and social justice. He has published 15 edited books, and more than 250 articles, chapters, book reviews, and popular pieces. He can be reached at marsella@hawaii.edu.

THE UNITED STATES OF AMNESIA, Part 2

Posted on November 28, 2016November 29, 2016 by kathiemm

Professor Nguyen Thi Ngoc Phuong, at Tu Du Obstetrics and Gynecology Hospital is pictured with a group of handicapped children, most of them victims of Agent Orange. Author: Alexis Duclos. In the public domain.

by Stefan Schindler

Anti-factoid American history, continued …

5 – Vietnam was America’s ally in World War Two. After Japan’s defeat, Vietnam persistently sought American friendship. Vietnam was, briefly, an independent and united country with a newly written constitution and plans for democratic elections. If post-war America was paranoid about Chinese communist expansion into Southeast Asia, no better ally could be had than the Vietnamese, who had fought the Chinese for two thousand years. Yet, shortly after Japan’s surrender, President Truman helped the French do to the Vietnamese what the Nazis had just done to them.

6 – Note the moral contradiction in saying that German, Italian, and Japanese imperialism is not OK, but that British, French, and American imperialism is just fine. Most American citizens remain oblivious to the ethical absurdity of presidents saying for decades that we have to support dictatorships to make the world safe for democracy.

7 – The Eisenhower Administration, in direct violation of the Constitution, promoted the insertion of “In God We Trust” on America’s coins. The Eisenhower Administration walked out of the Geneva Peace Conference of 1954 after the Vietnamese won their eight-year war against the French; then the U.S. undermined the 1956 Vietnamese democratic election guaranteed by the Conference, installing in a mostly Buddhist “South Vietnam,” an American financed Catholic puppet dictator who immediately began killing and imprisoning those Vietnamese who fought the eight-year war of independence – 1946 to 1954 – against the French.

8 – The Eisenhower Administration overthrew social democracy in Iran in 1953, supporting a subsequent, 26-year dictatorship that profoundly contributed to Middle Eastern hatred of America. Eisenhower’s CIA did same in Guatemala in 1954.

9 – Nelson Mandela spent 26 years in a South African prison thanks to the Central Intelligence Agency’s informing the South African apartheid government of Mandela’s whereabouts, leading to his arrest and imprisonment.

10 – After the assassination of President Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson had a full two months to respond favorably to a South Vietnamese call for peace and the withdrawal of America’s military. Instead of making peace possible, Lyndon Johnson did what President Kennedy never did: he launched a full scale war, during which, in violation of international law, and constituting an indisputable war crime, America sprayed 20 million tons of Agent Orange across the Vietnamese landscape, and dropped more bombs on Vietnam than all the bombs dropped everywhere in World War Two.

Co-founder of The National Registry for Conscientious Objection, a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, a recipient of The Boston Baha’i Peace Award, and a Trustee of The Life Experience School and Peace Abbey Foundation, Dr. Schindler received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Boston College, worked one summer in a nature preserve, lived in a Zen temple for a year, did the pilot’s voice in a claymation video of St. Exupery’s The Little Prince, acted in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” and performed as a musical poet in Philadelphia, Boston, and New York City. He also wrote The Peace Abbey Courage of Conscience Awards for Howard Zinn and John Lennon. He is now semi-retired and living in Salem, Massachusetts.

THE STANDING ROCK PROTEST: Part 1

Posted on November 25, 2016November 29, 2016 by kathiemm

By Anthony J. Marsella

I have two major purposes in writing this commentary:

To call attention to the national media’s intentional lack of coverage to the Standing Rock protests. This lack of coverage is an egregious affront and insult to Native American Indians and their supporters, and also to indigenous peoples everywhere caught in struggles against oppression and exploitation by the national and global political elite and cabal: corporate-governments-military. We are witnessing Genocide, Ecocide, and Nationcide! And still the silence!

2. To address the tragic state of our nation’s alleged commitments to our sacred documents enshrining human rights, participatory governance, equality, and transparency in decisions and policies.

STANDING ROCK: AN ICONIC EVENT DENIED VISIBILITY

Amid the preoccupation with Donald Trump’s election regrets and elation, and his ascendancy to the power and privilege of the USA presidency, there is a conspicuous absence of attention to the what may be the most critical struggle for human rights and human dignity in the United States since the civil rights protests of African American and Women’s Rights born in the 1950s and continuing today.

Even within the context of the continuing struggles for equality and human rights of our times, the unfolding events at Standing Rock promise to dwarf past struggles in their ultimate consequences for revealing the egregious realities of corporate dominance, federal and state government betrayal, and militaristic control and aggression of USA society today.

Protests at Standing Rock by Native American Indians and supporters of law, justice, and conscience, are conspicuously absent from front-page coverage and editorials, and also from TV news shows. Newspaper headlines and opening news coverage stories should be blaring the events at Standing Rock, the origins, historic course, genocidal process, promoted and sustained by corporate-government-military cabal complicity in the wanton destruction of the Native American Indian land, traditions, and people. It happened and is happening on your watch!

The media coverage should be relentless, and not be left to independent media sources struggling to survive financially as national media stocks soar! This is a national tragedy, and is far more important to our national identity and survival then the vast majority of topics covered. Shame on you New York Times! Shame on you Washington Post! You reveal your ownership and control!

The national political elite have spoken; once again human life and dignity will be sacrificed on the altar of greed and dominance; once again, the concentration of wealth, power, and position in the hands of a few, rule. Must I list the names of the billionaires, political figures, and military luminaries, we have elevated to positions of respect and admiration? Must I cite the award celebrations attempting to establish “icons” to be followed as admirable examples of the status quo? Must I list the celebrities who prance before the media in expensive couture, baring bodies, guarding conscience, and protecting image? It happened, and is happening, on your watch. Native American Indians are dying once again in a struggle for their inalienable rights. Where are you?

Anthony J. Marsella, Ph.D., a member of the TRANSCEND Network, is a past president of Psychologists for Social Responsibility, emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Hawaii, and past director of the World Health Organization Psychiatric Research Center in Honolulu. He is known nationally and internationally as a pioneer figure in the study of culture and psychopathology who challenged the ethnocentrism and racial biases of many assumptions, theories, and practices in psychology and psychiatry. In more recent years, he has been writing and lecturing on peace and social justice. He has published 15 edited books, and more than 250 articles, chapters, book reviews, and popular pieces. He can be reached at marsella@hawaii.edu.