I send this reminder of our commercialized
Turkey Day celebration, based on myths regarding the Pilgrims and the Native
American Indians, and the subsequent exploitation and destruction of American
Indian nations.
Legends say colonists were warmly welcomed, and American Indians appreciated their presence. Over time, actual events of those fateful days have been rewritten many times, each time suggesting the virtues of colonization, commercialization, and corruption, from the point of view of the colonizers. Missing, of course, are the related truths: “exploitation, destruction, and genocide.”
Some have even proposed “Turkey” replace the
Bald Eagle as our national bird, in honor of the myths of Pilgrim and American
Indian celebration. White-farmed turkey, of course. How easily we fall into the
propaganda!
Change is in the air! Amidst the agonizing
recognition and struggles against “genocide,” Native American Indian voices
have come together with a profound and an undeniable power at “Standing Rock”
and other emerging abusive locations. If there is to be another “Bury My Heart at Wounded
Knee,” it will not be without a gathering of Native American Indian
resistance.
Native American Indian voices are now joined
by the voices of people of all ethnic, racial, and cultural groups, conscious
of the suffering Native American Indians have had to endure.
I do not wish to romanticize the ensuing struggles between colonists, pioneers, homesteaders, cowboys, and Native American Indians. The violence was appalling for all sides. But in the end, Native American Indians have been the lasting victims!
Victims they will be no longer! No more
myths, no more cowboy and Indian shootings, no more blue-clad horse-soldiers,
to the rescue, bugles blowing, sabers drawn, rifles against arrows; no more
forts, no more sinister half-breeds, no more drunken Indians hooked on
firewater, no more passive squaws, no more White-man schools shaming and
traumatizing students, invalidating their heritage and being! No more! Never again! Not in my house!
Colonization cannot be undone! Colonization
decimated Native American Indian populations across the land. It was, in every
sense of the word, genocide! Through the uses of infectious disease,
relocation, tragic marches, blatant murder, massacres, and treacherous compacts
ands promises, Native American Indians now find themselves victims once again
to a government willing to continue the assault upon their lives, their life-affirming
culture, traditions, and identity.
“Wounded Knee”
will be replaced by “Standing Rock!” Not as a tragic location, but as an
assertion and recovery of identity. The United States government must apologize
and withdraw the 3.7 billion-dollar Dakota Access Oil Pipeline routes. Canada must also
agree human rights “trump” oil! Oil pipelines must be re-routed because of
their disastrous risks to polluting the Missouri River:
“Native American Indian Lives Matter!” Already more than 200 oil spills have
already occurred. Genocides stop here today!
I visited the Pine Tree Sioux (Lakotah) Reservation years ago! I was
stunned by what I saw! I was stunned by the words of government officials when
I questioned the obvious poverty and destruction. I recognized I had
contributed to the entire tragedy as I played cowboys and Indians in my
childhood. I bought into the John Wayne mentality! I always took the part of the Indians, and I
always lost. Toy rifles against bows and
arrows! I recall the words legitimizing our play: “Whiteman speaks with forked tongue. “Soon Iron Horse come! Kill many
buffalo! My people will pass.”
Childhood play, modeling TV and movies, affirming
and endorsing a harsh and enduring reality for a time. No longer! This
destructive affront to American Indians across the land must end.
The Society of American Indian Psychologists (SIP), under leadership of Art Blume and colleagues have challenged the American Psychological Association administration to speak out against the APA Code of Ethics and its implication for abuse. The choice is clear and unambiguous! Standing-Rock Water Protectors are just in protest!
How blind can anyone
be to their request? Water is sacred in so many ways, and yet we despoil it and
toxic it with impunity and abandon. But more than “water” is at stake. For a people and a government that have
abused Native American Indian rights and survival for more hundreds of years,
there are the issues of dignity, integrity, and morality. There are issues of
priorities: consumerism, materialism, commodification, greed, profit,
pollution, crime, corruption, violence.
I say: Help the
Native American Indians win when cowboys and Indians is played. Read the
plaque. Ring the bells! It’s a new day! And we are moving on!
We need to
understand the spark of divinity within human beings who put their lives at
risk to benefit others. Of particular interest are those who commit acts of
heroism for which they will not be honored and may even be vilified, despised
and ostracized.
Especially on
Veterans Day, helicopter reconnaissance pilot Hugh Thompson, Jr. and his
crew come to mind. Their chopper was hovering over My Lai on March 16, 1968
when they saw what looked like a massacre taking place. Civilians – old men,
women, even children, were being herded into a ditch and shot. Thompson
brought down the chopper and warned U. S. soldiers that if they didn’t stop
shooting civilians, he would turn his guns on them. Strangely, there wasn’t
much screaming coming from the victims. Later it was learned that their tongues
had been cut out to prevent screams. Pregnant women had been bayonetted
through the belly. The lucky ones, according to Thompson, were those “who took
a round right through the brain. There was a lot of evil.” This is not to
say that the perpetrators of these war crimes weren’t victims themselves. A
full account of the massacre can be found in “The Forgotten Hero of My Lai: The
Hugh Thompson Story,’” by Trent Angers.
Thompson
reported the incident in a tearful rage when he returned to headquarters. When
charges were brought against 26 officers and enlisted soldiers, including
William Calley and Ernest Medina, he testified against them. They were
acquitted or pardoned.
Thompson was
shunned and condemned by the military, the government and the public for his
whistleblowing. Congressman Mendel Rivers (D-S.C.) actually said Thompson was
the only person at My Lai who should be punished and unsuccessfully tried to
have him court- marshaled for turning his guns on fellow soldiers. People made
death threats and left mutilated animals on his porch. Subsequent to My Lai he
suffered post traumatic stress, bouts of alcoholism and severe nightmare
disorder. He was married and divorced several times. Although the
military abandoned him for telling the truth, he did not abandon the military,
serving until 1983. He died in 2006 at age 62 with his surviving crew member
Lawrence Colburn at his side.
Anyone who
thinks whistleblowing is an easy road is mistaken. Thompson told the Associated
Press in 2004, “Don’t do the right thing looking for a reward, because it might
not come.” Chelsea Manning, who was obligated by law under the Geneva
Convention to report the murder of civilians gunned down by a U. S. Apache
helicopter crew as they attempted to remove the dead and injured from an Iraqi
street, was imprisoned in August 2013 for reporting the war crime as he was
required to do. By doing so, according to the military, he was “disrupting good
order and discipline” and “discrediting the armed forces.” Prosecutors did not
present any evidence that the leaks caused harm to anyone. She served more than
seven years of a 35-year sentence.
In 1998, 30
years after the My Lai massacre, Thompson and his crew were awarded the
Soldier’s Medal, the highest award for bravery not involving contact with the
enemy. In 1999 Thompson and Colburn received the Peace Abbey Courage of
Conscience Award.
Why did Thompson
continue to speak out instead of going along with the subsequent coverup? At
least two factors would seem to have influenced his behavior. His grandmother
was a full-blooded Cherokee, whose ancestors were victims of ethnic cleansing
under the Indian Removal Act. He was raised an Episcopalian in a working class
family that condemned ethnic discrimination and aided minorities within the
community.
My Lai became a
symbol for everything wrong with our presence in Vietnam when Army veteran Ron
Ridenhour and Dispatch News Service reporter Seymour Hersh broke the story.
Because My Lai is the only massacre from the Vietnam era to gain wide notice,
it is thought to be an anomaly. It wasn’t. Hersh reports that, on a recent
trip to Vietnam, he learned that massacres of civilians like the one that took
place at My Lai were not unusual.
A study by the International Committee of the Red Cross reports that there have been 10 civilian deaths for every soldier death in wars fought since the mid-20th century. Practically speaking, civilians have become the enemy. Hugh Thompson reached out to enemy civilians in recognition that we are all one.
Note from Kathie MM: Originally posted on the Boca Beacon by Marcy Shortuse. Republished with permission. And thanks to Stefan Schindler for bringing this fine article to my attention.
Pegean says, “It makes me want to gag! See how he blames the victims? See how he tries to make it sound as if abandoning people who helped you (and their families) is a good thing? What would youcall that behavior?
Talk to the totalitarian hand:While Julian Assange rots in prison for publishing journalism, clinical psychologist Dr Lissa Johnson explains some of the science behind how we got here, and also how we push back.
6 Aug 2019 – On Sunday June 28th 2019, Western democracy arrived at an historic crossroads. Moving forward from this day, citizens of Western nations will head down one of two paths.
The first path leads towards genuine democracies, wherein governments are accountable to the publics they govern, and publics have a right to know what leaders do in their name. It is a path along which a free press fosters an informed electorate, capable of making informed decisions at election time. Such principles are not only fundamental prerequisites for democracy, but essential protections against government abuses of all kinds.
The second path heads down totalitarian terrain, currently being blazed by the Trump administration, wherein governments decide who is free to speak and who is not, including who is a ‘journalist’ and who is not, by granting themselves the power to silence those who make them look bad. This pathway not only spells death to democracy and the public’s right to know, it is a recipe for state-sanctioned abuse.
As the Science of Human Rights Coalition warns in a document titled Human Rights 101, “Unless citizens want their governments to support human rights, government leaders rarely will do so… [Human rights principles] carry no weight unless the people know them, unless the people understand them, unless the people demand that they be lived.”
People kept in the dark about their government’s activities, however, are in no position to demand anything of their governments at all, as political philosopher Hannah Arendt reminds us. Down the pathway of governmental secrecy, citizens can kiss goodbye not only to respect for human rights, but to holding their leaders accountable over any issue in which the interests of the elites and the majority clash, whether fossil fuels, climate emergency, racial and economic inequality and injustice, endless wars, mass surveillance or any other public interest matter one might care to name.
Judicial Harassment, Public Mobbing and Holding Governments to Account
But getting back to Sunday, June 28th 2019; what happened that placed Western societies at such a crossroads, faced with a choice between democracy and autocracy, freedom and tyranny, knowing and not knowing, light and dark?
On that day, the UN Special Rapporteur on torture, Nils Melzer, published letters to four ostensibly democratic states, detailing the ways in which those states have joined forces to mob, persecute, silence, harass, defame and psychologically torture a publisher of journalism.
Importantly, the states concerned have targeted the publisher in question not for causing any harm nor publishing misleading content. Quite the reverse. The publisher under attack stands out amongst his peers for his unblemished record of 100 per cent accuracy. Which makes that publisher Julian Assange.
WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange is being mobbed not for perpetrating harm or deception, but for making powerful leaders look bad. By publishing the truth about them.
In democracies founded on informed electorates, such journalistic activity is a welcome development. In totalitarian states, however, where powerbrokers’ interests reign supreme, it is not.
The Cambridge Dictionary defines totalitarianism as “a politicalsystem in which those in power have complete control and do not allow people freedom to oppose them”. A political system in which a publisher languishes in Belmarsh Supermax for journalism would be an example.
In fact, Pulitzer Prize winning author Chris Hedges has long argued that Western societies are undergoing a gradual transformation from democracies to corporate totalitarian states, through a slow motion corporate coup d’etat, in which power is seized not by a demagogue but by “the faceless anonymity of the corporate state.” A Princeton study in 2014 lent empirical weight to that view.
The violently oppressive reaction of powerful state-corporate interests to the publishing activities of Julian Assange appears to illustrate Hedges’ point even more powerfully still.
As punishment for keeping the world’s population so accurately informed about the inner workings of power, Nils Melzer reports that Julian Assange is not only incarcerated in Belmarsh prison, but has suffered nearly a decade of “prolonged, involuntary and arbitrary detention… [along with]sustained and unrestrained public mobbing, intimidation and defamation… [ranging from]judicial harassment… [to]open threats and instigation of violence, [including]repeated calls for his assassination or murder.”
Professor of international law Nils Melzer has succinctly pointed out that none of this has anything to do with facing ‘Swedish Justice’. Melzer explains that the Swedish investigation surrounding Julian Assange has been, from the start, “a relentless campaign of judicial persecution… [involving]abuse of the judicial system in order to try to extradite [Julian Assange] to the US”.
Most recently, that judicial persecution has entailed locking Julian Assange in Belmarsh Prison for 50 weeks over the pseudo-legal concoction of defunct bail infringement. Even the Secretary General of the Swedish Bar Association has called the Swedish investigation “deplorable”, fearing that it has “damaged the reputation of the Swedish judicial system”.
Altogether, Professor Melzer’s letters, which constitute his final report, lay the responsibility for the near decade-long campaign of persecution and psychological torture of Julian Assange squarely at the feet of the UK, the US, Sweden and Ecuador. In his letters to those four states, Melzer notified each government of their culpability via “direct perpetration or, as the case may be, through instigation, consent, or acquiescence, as well as through failure to prevent” the various forms of persecution described.
In addition to detailing the states’ culpability, Professor Melzer requested a response from each state outlining their plans to investigate the allegations in his final report, and to protect Julian Assange from further harm, as well as ensuring redress for harms caused to date. In the event that no such measures were forthcoming, Professor Melzer asked the states to “explain how this is compatible with [their]human rights obligations”.
Posted on the website of the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, alongside Nils Melzer’s letters, are the states’ replies. Before examining those replies and their implications for Western democracies, it is worth briefly revisiting how and why the persecution of Julian Assange began.
A Tender Eye That Brought Humanity to a Vicious War
In 2007, two Reuters employees set out on assignment in Baghdad. They were Namir Noor-Eldeen, a 22-year-old photo-journalist and his driver, Saeed Chmagh, 40, a father of four.
He was “one of the most beloved members of the Reuters staff, a cheerful, funny, smart young man who loved motorcycles” a colleague recalled. A former Reuters Chief Photographer in Iraq described Namir as an “editor’s dream… [whose]quick smile and energy never faded…it’s very, very sad to know I’ll never get one of his bear-hug greetings again.”
While on assignment in Baghdad, after walking calmly across an open square, the two unarmed men found themselves showered with gunfire, raining down from a US Apache helicopter above. Namir’s body was “riddled with bullet holes”, killing him instantly. His wounded colleague, Saeed, attempted to drag himself on his stomach to safety, out of the helicopter’s sights.
As Saeed crawled away, two young children, aged five and ten, arrived on the scene in a van. Their father and his friends, all unarmed, stopped to rescue Saeed from the carnage, dragging him into their vehicle. The man’s children sat and watched as their father was ripped apart by gunfire, unleashed from the helicopter above, while being strafed by bullets themselves. As they cried and bled, surrounded by death, the children had no-one to cradle them through their pain, their father lying lifeless on the ground.
“Look at those dead bastards,” one of the soldiers gloated. “Nice.”
Three years later, in 2010, for posting a leaked video of the massacre, offering the world a human glimpse of the war on Iraq, as well as exposing tens of thousands of other civilian killings in Iraq and Afghanistan, Julian Assange was placed on an FBI manhunting target list.
A whole-of-government operation was launched against him, replete with a ‘war room’ under the direction of a Brigadier General, involving a “suite of government offices not far from the Pentagon”, where “120 intelligence analysts, FBI agents, and others” worked “24 hours a day, seven days a week”, targeting WikiLeaks.
In 2010 Barack Obama even urged foreign allies to file criminal charges against Julian Assange, just weeks before the legally “deplorable” Swedish investigation was instigated. As if that weren’t enough effort to silence a journalist, a grand jury was also convened, where Julian Assange now faces 17 counts under the Espionage Act and 175 years in US prison, for reporting on Namir and Saeed’s deaths, the deaths of their rescuers, and the trauma of the children who watched from a van.
For turning these carefully dehumanised foreigners into living breathing human beings, bringing humanity to a vicious war just as Namir had done, Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning have been made to pay. As punishment, both have suffered years of detention and both have suffered torture, while those responsible for the killings have walked free.
Nils Melzer warns, “When you prosecute a whistleblower and a journalist for exposing war crimes and corruption, you have to be very careful, because if you don’t prosecute the war crimes, then clearly you don’t have equality before the law… then prosecution becomes persecution.”
A Line in the Sand
The murderous acts that WikiLeaks exposed in 2010 are the very kind of acts that the US-led persecution of Julian Assange has served to bolster and protect, along with a raft of other state-corporate crime and abuse such as torture, exploitation of vulnerable populations, for instance in Haiti and the Chagos Islands, CIA domestic spying tools, predatory pro-corporate deals such as the TPP, environmental abuses by oil and mining companies, and on and on and on.
Not only has the near-decade long campaign of mobbing, judicial harassment and vilification of Julian Assange served to distract from these state-corporate abuses and crimes, creating a climate of impunity for the perpetrators, it is now poised to create a precedent of legal impunity, via the Espionage Act charges.
As numerous leading legal minds and even establishment media have warned, the Espionage Act prosecution awaiting Julian Assange in the United States stands to criminalise journalism worldwide, green-lighting cross-border pursuit of publishers around the globe. The legal upshot will be that states can get away with murder simply by slapping Espionage charges on those who expose their crimes. Or, alternatively, by torturing them to death, whichever comes first in the Assange precedent.
Either way, Nils Melzer has expressed his grave concern that “US authorities intend to make an ‘example’ of [Julian Assange], in order to punish him personally, but also to deter others who may be tempted to engage in similar activities.” Similar activities being holding power to account by publishing truthful material in the public interest, a cherished bedrock of democracy and human rights.
WikiLeaks publisher, Julian Assange, being dragged from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London in April 2019.
Chris Hedges writes that the persecution of Julian Assange represents not only a sharp downhill turn on the corporate totalitarian slide, but “the destruction of all protection of the rule of law”.
Speaking at a rally for Julian Assange in Sydney, Mike Head, of the World Socialist Website, adds that it is “not just about the past crimes [that Julian Assange]has exposed. It’s also a warning of the future crimes being prepared”.
In short, the implications of Nils Melzer’s letters to the US, the UK, Sweden and Ecuador could not be more serious nor more dire.
WikiLeaks’ editor Kristinn Hrafnsson says, “A line has been drawn in the sand and either you are going to support Julian and fight this retribution and those indictments, or you basically step back and the lights will go out. That’s how serious it is.”
The UN Rapporteur on Torture’s letters stand on that line in the sand, by demanding that the states involved publicly confirm where they intend to head from here: down the path of lights-out for rule of law and democratic freedoms, or down the path of democracy and human rights?
Note from KMM: In the next post, Dr. Johnson demonstrates the role of moral disengagement in the torture of Julian Assange, and the role of the corporate media in the process. Article originally published by Transcend Media Services, September 16, 2019.