International Ideological Musings

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The ‘Meaning’ of 9/11

It’s not what you think
by Justin Raimondo, September 10, 2010


One would think that after nine years at least some of the anger, the horror and shock of the 9/11 terrorist attacks would have dissipated: but no. A glimpse at the headlines, a few days before the somber anniversary, disabuses us of this hopeful notion: a crazed pastor out in the boonies somewhere is burning Korans, and the commander of our forces in Afghanistan feels compelled to respond, as does the President. The proposal to build a Muslim community center blocks from "ground zero" – modeled on Jewish community centers ubiquitous in New York – is met with furious opposition, and the "anti-Islamization" movement spearheaded by bigots takes off, with mosques all over the country under attack. Physical attacks on Muslims, or people perceived as Muslim, escalate: a New York City cabbie is assaulted by a crazed Islamophobe, and people who have lived in this country for the whole of their lives are afraid.

What’s going on? Andrew Sullivan, writing on his popular blog, writes he is "at a loss to understand why so many have reacted so ferociously to this project." After all, Imam Feisel Rauf, the Muslim cleric who wants to build Cordoba House, is a moderate who has condemned Islamic extremism: Rauf was sent by the Bush administration overseas to act as an ambassador of good will to Muslim countries. So where is the ferocity coming from?

To find the answer to this question, we just have to follow the money, and thankfully Ken Vogel and Giovanni Russonello over at Politico have done just that. After detailing the money coming into the Cordoba House project from mainstream donors like the Rockefellers, they write:


[….]


Laura Rozen follows up on her Politico blog, detailing the trail of donations from 2008 990 filings for Chernick’s charitable foundation, the Fairbrook Foundation, listing all the familiar suspects – CAMERA, Horowitz, MEMRI, Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy, the Israeli nationalist "Stand With Us" campus project – and a few less familiar, such as the American Friends of Ateret Cohanim, dedicated to thwarting our stated policy of no more settlements where it counts: in East Jerusalem.

Millions pour into the coffers of these groups, all of which are dedicated to one overriding principle, one goal: advancing Israel’s national interests in the US.

[….]

http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2010/09/09/the-meaning-of-911/

http://antiwar.com/

For fair use only.

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The Other September 11
09/10/09
Written by Eileen Smith

In Santiago, Chile a city of seven million inhabitants, thousands of miles from what we have all been trained to refer to as “ground zero,” a major street that runs through the upper-middle class neighborhood and shopping district of Providencia is named September 11th.

Properly, it is called “Once de Septiembre,” and it might seem to Americans that Chile is recognizing “our” September 11th. In fact, an art display just steps from the presidential palace, and in front of the country’s left-leaning newspaper, La Nación’s headquarters is a small art show, with front newspaper pages depicting the events that transpired on September 11th, 2001. Beside it is a small photo exhibit of peaceful New York, with the towers still standing.

But the story in Chile predates “our” September 11th by nearly two decades.

September 11, 1973 was the day on which the military coup, or golpe militar, changed Chile’s political reality. President Salvador Allende died during the attack on La Moneda, the presidential palace, and this day began nearly 17 years of what is commonly referred to as the bloodiest dictatorship in Latin American history, headed by Augusto Pinochet, with links to the U.S. government.

Over the course of the following nearly two decades, thousands were killed or “disappeared,” and tens of thousands incarcerated. Some 200,000 people went into exile. Many went to Europe if they could, such as current President Michelle Bachelet’s family, which fled to East Germany, or to neighboring Latin American countries such as Peru and Argentina, if they could not.

For those who stayed, many were “internally exiled,” relegated to far-flung zones with little or no contact with their families. Neighborhoods were redrawn and residents of encampments scattered into the periphery of the city, where new, poorly-served areas would be constructed. They exist to this day.

People in Chile blame the dictatorship for some of society’s ills, for the class-based oligarchy that exists in current day Chile, for the rifts between families and lost sons and daughters, parents and grandparents. But among Chilean society also walk Pinochetistas, supporters of the dictatorship and what it stood for, and the relative economic stability they say it has brought. It was these people who mourned Pinochet’s death in December, 2006, holding vigil outside of the Escuela Militar, while smaller anti-Pinochet demonstrations rocked other areas of the city.

Since Pinochet’s death, the demonstrations to which Chileans have become accustomed on September 11th have shrunk in violence and timbre in recent years. Though violent demonstrations take place in some of the poorer, more densely-populated outlying areas, the activity around the Moneda and in more central areas has been tense, but civil for the most part.

People place red carnations and notes to and for the disappeared or killed, around the statue of Salvador Allende, and in other key spots. All the while the police keep crowds moving, keep the teargas poised for launching, and the guanacos, or water cannons, are ready to be fired should the need arise.



About the Author
Matador ID: bearshapedsphere

Eileen Smith is an ex-Brooklynite who's made a life in Santiago, Chile. She's a fluent Spanish speaker who can be found biking, hiking, writing, photographing and/or seeking good coffee and nibbles at most hours of the day. She blogs here.

* What's going on in... Chile? (9 comments)

http://matadorpulse.com/the-other-september-11/

For fair use only.

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Operation Condor

Operation Condor (Spanish: Operación Cóndor, also known as Plan Cóndor, Portuguese: Operaçăo Condor), was a campaign of political repression involving assassination and intelligence operations officially implemented in 1975 by the right-wing dictatorships of the Southern Cone of South America. The program aimed to eradicate alleged socialist and communist influence and ideas and to control active or potential opposition movements against the participating governments.[1] Due to its clandestine nature, the precise number of deaths directly attributable to Operation Condor is highly disputed. It is estimated that a minimum of 60,000 deaths can be attributed to Condor,[2] possibly more.[3][4][5] Condor's key members were the governments in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil. The United States participated in a supervisory capacity, with Ecuador and Peru joining later in more peripheral roles.[6]

[...]

History

On 25 November 1975, leaders of the military intelligence services of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay met, with Manuel Contreras, chief of DINA (the Chilean secret police), in Santiago de Chile, officially creating the Plan Condor.[7] However, cooperation between various security services, in the aim of "eliminating Marxist subversion", previously existed before this meeting and Pinochet's coup d'état. Thus, during the Xth Conference of American Armies held in Caracas on September 3, 1973, Brazilian General Breno Borges Fortes, head of the Brazilian army, proposed to "extend the exchange of information" between various services in order to "struggle against subversion".[8] Furthermore, in March 1974, representatives of the police forces of Chile, Uruguay and Bolivia met with Alberto Villar, deputy chief of the Argentine Federal Police and co-founder of the Triple A death squad, to implement cooperation guidelines in order to destroy the "subversive" threat represented by the presence of thousands of political exilees in Argentina.[8] In August 1974 the corpses of the first victims of Condor, Bolivian refugees, were found in garbage dumps in Buenos Aires.[8]

According to French journalist Marie-Monique Robin, author of Escadrons de la mort, l'école française (2004, Death Squads, The French School), the paternity of Operation Condor is to be attributed to General Rivero, intelligence officer of the Argentine Armed Forces and former student of the French.[9]

Operation Condor, which took place in the context of the Cold War, had the tacit approval of the United States. In 1968, U.S. General Robert W. Porter stated that "In order to facilitate the coordinated employment of internal security forces within and among Latin American countries, we are...endeavoring to foster inter-service and regional cooperation by assisting in the organization of integrated command and control centers; the establishment of common operating procedures; and the conduct of joint and combined training exercises." Condor was one of the fruits of this effort. The targets were officially armed groups (such as the MIR, the Montoneros or the ERP, the Tupamaros, etc.) but in fact included all kinds of political opponents, including their families and others, as reported by the Valech Commission.[citation needed] The Argentine "Dirty War", for example, which resulted in approximatively 30,000 victims according to most estimates, targeted many trade-unionists, relatives of activists, etc.[citation needed]

From 1976 onwards, the Chilean DINA and its Argentine counterpart, SIDE, were its front-line troops. The infamous "death flights", theorized in Argentina by Luis María Mendía — and also used during the Algerian War (1954–1962) by French forces — were widely used, in order to make the corpses, and therefore evidence, disappear.[citation needed] There were also many cases of child abduction.[citation needed]

On December 22, 1992 a significant amount of information about Operation Condor came to light when José Fernández, a Paraguayan judge, visited a police station in the Lambaré suburb of Asunción to look for files on a former political prisoner. Instead he found what became known as the "terror archives", detailing the fates of thousands of Latin Americans secretly kidnapped, tortured and killed by the security services of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay. Some of these countries have since used portions of this archive to prosecute former military officers. The archives counted 50,000 persons murdered, 30,000 "desaparecidos" and 400,000 incarcerated.[10]

According to these archives other countries such as Peru cooperated to varying extents by providing intelligence information in response to requests from the security services of the Southern Cone countries. Even though Peru was not at the secret November 1975 meeting in Santiago de Chile there is evidence of its involvement. For instance, in June 1980, Peru was known to have been collaborating with Argentine agents of 601 Intelligence Battalion in the kidnapping, torture and disappearance of a group of Montoneros living in exile in Lima.[11]

The "terror archives" also revealed Colombia's and Venezuela's greater or lesser degree of cooperation (Luis Posada Carriles was probably at the meeting that ordered Orlando Letelier's car bombing). It has been alleged that a Colombian paramilitary organization known as Alianza Americana Anticomunista may have cooperated with Operation Condor. Brazil signed the agreement later (June 1976), and refused to engage in actions outside Latin America.

Mexico, together with Costa Rica, Canada, France, the U.K., Spain and Sweden received many people fleeing from the terror regimes. Operation Condor officially ended with the ousting of the Argentine dictatorship in 1983, although the killings continued for some time after that[citation needed].

[....]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Condor

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1957-1975: The Vietnam War

1957-1975: The Vietnam War
Submitted by Steven. on Sep 8 2006

Howard Zinn's short history of the war in Vietnam from the beginning of the Communist insurgency in 1957 until the defeat of US and South Vietnamese forces in 1975.

Following the partitioning of Vietnam into the pro-independence Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the North, and the US puppet state the Republic of Vietnam in the South in 1954 (see our short history of Vietnam from 1945 to 1957) elections were due to be held on re-unification. South Vietnam repeatedly blocked the elections to prevent the inevitable Communist victory.

A Communist insurgency erupted in 1957, which was largely kept under control until 1963 when the pro-independence Viet Cong inflicted a large defeat on South Vietnamese forces at the Battle of Ap Bac and full-scale war began to break out. The USSR and China were funding the Viet Cong while the US channelled funds to the South, and in 1965 the US sent combat troops to the region.

Historian Howard Zinn describes the conflict from that point on:

During 1965, over 200,000 American soldiers were sent to South Vietnam, and in 1966, 200,000 more. By early 1968, there were more than 500,000 American troops there, and the US Air Force was dropping bombs at a rate unequalled in history. Tiny glimmerings of the massive human suffering under this bombardment came to the outside world. On June 5, 1965, the New York Times carried a dispatch from Saigon:

As the Communists withdrew from Quangngai last Monday, United States jet bombers pounded the hills into which they were headed. Many Vietnamese - one estimate as high as 500 - were killed by the strikes. The American contention is that they were Vietcong soldiers. But three out of four patients seeking treatment in a Vietnamese hospital afterward for burns from napalm, or jellied gasoline, were village women.

[....]

The CIA in Vietnam, in a program called "Operation Phoenix," secretly, without trial, executed at least 20,000 civilians in South Vietnam who were suspected of being members of the Communist underground. A pro-administration analyst wrote in the journal Foreign Affairs in January 1975: "Although the Phoenix program did undoubtedly kill or incarcerate many innocent civilians, it did also eliminate many members of the Communist infrastructure."

After the war, the release of records of the International Red Cross showed that in South Vietnamese prison camps, where at the height of the war 65,000 to 70,000 people were held and often beaten and tortured, American advisers observed and sometimes participated. The Red Cross observers found continuing, systematic brutality at the two principal Vietnamese POW camps-at Phu Quoc and Qui Nhon, where American advisers were stationed.

By the end of the war, 7 million tons of bombs had been dropped on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia - more than twice the amount of bombs dropped on Europe and Asia in World War II. In addition, poisonous sprays were dropped by planes to destroy trees and any kind of growth - an area the size of the state of Massachusetts was covered with such poison. Vietnamese mothers reported birth defects in their children. Yale biologists, using the same poison (2,4,5,T) on mice, reported defective mice born and said they had no reason to believe the effect on humans was different.

More details of atrocities started to slowly leak out, such as that of the My Lai massacre in which nearly 500 men, women and childred were methodically shot to death in a ditch. Sadly, My Lai was unique only in its details. Journalist Seymour Hersh reported a letter sent by a GI to his family, and published in a local newspaper:

"Dear Mom and Dad:

Today we went on a mission and I am not very proud of myself, my friends, or my country. We burned every hut in sight!

It was a small rural network of villages and the people were incredibly poor. My unit burned and plundered their meagre possessions. Let me try to explain the situation to you.

The huts here are thatched palm leaves. Each one has a dried mud bunker inside. These bunkers are to protect the families. Kind of like air raid shelters.

My unit commanders, however, chose to think that these bunkers are offensive. So every hut we find that has a bunker we are ordered to burn to the ground.

When the ten helicopters landed this morning, in the midst of these huts, and six men jumped out of each "chopper", we were firing the moment we hit the ground. We fired into all the huts we could....

It is then that we burned these huts.... Everyone is crying, begging and praying that we don't separate them and take their husbands and fathers, sons and grandfathers. The women wail and moan.

Then they watch in terror as we burn their homes, personal possessions and food. Yes, we burn all rice and shoot all livestock."

The massacre at My Lai by a company of ordinary soldiers was a small event compared with the plans of high-level military and civilian leaders to visit massive destruction on the civilian population of Vietnam. Assistant Secretary of Defence John McNaughton in early 1966, seeing that large-scale bombing of North Vietnam villages was not producing the desired result, suggested a different strategy. The air strikes on villages, he said, would "create a counter-productive wave of revulsion abroad and at home." He suggested instead:

Destruction of locks and dams, however-if handled right-might . . . offer promise. It should be studied. Such destruction doesn't kill or drown people. By shallow-flooding the rice, it leads after a time to widespread starvation (more than a million?) unless food is provided-which we could offer to do "at the conference table." . . .

The heavy bombings were intended to destroy the will of ordinary Vietnamese to resist, as in the bombings of German and Japanese population centres in World War II - despite President Johnson's public insistence that only "military targets" were being bombed. The government was using language like "one more turn of the screw" to describe bombing. The CIA at one point in 1966 recommended a "bombing program of greater intensity," according to the Pentagon Papers, directed against, in the ClA's words, "the will of the regime as a target system."

[....]

http://libcom.org/history/articles/vietnam-war

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Edwin E. Moďse
Limited War
The Stereotypes

According to popular stereotype, fighting a limited war is a recipe for defeat. Among the most commonly heard generalizations about the Vietnam War is that it was a limited war--that the United States did not devote its full resources to the struggle, imposed very narrow restrictions on the use even of those resources that were made available, and was not trying to achieve a real victory.


[...]

http://www.clemson.edu/caah/history/FacultyPages/EdMoise/limit1.html

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Steve Biko's I Write What I Like

New Introduction to 'I Write What I Like'
Submitted by Abahlali_3 on Mon, 2007-12-03 [University of Abahlali baseMjondolo]

Lewis Gordon, New Introduction to Steve Biko's I Write What I Like

Steve Bantu Biko was a courageous man. This is not to say that he was callously neglectful of the value of life, including his own, but rather he was a man for whom life was so valuable that the fear of death could be transcended. The consequence was that he found a way for word and deed to meet and thus to achieve the urgently political and the genuinely liberating. Brutalized to death in the flesh, he left his words to unfold through three decades in a continued challenge to every human being to carry on the fight for our humanity. Dust though his body has become, his ideas live on.

You hold in your hand, dear reader, a classic work in black political thought and the liberation struggle for all humankind. I mention both to emphasize the paradox offered by blackness as the limit—as the periphery or the margin -in the modern, racist world where whites are treated as the carriers of universal humanity, although the world of color often admits the genuinely universal and often hidden aspects of the modern world: its dirty laundry or, in the formulation of the Latin American philosopher Enrique Dussel, its "underside."

An imbalance of power and perspective is the consequence of white privilege, and it has led to what I call a theodicy of the West. Theodicy is the effort to account for the compatibility of evil or injustice with the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, and good God. If God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good, why doesn't God do something about injustice in the world? White supremacists rationalize modern racism as a consequence of God's favor of white people. Biko challenges such views of God in "Black Souls in White Skins?" in which he writes that the revolt of black youth is the most reasonable response: "The anachronism of a well-meaning God who allows people lo suffer continually under an obviously immoral system is not lost to young blacks who continue to drop out of Church by the hundreds." He calls for a liberating message: ''|The Bible] must rather preach that it is a sin to allow oneself to be oppressed."

God has been replaced in the modern world by an order or system that is to be maintained at all cost. In theological language, such rationalization of modern racism is a form of idolatry because it treats the system as God, although Biko does not put it this way. Racism can be described as a form of idolatry in that it holds one class of people above others as intrinsically superior. This means that it creates a double standard for human membership. On the one hand, if those who are "below" consider themselves human, then those who are "above" are suprahuman or demigods. And if those who are "above" consider themselves human, then those who are "below" are subhuman and closer to animals. This is the relational theory of racism. It enables us to see the problem of normativity that emerges in what Frantz Fanon and subsequently David Theo Goldberg call "racist culture." Those who place all others beneath themselves create a situation in which the assertion of their humanity and their superiority becomes superfluous. They literally are the standpoint of nil reality. This means, then, that racism is fundamentally asymmetrical, and it is this pervasive asymmetry that marks many of the contradictions in efforts from within the racist system to liberate blacks. Biko's trenchant criticisms of unequal power relations bring this argument to the fore.

Much of Biko's energy is devoted to criticizing the liberal in both the condescending white and the idiotic black forms. The black liberal is idiotic because black people lack power in a white-controlled system. The white liberal, on the other hand, operates from the vantage point of having something—perhaps a great deal—to lose in the event of progressive social change. The white liberal's offer to help has an air of condescension because it masks a profound existential investment in the continuation of the racist system. Thus, the white liberal always insists on offering the theoretical or interpretive strategies against antiblack racism, but such strategies often act to preserve the need for white liberals as the most cherished members and overseers of values in their society. In Biko's words: "I am against the superior-inferior white-black stratification that makes the white a perpetual teacher and the black a perpetual pupil (and a pour one at that)."

Biko refuses to be told what to think and what to write. "I write what I like," he declares under the clever pseudonym Frank Talk. The clarity of Frank Talk is a demand for truth. He reveals here the unique, doubled relationship blacks have with European civilizations: blacks face a world of lies in which they are forced to pretend as true that which is false and pretend as false that which is true. This is the insight behind what is perhaps the most powerful trope of black theoretical reflection, introduced by W. E. B. Du Bois more than a century ago —double consciousness. Double consciousness is knowing the particularity of the while world in the face of its enforced claim to universality. Double consciousness is knowing that much of the history offered up to black people—its many interpretations and echoes of while superiority and black inferiority, of white heroism and black cowardice, and even the temporal and geographical location of history's beginning as a step off of the African continent—is a falsehood that blacks are forced to treat as truth in so many countless ways. Double consciousness, in other words, is knowing a lie while living its contradiction.

Double consciousness signals the most famous, and in some circles infamous, concept in Biko's thought: Black Consciousness. The roots of Black Consciousness go back almost two centuries to the thought of Martin Delaney. A proud, African-born black man living in the United States in the nineteenth century, Delaney advanced the view that black people's appreciation of blackness was a key dimension of their eventual liberation.' His argument addresses the force of the signs and symbols through which people are seen and understood in their society. Seeking value in blackness was a message that influenced generations of black intellectuals in the nineteenth century straight through to Du Bois and his nationalist rival Marcus Garvey. The importance of this move, which we may call symbolic resistance, continued through reflections by the philosopher and critic Alain Locke during the Harlem renaissance and into the salon of the Nardal sisters in Paris from which the Negritude movement emerged in Aime Cesaire's coinage and Leopold Senghor's existential ruminations. Writing on Cesaire's return to Martinique in 1939, Fanon described, in his "West Indians and Africans," included in his collection of essays Toward the African Revolution, the shock, the disrupting force, of seeking the good and beautiful in things black: "for the first time a lycee teacher - a man, therefore, who was apparently worthy of respect, was seen to announce quite simply to West Indian society 'that it is fine and good to be a Negro.' To be sure, this created a scandal. It was said al the time that he was a little mad and his colleagues went out of their way to give details as to his supposed ailment."

In the 1960s, New World blacks such as Malcolm X, Charles Hamilton, and Stokley Carmichael (Kwame Ture) took another turn in reconstructing everyone's altitude toward things black through the conjunction of "black" with "power" to allay the costs of associating blackness with impotence. The resulting Black Power movement was a point at which white liberals began their flight from black liberation struggles, a departure which revealed much about the racism that simmered beneath their allegiance: the price of their coalition was continued black impotence and dependence. Biko's Black Consciousness (in which the term "black" includes all people of color) stands on the shoulders of this history. It is grounded in recognition of the high costs of truth. Biko wants the people, all people, to see what was going on in South Africa and all over the world. He wants us to see the connections between South African black townships, the black ghettoes in England, the United States, and Brazil, and the many similar communities in South Asia and the Middle East. Many of us share his insight today when we seek those whom we call "the blacks'" of their society, even if they may not be people of African descent.

Why does Biko focus his criticisms on liberals? He does so because liberals pose as allies of blacks for the sake of securing a liberal future. But is a liberal future best for blacks? Although a "right-wing" future is patently anti-Black one has to offer black people more options from liberalism than simply its being better than the right-wing position. Yet liberalism offers a double-edged sword. On the one hand, there is "conservative" liberalism, where the goal is to be colorblind. The problem with this kind of liberalism is that it changes no structures. Thus, this liberalism expects us to be colorblind in a world of white normativity, a world where whites hold most of the key cards in the deck. Another kind of liberalism focuses on bringing blacks "up" to whites. The problem with this strategy is that it makes whites the standard. Blacks would thus fail here on two counts. First, they would fail simply by not being white. Second, why must it be the case that what whites have achieved constitute the highest standards that humanity can achieve? One luxury of modern racism is that it has enabled many white people to compete only with each other while either eliminating competition from other groups or placing unfair burdens on them. Could many whites survive the many obstacles faced by blacks on a daily basis? Could, with the absence of those tests, they be assured that they are the "better" at what they do than their black competitors?

White supremacy has afforded many whites the luxury of mediocrity — as many blacks discover when they trespass on white, privileged places. Equality with such whites would be a very low human standard indeed. Related to this branch of liberalism is the very popular economic "class" argument, which evades responsibility for antiblack racism by focusing energy on poor whites who also need to be brought "up" to the standard of the white liberal. Here we see the presumption of the while liberal as a middle- or upper-class individual, which entails the rejection of whiteness as an economic commodity. The problem is that the white liberal ultimately doesn't care about the white poor because of the contradiction of wanting to maintain a system that will have poor people and also wanting those who are not poor as their cohorts. In effect, the poor could never be their consorts. Even more, the black poor, if able to escape their poverty, still stand in a white world as a liability. Biko appeals to Black Consciousness as a way of going beyond alt this.

Black Consciousness calls for black realization of the humanity of black folk. It is a transcendence of racial self-hatred. It is also the realization that freedom is a standard much higher than equality, although equality is more just than inequality. He is in concert with William R. Jones, the famed black liberationist and author of Is God a White Racist?, who argued in his retirement speech that the rightful aim of black liberation is, simply put, "freedom, freedom, freedom ..."

Black liberation, the project that emerges as a consequence of Black Consciousness, calls for changing both the material conditions of poverty and the concepts by which such poverty is structured. Four decades ago, Frantz Fanon made the same point thus: liberation requires setting afoot a new humanity, which amounts to saying it requires, literally, changing the world.

A quarter of a century has passed since Biko's murder in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. What has since transpired is a series of events that bring to the fore his words of admonition. Many white liberals in the United States have moved to the right and many white progressives have since become neo-liberal or neo-conservative when it comes to black emancipation projects.

In South Africa, there has been much progress since the days when Biko's prescient and provocative reflections first emerged. Yes, there have been elections, and yes, there is a new constitution for the Republic of South Africa, a constitution with language that is the envy of nearly every progressive community throughout the globe. But it is also true that the route of a liberal solution has been taken, and with it a rejection of the Bikoian thesis—with roots that go all the way back to Toussaint L'Ouverture in Haiti and Frederick Douglass in the United States that freedom is something that can only be taken, not given. With this liberalism came the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), where many South African citizens were encouraged to relate their victimization and others were encouraged to confess, without fear of reprisals from the new state, their roles in the atrocities that occurred during formal apartheid South Africa. Needless to say, most of the people who spoke out were of color (black, colored, or Asian).

Remarkably Christian though this may have been in its obvious theme of confession and forgiveness as conditions of redemption, one sees the devastating spiritual impact of the TRC proceedings all over South Africa. One sees it in the streets, in the parks, in the stores, in the schools, in the offices. One sees it particularly in whites. There are many moral rationalizations that can be made of those proceedings, but in the end, the lived reality is painful and bitter. They reveal how desperately South Africa wanted to prevent white flight; they reveal that the global market is heavily racially inflected; lurking beneath the undercurrents of transition in South Africa is the fear that the economy is the baby that could be lost with the white bath water. Whites thus walk the streets of South Africa as a precious commodity. There are, of course, whites who do not want this to be the case, and there are those who prefer it this way. In either case, whites protect the nation from international abandonment, for precedence shows that whereas a black nation is often simply abandoned by the North American and European powers, a white one—even one that was their former enemy as in The case of Russia—will be given many economic and political safeguards. This reality has a devastating impact on the consciousness of black South Africans. How can the conclusion that black South Africans are expendable be avoided?

Black South Africans have been, as South African philosopher Mabogo P. More has argued, humiliated by the TRC. The rancor of that humiliation permeates the air. Yes, some truth made its way to the public spaces. But public spaces cannot become genuine political spaces without a meeting of human beings on both human and humane terms. Denigration and expendability are poor grounds on which to build a polity and a praxis of freedom.

Like many generations before us, we now face the question of where to go from here. What is our generation's mission? In the United States and South Africa, and all across the globe, the people have been promised much—short of freedom. The world has changed much since the fall of the Soviet Union and the collapse of many Third World governments after periods of decolonization. New conflicts have emerged in which communities are paradoxically more alienated from each other as they are compelled to live closer together. By way of technological development and restructuring of economies worldwide, our planet has become a very small place with a lot of very angry people. It is in times like these that we need to engage our past sages. I am sure that if he were alive today, Steve Bantu Biko would be disappointed but not deterred. Deep down, every liberationist is an optimist. We should learn from the struggles of this young man of a few decades past. Read his thoughts and participate in their continued cry to the present and the future as they call for a consciousness committed to truth in the continued struggle for freedom, freedom, freedom

http://abahlali.org/node/3039

For fair use only.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Biko

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Consciousness_Movement

"Merely by describing yourself as black you have started on a road towards emancipation, you have committed yourself to fight against all forces that seek to use your blackness as a stamp that marks you out as a subservient being." Steve Biko, 1977

"The blacks are tired of standing at the touchlines to witness a game that they should be playing. They want to do things for themselves and all by themselves." Steve Biko, 1977

"Black Consciousness is an attitude of the mind and a way of life, the most positive call to emanate from the black world for a long time. Its essence is the realisation by the black man of the need to rally together with his brothers around the cause of their oppression - the blackness of their skin - and to operate as a group to rid themselves of the shackles that bind them to perpetual servitude." Steve Biko, 1977


"We do not want to be reminded that it is we, the indigenous people, who are poor and exploited in the land of our birth. These are concepts which the Black Consciousness approach wishes to eradicate from the black man's mind before our society is driven to chaos by irresponsible people from Coca-cola and hamburger cultural backgrounds." Steve Biko, 1977

"You are either alive and proud or you are dead, and when you are dead, you can't care anyway." Steve Biko, 1977


"Being black is not a matter of pigmentation - being black is a reflection of a mental attitude." Steve Biko, 25 Oct 1977.


"Even today, we are still accused of racism. This is a mistake. We know that all interracial groups in South Africa are relationships in which whites are superior, blacks inferior. So as a prelude whites must be made to realize that they are only human, not superior. Same with blacks. They must be made to realize that they are also human, not inferior." quoted in the Boston Globe. Steve Biko, 3 May 1976

"The basic tenet of black consciousness is that the black man must reject all value systems that seek to make him a foreigner in the country of his birth and reduce his basic human dignity." evidence given at the SASO/BPC trial. Steve Biko. 1971

"The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed." Speech in Cape Town

"It is better to die for an idea that will live, than to live for an idea that will die." Steve Biko

http://www.southafrica.to/people/Quotes/SteveBiko/SteveBiko.htm

[Risto the Great]

Interesting stuff. To quote myself:

"it is fine and good to be a Macedonian"

[indigen]

Mutabaruka - Any Which Way Freedom (live)
YouTube - Mutabaruka - Any Which Way Freedom (live)


Mutabaruka Lyrics


"Mutabaruka Freedom lyrics"

Any which way ... freedom

Meanwhile yuh dancin to dis musik
And tryin to figure out these lyrics
Meanwhile yuh drinkin and havin fun
Watch out
De revolution a com

Betta be a part a de solution
Dis mite be di final confrontation
Betta awake to dis reality
Dis is no time to loose yuh sanity
Caussse...

By de ballot or de bullet
By de bible or de gun
Any which way freedom mus com

Killin de children in soweato
Turnin el salvador inna one big ghetto
Dumpin waste on sea and lan
Buildin up arsenal of nuclear weapon
Opressin de haitians
Bombin in iran
Troops in afganistan
There mus be
There mus be
A solution... a revolution

By de ballot or de bullet
By de bible or de gun
Any which way freedom mus com

Now yuh kill i today
Yuh cant kill i tomorrow
Today for you... tomorrow your sorrow
Revolution for de poor a change mus com
Either by de bible or by de gun
A change mus com
A change mus com

By de ballot or de bullet
By de bible or de gun
Any which way freedom mus com

Talkin to u leftist and capitalist
Food clothes and shelter have no politics
De almighty creator belongs to no religion
Ideologies wont bring about a solution
Now turn to yuh psalms in de bible
And show me a.k. 47
Com meck wi fight oppression
Com meck wi fine a solution
Com meck wi fight oppression
Com meck wi start a revolution
There mus be
There mus be
A solution...a revolution

By de ballot or de bullet
By de bible or de gun
Any which way freedom mus com

In nicaragua
In el salvador
In south africa

---------------

For fair use only.

[indigen]

Interesting stuff. To quote myself:

"it is fine and good to be a Macedonian"

RTG, father of Macedonian Consciousness!

[julie]

Indigen, thank you for those posts. Biko was an amazing soul
We can substitute Macedonian in italics

macedonian Consciousness is an attitude of the mind and a way of life, the most positive call to emanate from the macedonian world for a long time. Its essence is the realisation by the macedonian man of the need to rally together with his brothers around the cause of their oppression - macedonian freedom - and to operate as a group to rid themselves of the shackles that bind them to perpetual servitude." Steve Biko, 1977

[George S.]

It doesn't matter how we get our freedom & it's not wrong for one to fight for their freedom from the oppressors.Some good point's were raised in this thread.