WARS ABROAD, WARS AT HOME

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WARS ABROAD, WARS AT HOME

 

Racist Massacre in Charlestown

The murders of African-American worshippers took place in an historic church with roots in the struggle against slavery and in the still-unfinished mission to achieve equality in our country. These Are The Victims Of The Charleston Church Shooting.

 

The massacre also illustrates the connectedness of racist violence at home with the wars and US support for oppressions abroad.  The killer proudly displayed the symbols of Apartheid South Africa and colonial Rhodesia.  During the 1980’s, it was a core mission of the US reactionaries and racists to support those regimes – along with backing rightwing terrorists in Central America and Southern Africa. (The US Congress eventually passed sanctions against South Africa over the veto of Pres. Ronald Reagan.) 

 

Not incidentally, Israel – which South Africans today call an Apartheid State – was the principle arms supplier to the white government in Pretoria. Just last week, a historic Catholic church on the Sea of Galilee was torched by Jewish religious extremists – and years before a US-born Israeli Baruch Goldstein massacred 29 worshippers at the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron.  Goldstein is venerated as a martyr by West Bank settlers.  Meanwhile, Israel has for many years been the largest recipient of US foreign aid and is faithfully shielded by our government from international censure.

 

Racism is embedded in US history and was institutionalized in our very founding Constitution.  It also undergirds US foreign and military policy today. Conversely, the struggle for equality at home has always made links with the drive for justice abroad – going back to the missions of abolitionist Frederick Douglass to Ireland and Haiti and continuing with the solidarity from Ferguson to Palestine (and including Hip-hop music).

 

Murders in Charleston

The daisy chain of racial outrages that have been a constant feature of American life since Trayvon Martin’s death, three years ago, are not a copycat phenomenon soon to fade from our attention.  At the same time, what happened at Emanuel A.M.E. belongs in another terrible lineage—the modern mass shooting. We have, quite likely, found at 110 Calhoun Street, in Charleston, South Carolina, the place where Columbine, Aurora, and Newtown cross with Baltimore, Ferguson, and Sanford. We periodically mourn the deaths of a group of Americans who die at the hands of another armed American. We periodically witness racial injustices that inspire anger in the streets. And sometimes we witness both. This is, quite simply, how we now live.  More

 

Charleston and the Age of Obama

Between 1882 and 1968, the year Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated, three thousand four hundred and forty-six black men, women, and children were lynched in this country—a practice so vicious and frequent that Mark Twain was moved, in 1901, to write an essay called “The United States of Lyncherdom.” … That legacy of extreme cruelty and unpunished murder as a means of exerting political and physical control of African-Americans cannot be far from our minds right now…  No small part of our outrage and grief—particularly the outrage and grief of African-Americans—is the way the Charleston murders are part of a larger picture of American life, in which black men and women, going about their day-to-day lives, have so little confidence in their own safety. One appalling event after another reinforces the sense that the country’s political and law-enforcement institutions do not extend themselves as completely or as fairly as they do for whites.  More

 

This is American terrorism: White supremacy’s brutal, centuries-long campaign of violence

It’s 2015, and Black people in America are under a sustained and lethal terrorist attack… Meanwhile, the same media that declared a deadly shootout between biker gangs in Waco, TX, a “brawl,” has labelled the murder of 9 in Charleston a “shooting.” But this was no mere shooting. It was a cold-blooded, pre-meditated, white supremacist terrorist attack that ended the lives of nine unarmed Black people in the same church co-founded by the revolutionary Denmark Vesey, who sought to overthrow America’s wicked regime of human bondage and chattel slavery.  More

 

Take Down the Confederate Flag—Now

Yet the Confederate battle flag—the flag of Dylann Roof—still flies on the Capitol grounds in Columbia.  The Confederate flag’s defenders often claim it represents “heritage not hate.” I agree—the heritage of White Supremacy was not so much birthed by hate as by the impulse toward plunder… That the Confederate flag is the symbol of white supremacists is evidenced by the very words of those who birthed it: “Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth...”  More

 

Democrats block defense spending bill, amid budget fight

Democrats blocked the fiscal 2016 defense spending bill in the U.S. Senate on Thursday, part of a campaign to force Republicans to start budget negotiations by refusing to allow any appropriations measure to advance to a final vote… Senate Democrats and Republicans are fighting over how to deal with so-called "sequestration" spending caps, especially a Republican-led plan to use $38 billion in special war contingency funds to let the Department of Defense sidestep the mandatory restrictions put in place under the 2011 Budget Control Act… Democrats say other programs, including health research and education, are as important as the military. They dismiss the use of the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) funds a "gimmick" to avoid making difficult decisions. "To have a secure nation, it's more than the people who are in armed services," Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid said. "  More

 

After 25 Years of Losing to Wall Street, Are Left-Wing Democrats Winning?

The rebellion of House Democrats that blocked the president’s trade deal with Asia is more than political humiliation for Barack Obama. It is the start of something far bigger—the revival of the Democratic Party as a born-again advocate for working people and economic justice.  The congressional defeat shocked Washington, where the cynical rule is “to get along, you go along.” Even though the Obama-Boehner-McConnell forces are attempting to resuscitate the “fast track” gimmick, the TPP fiasco will be remembered as a fundamental turn in the road… On the Democratic left, the spirit of reform is resurgent. Both politicians and freelance advocates are advancing strong new ideas for confronting inequality and repairing the damage done to ordinary Americans—and not only by the Republicans. The media usually portray these ruptures as symptoms of dysfunctional politics. But these intramural fights may actually be leading toward something far more positive for the country.  More