Mickey Z. -- World News Trust
“How much can you know about yourself
if you've never been in a fight? I don't wanna die without any scars.” --Tyler Durden (Fight Club)
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William Burroughs once wrote about how
we humans -- like the bull in a bullfight -- tend to focus on the elusive
red cape instead of the matador. Indeed, we are all-too-easily distracted
from real targets by an attractive image or illusion.
Of course, some bulls see right through
the red cape, uh, bullshit... and quite justifiably introduce
the matador to the business end of their horns. Before you mistake that
for a lesson and/or inspiration, don’t forget that such bulls are
promptly killed while the matador is mourned as a brave hero.
Here’s my question: If every
bull in every bullfight were to gore every matador, how
long would it be before bullfights were a thing of the past?
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Malcolm X sez:
“It is criminal to teach a man not
to defend himself when he is the constant victim of brutal attacks.”
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In the late 1960s -- thanks to Cesar Chavez
and the United Farm Workers (UFW) -- deciding whether or not to buy grapes
became a political act. Three years after its establishment in 1962,
the UFW struck against grape growers around Delano, California... a long,
bitter, and frustrating struggle that appeared impossible to resolve
until Chavez promoted the idea of a national boycott. Trusting in the
average person’s ability to connect with those in need, Chavez and
the UFW brought their plight -- and a lesson in social justice -- into
homes from coast-to-coast and Americans responded.
“By 1970, the grape boycott was an
unqualified success,” writes Marc Grossman of Stone Soup. “Bowing
to pressure from the boycott, grape growers at long last signed union
contracts, granting workers human dignity and a more livable wage.”
Through hunger strikes, imprisonment,
abject poverty for himself and his large family, racist and corrupt
judges, exposure to dangerous pesticides, and even assassination plots,
Chavez remained true to the cause...even if meant, uh... "stretching"
the non-violent methods he espoused:
Once in 1966, when Teamster goons began
to rough up Chavez’s picketeers, a bit of labor solidarity solved
the problem. William Kircher, the AFL-CIO director of organization,
called Paul Hall, president of the International Seafarers Union.
“Within hours,” writes David Goodwin
in Cesar Chavez: Hope for the People, “Hall sent a carload of the
biggest sailors that had ever put to sea to march with the strikers
on the picket lines... There followed afterward no further physical harassment.”
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To me, the following quote reads like
a poem... so that’s how I’ll present it:
You’ve got to learn
that when you push people around,
some people push back.
As they should.
As they must.
And as they undoubtedly will.
There is justice in such
symmetry.
--Ward Churchill
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When early American revolutionaries chanted,
“Give me liberty or give me death” and complained of having but
one life to give for their country, they became the heroes of our history
textbooks. But, thanks to the power of the U.S. media and education
industries, the Puerto Rican nationalists who dedicated their lives
to independence are known as criminals, fanatics, and assassins.
On March 1, 1954, in the gallery of the
House of Representatives, Congressman Charles A. Halleck rose to discuss
with his colleagues the issue of Puerto Rico. At that moment, Lolita
Lebrón alongside three fellow freedom fighters, having purchased a
one-way train ticket from New York (they expected to be killed) unfurled
a Puerto Rican flag and shouted “Free Puerto Rico!” before firing
eight shots at the roof. Her three male co-conspirators aimed their
machine guns at the legislators. Andrés Figueroa’s gun jammed, but
shots fired by Rafael Cancel Miranda and Irving Flores injured five
congressmen.
“I know that the shots I fired neither
killed nor wounded anymore,” Lebrón stated afterwards. With the attack
being viewed through the sensationalizing prism of American tabloid
journalism, this did not matter. She and her nationalist cohorts became
prisoners of war for the next twenty-five years.
Why prisoners of war? To answer that,
we must recall that since July 25, 1898, when the United States illegally
invaded its tropical neighbor under the auspices of the Spanish-American
War, the island has been maintained as a colony. In other words, the
planet’s oldest colony is being held by its oldest representative
democracy -- with U.S. citizenship imposed without the consent or approval
of the indigenous population in 1917. It is from this geopolitical paradox
that the Puerto Rican independence movement sprang forth.
This movement is based firmly on international
law, which authorizes “anti-colonial combatants” the right to armed
struggle to throw off the yoke of imperialism and gain independence.
UN General Assembly Resolution 33/24 of December 1978 recognizes “the
legitimacy of the struggle of people’s for independence, territorial
integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial domination and
foreign occupation by all means available, particularly armed struggle.”
Prison did not dampen Lebrón’s revolutionary
spirit as she attended demonstrations and spoke out to help win the
long battle to evict the U.S. Navy from the tiny Puerto Rican island of
Vieques in 2003.
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Emma Goldman sez:
“No great idea in its beginning can
ever be within the law.”
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In her excellent 1995 book, Bridge
of Courage, Jennifer Harbury quotes a Guatemalan freedom fighter
named Gabriel, responding to a plea to embrace non-violent resistance:
"In my country child malnutrition is close to 85 percent,” he
explains. “Ten percent of all children will be dead before the age
of five, and this is only the number actually reported to government
agencies. Close to 70 percent of our people are functionally illiterate.
There is almost no industry in our country -- you need land to survive.
Less than 3 percent of our landowners own over 65 percent of our lands.
In the last fifteen years or so, there have been over 150,000 political
murders and disappearances.... Don't talk to me about Gandhi; he wouldn't
have survived a week here. There was a peaceful movement for progress
here, once. They were crushed. We were crushed. For Gandhi's method
to work, there must be a government capable of shame. We lack that here."
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Huey P. Newton sez:
“In the spirit of international revolutionary
solidarity, the Black Panther Party hereby offers ... an undetermined
number of troops to assist you in your fight against American imperialism.
It is appropriate for the Black Panther Party to take this action at
this time in recognition of the fact that your struggle is also our
struggle, for we recognize that our common enemy is U.S. imperialism,
which is the leader of international bourgeois domination. There is
no fascist or reactionary government in the world today that could stand
without the support of United States imperialism. Therefore our problem
is international, and we offer these troops in recognition of the necessity
for international alliance to deal with the problem … Such alliance
will advance the struggle toward the final act of dealing with American
imperialism. To end this oppression we must liberate the developing
nations … As one nation is liberated elsewhere, it gives us a better
chance to be free.”
(Excerpted from an October 29, 1970
letter to the National Front for Liberation and Provisional Revolutionary
Government of South Viet Nam)
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Arundhati Roy sez:
"People from poorer places and poorer
countries have to call upon their compassion not to be angry with ordinary
people in America."
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In his book Endgame, Derrick Jensen
tells of a discussion he had with a longtime activist. “She told me
of a campaign she participated in a few years ago to try to stop the
government and transnational timber corporations from spraying Agent
Orange, a potent defoliant and teratogen, in the forests of Oregon,”
Jensen writes. All too predictably, the dedicated demonstrators assembled
to protest the toxic spraying were, “like clockwork,” ignored by
the helicopter pilots. Both humans and landscape ended up thoroughly
doused with Agent Orange -- time and time again. The protest campaign
obviously had no effect, so a different approach was taken. “A bunch
of Vietnam vets lived in those hills,” the activist told Jensen, “and
they sent messages to the Bureau of Land Management and to Weyerhauser,
Boise Cascade, and the other timber companies saying, ‘We know the
names of your helicopter pilots, and we know their addresses’
“You know what happened next?” she
asked.
“I think I do,” Jensen responded.
“Exactly,” she said. “The spraying
stopped.”
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MLK sez:
“When you're right, you can never be
too radical.”
Until the laws are changed or the power
runs out, Mickey Z. can be found on the Web at http://www.mickeyz.net