American History 101

I was born in the US, and have lived here a great majority of my life.  I was raised with the same stories most Americans are raised hearing; the old familiar tales of how the “greatest country on earth” came to be. I was taught to be patriotic, to be loyal. I was taught to love the flag and the Star Spangled Banner, and Davey Crocket and Abraham Lincoln. We threw off the weight of the tyranny of King George III and fashioned an incredible and majestic nation the likes of which the world has never known.

This would be great and all, if it wasn’t precipitated on a complete, boldfaced lie.

History, as We’d Like to Believe it

You see, pretty much everything we’re taught about American history is false. Complete and utter hogwash. Squanto helped the Pilgrims, it’s true. It’s also true that he did so because he came back to where his village was, and everyone he knew was dead and gone. In their place, in his village were the invaders.  He still helped them out. Just before the famous settlements at Jamestown and others, a plague brought by the Europeans wiped out most of the population of Natives all along the coast. What had been a thickly populated area of Natives, with a society and people no more primitive than the Europeans who came, was reduced to a shadow of its former self in record time thanks to the greatest genocide ever known to humankind.

Christopher Columbus raped, pillaged, and end enslaved the natives he met. From the very beginning this country was not founded on an idea of  freedom, but one of racism, slavery and theft. Within a few years of the settling of what is now the US, slaves from the West coast of Africa would arrive, beginning the trans-Atlantic slave trade.  It would not end for hundreds of years.

Slaves, packed into the bottom of the ships, dying as they lay chained in their own filth, not even able to move. The stifling hot cabin making them pass out. Millions died in the infamous “Middle Passage.” If they tried to refuse the gruel they were given to keep them alive, preferring death over their horrible conditions, the slave traders would force them to eat with this:

It’s called a Speculum Oris, or “mouth opener”. It was forced violently into the slave’s mouth to pry his mouth open; which would then give the opportunity for the slave trader to pour the gruel down the slave’s throat. It only cost the slave a few teeth to do this, to deny him the right to die.

These slaves built the material wealth of the US. The founders of the US owned slaves whose ancestors had been brought over from Africa, from their homes and their villages and their families. The author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, —” himself owned hundreds of slaves. Obviously he either didn’t consider slaves people, or he didn’t believe the words he wrote.

That’s not all. Immigrant workers, sharecroppers, oppressed and poor people of all nationalities built the country. All while the high minded plutocrats convinced the poor men and boys to die for their country. From the Trail of Tears, to the Transcontinental railroad,  America has been built on the backs of the oppressed, while those in power reap all the rewards.

Why Historical Revisionism?

The question is then, why this cult of America? Why do we speak of “Un-Americanism” as if there was some high cosmic ideal that we all were assigned to live under at our birth? Why are we shackled to the unending propaganda that somehow, the US is better, more moral, more just than any other country, when by any stretch of the imagination it’s not?

To keep you enslaved. You are enslaved. You most likely don’t own your own business. Even if you do, the bank probably owns it on paper. You work your whole life to make a living. Most people don’t think that they’ll ever get filthy rich, but they’d like a nice lifestyle. They want a decent place to live, enough food to eat, entertainment. They want to send their children to school, to college. They want to pursue their dreams. Most can’t. Most are left living vicariously through TV; seeing their favorite celebrity wear the clothes they’ll never see, let alone buy. Their idols making more money than 100 lifetimes of normal work. They go to work every day, putting in time, selling the only commodity they have. Their life.

They have the freedom to choose what job to have! You may say. They don’t have much choice though, nor can they choose how much they’re going to make. To even own a home, they must put themselves in 30 years of debt. A car for transportation is also expensive, even if you’re buying used. Food prices through the roof. After all they pay for, maybe there’s some left over for  a small amount of entertainment in your small amount of free time.

Day after day after day. Eat work sleep eat work sleep. You buy and you buy but you can’t fill the empty void inside you. You’re not living. You’re going through the motions of a robot. You’re nothing more than a commodity who makes the rich richer.

Then, the 4th of July comes. Red, white and blue are everywhere. Bunting hung on porches, flags flown from the eaves, the smell of gunpowder fills the air as we blow things up in celebration of our great country. We celebrate all the good that America is. The next day you go back to your soul crushing job. You make money for the rich capitalists, and barely make it through. Forget saving enough for your kids to get a good education, they’ll have to accumulate years worth of debt to achieve anything. Maybe they can join the military, they’ll be lauded as heroes as they try not to die for imperialist causes. Maybe if they make it out alive, they can go to college, still barely making it, to get a soul crushing job that won’t even pay for their kid’s education. Rinse, repeat, cash your little check.

Never though, do we teach our kids the truth of the horrible genocidal history of their country. We wouldn’t want them to question the country they were born into. We wouldn’t want them to think critically about their country. We wouldn’t want to progress beyond the politics of the 18th century. No, we stubbornly assert that we are the best in the world. Our cities crumble. We have trains systems from 50 plus years ago as the rest of the world moves forward. We talk about freedom while millions of our citizens are incarcerated in the horrible hell hole called the US prison system. The prison building companies get rich, the war profiteers get rich, the Wall St. gamblers get rich. The working mother struggling to feed her family falls into depression. The country moves on, continuing the centuries of exploitation and wage slavery. Those who work the hardest can barely survive, while the rich live off their trust funds. They go to Harvard and Yale, where they get set up for a life of luxury. Don’t worry, you can make it too. Just think of people like Bill Gates, he was a college dropout. OK, so his father is a rich attorney who sent him to the most prestigious school in the Seattle area, then to Harvard. Don’t worry about the fact that he had his daddy’s money to live on while he was busy stealing other’s ideas to make Microsoft. I’m sure if you “work hard enough” you can make it too.

The Way Out of Poverty

So why are so many Americans enslaved? Unable to break through the bullshit story of our past? Unable to see through the decades of propaganda? We are shackled to our propaganda, unable to think, unable to move. We believe vehemently that we are merely a step away from financial freedom. As our homes are taken, as we fail to pay our bills and they pile up, we keep telling ourselves that one day, we’ll catch a break, that all will be OK. To paraphrase the great John Steinbeck, we are convinced that we are temporarily displaced millionaires, not the oppressed proletariat. They have a hold on our minds, our labor and our very being. We are naught but cogs in the wheels of their machinery, making the money flow on the oil of the worker’s blood, sweat and tears.

It needn’t be this way. We shouldn’t have to live in a bleak world, looking to the future, not with hope, but with dread. We should be the masters of our ship, the guardians of our souls. We should realize that the very bounty of the earth is ours for the plucking. That we can live in harmony and peace. It will not be easy. It will not come through pleading and praying and begging. It will come by asserting the rights of all humanity. The right to food, the right to clothing, the right to an education and to health care. We deny the right of capitalists to hoard unlimited amounts of wealth to the detriment of the rest of society. We reject the capitalist idea of property rights, that one person or company can monopolize a portion of the means of production necessary for everyone’s livelihood.  We assert that we can build a better world through the unity, strength and work of the proletariat. We assert that all humanity is one brotherhood. We the proletariat, have no country. We are internationalists, who want the best for everyone, not just a few.

The only way forward is educating the working class. Tell them of the real history of the US. Tell them of the real nature of the material conditions. Talk to them about their problems. Help each other as much as you can. The only way that the world is going to change, is through a revolution of the mind, first and foremost. The material conditions for revolution are already here, we just need to show them to the world. The only way things are going to change, is by the forcible overthrow of all social conditions, and the end of the United States of America as we know it. Be brave. Be happy. A better future awaits.
“I freed a thousand slaves I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves.”
Harriet Tubman

 

What’s behind Kony 2012?

What’s behind Kony 2012 ?                                                                                                                                                              .

he discovery of oil in Uganda in recent years is a contributing factor to imperialism’s interest in the region

What’s behind Kony 2012?

U.S. military intervention cannot be a force for progressive change

By Eugene Puryear

MARCH 8, 2012

The discovery of oil in Uganda in recent years is a contributing factor to imperialism’s interest in the region.

The power of social media is immense. That fact was fully on display as Facebook walls and in-boxes everywhere flooded with messages from a new political campaign “Kony 2012.” Kony 2012 purports to be aimed at bringing to justice Joseph Kony, leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army, an armed rebel band that roams the jungles of northern Uganda and northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo.

Kony is without a doubt an odious figure. Since 1987, his LRA has roamed across Uganda, the DRC, the Central African Republic and South Sudan. Originally a part of a broader movement in Uganda focused on the rights of the Acholi people, the LRA morphed into a band of armed child soldiers, manipulated and drugged, rampaging wantonly across the landscape with seemingly no real goals or ideology.

Principally, the LRA appears to be a vehicle for Kony’s own leadership fantasies, which are hard to decipher and most likely rooted in some ethereal alternative reality. It is indisputable that Kony and the LRA have had a devastating effect on the regions they have inhabited, engaging in killings, rapes and abductions that are deserving of condemnation.

Once these facts are taken into account, however, it must be said that the aims of Kony 2012, whether sincere or not, have absolutely no chance of helping the people of Uganda or the DRC to mitigate the ill effects of the LRA. Kony 2012 calls for military intervention from Western powers to capture Kony and extradite him to the Hague to be tried for war crimes.

A little-known but not insignificant factor at play in the region is the discovery of oil in Uganda in recent years. “One of the most spectacular recent finds has been in Uganda. The reserves of the Albertine rift, which takes in the Ugandan and Congolese shores of Lake Albert …, are said to need $10 billion for development. All being well, Uganda will soon become a mid-sized producer, alongside countries such as Mexico. Foreign investment in Uganda may nearly double this year to $3 billion. The country expects to earn $2 billion a year from oil by 2015.” (The Economist, May 31, 2010)

Could it be that a desire to get access to this bonanza is a significant factor behind imperialist interests in intervening in the region’s conflicts? To ask the question is to answer it.

Oil, of course, is not the whole story, as Uganda is a key U.S. ally in a number of geostrategic endeavors.  There is much to be said on this topic, but there are three basic points progressive activists and revolutionary militants in the United States should keep in mind when considering the issues around the LRA.

1) Military intervention by the West has already been disastrous

The current Ugandan government has long been a friend of the West. In 1987, the year after he came to power, President Yoweri Museveni implemented an International Monetary Fund (IMF) austerity plan. Under Museveni, Uganda became an important supporter of U.S.-backed military operations in the neighboring countries of Rwanda, Somalia, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo. In a July 2011 meeting of AFRICOM, the Pentagon’s agency for coordinating military operations in Africa, AFRICOM commander Gen. Carter Ham called Uganda, “a major partner” in achieving U.S. objectives in the region. (NTV Uganda, July 25, 2011)

As it concerns the LRA, the United States in particular has been attempting to build up Ugandan military forces. In 2008, the U.S. African Command brought together the combined forces of the Ugandan, CAR and South Sudanese military in “Operation Lightning Thunder” to deliver a death blow to the LRA. This operation failed miserably, and in retaliation the LRA killed almost 1,000 people and abducted 700 people. Twenty thousand people were displaced in the process. One further casualty was fledgling peace talks that drowned in blood.

Rather than an isolated incident, this was just the most recent in a long line of failed attempts to destroy the LRA. The LRA operates in an area the size of France, significant parts of which are covered by dense jungle and seriously lacking in infrastructure. These offensives at best serve to drive the LRA further into the hardest to penetrate areas, where they live to fight another day. Small assassination squads and massive military forces have failed over and over to capture or kill Kony or make a significant dent in the LRA’s fighting ability. In fact, the only outcome of U.S.-supported offensives has been significant further suffering in the LRA’s areas of influence, where the innocent have been routinely victimized by the LRA’s retaliatory offensives.

Perversely, President Obama sent 100 troops to Uganda last fall to try again. As always, this new and improved plan is supposed to bear fruit, but the preponderance of evidence suggests that these strategies of dealing with the LRA militarily are at best aspirational and at worst (and most likely) futile.

U.S. imperialist interests and humanitarian interests are mutually exclusive. The Kony 2012 campaign perpetuates the myth that the U.S. military can act as an agent for human rights, and will resonate with many truly well-intentioned people who feel “we must do something.” This only facilitates U.S. military intervention whose real goals are to ensure U.S. geostrategic interests in the region at the expense of the Ugandan people.

2) Conflict is deeper than the LRA

As odious as the LRA may be, it is a limited part of a much broader regional conflict that has been raging across East Africa for well over a decade, in which millions of people have lost their lives and rape has become a weapon of war on an unprecedented scale. DRC, South Sudan and Uganda in particular have been racked by a series of regional conflicts fueled by the resource-extraction mania demanded by the always-hungry, never tired imperialist capital accumulation machine.

Over vast swaths of the countries mentioned above are a series of ethnic and regional conflicts that are further compounded by the desire of elites in these states to establish their rule over both resource-rich areas and havens of their factional opponents.

This has created a vast array of militias of varying sizes and motivations continually fighting and moving across the region as necessary for survival, often using control over rudimentary mining operations to fund their activities. Some of these groups also ally themselves with one government or the other that provide funding and weapons and operate their own very brutal operations. On top of that, Western powers looking to exploit the resources of these regions ally themselves with these governments, arming and funding their military activities.

The Ugandan army that Kony 2012 hopes will put an end to the abuses of the LRA is itself a serial human rights abuser. In suppressing the Acholi revolt that the LRA sprang from, the Ugandan army forced thousands of people in the Acholi areas into concentration camps. There is also the brutal occupation Ugandan forces carried out for years in eastern DRC, systematically looting that country of a significant amount of its wealth. While hunting Kony in CAR, the Ugandan army looted, operated prostitution rings, and raped and infected girls with HIV. The Sudanese People’s Liberation Army, championed by Kony 2012, also has its own sordid record of brutal behavior.

It is patently ridiculous to suggest that sending a group of raping looters to solve human rights abuses will improve the situation for the peoples of Uganda, South Sudan or the DRC.

3) Strengthening the Ugandan army has repercussions for Ugandan progressives

Uganda is a country of deep divisions, and President Museveni has relied on a mix of co-option, intimidation and military campaigns to keep the country “unified” under the aegis of the National Resistance Movement. While a full analysis of the NRM government is beyond the scope of this article, it is worth noting that NRM often suppresses progressive activists, shows callous disregard for the rights of oppositional ethnic groups, and acts as the governmental wing of anti-gay lynch mobs.

Given this context, one cannot overlook the fact that better training, communications and arms for the Ugandan military is likely simply to result in more effective suppressive activity towards legitimate progressive and ethnic movements.

Taking all of this into account, it is clear that Kony 2012 deserves no support from the people of the world whom it seeks to rally under its banner. In the name of fighting for “human rights,” Kony 2012 is championing a rogues gallery of murdering, raping, corrupt governments and militaries that happily ally themselves with imperialist powers that have killed hundreds of thousands in Iraq and Afghanistan in just the last decade.

Scrutinizing Invisible Children

It is also imperative that progressives seek to understand the origins of the Kony 2012 campaign, which has its roots in the organization Invisible Children. IC has been criticized for spending only 32 percent of its funds on direct services to children in Africa, with the remainder going to staff salaries, travel and transport and film production.

IC supports direct military intervention. Both the Ugandan army and Sudan People’s Liberation Army have been repeatedly accused of rape and looting, but IC continues to defend them, arguing that the Ugandan army is “better equipped than that of any of the other affected countries,” although Kony is no longer active in Uganda and hasn’t been since 2006 by their own admission.

The journal Foreign Affairs writes that IC “manipulates facts for strategic purposes, exaggerating the scale of LRA abductions and murders and emphasizing the LRA’s use of innocent children as soldiers, and portraying Kony—a brutal man, to be sure—as uniquely awful, a Kurtz-like embodiment of evil,” (referring to a fictional character in Joseph Conrad’s novella “Heart of Darkness”).

Chris Blattman, a political scientist at Yale, has written on the topic of IC’s programming: “There’s also something inherently misleading, naive, maybe even dangerous, about the idea of rescuing children or saving of Africa. […] It hints uncomfortably of the White Man’s Burden. Worse, sometimes it does more than hint. The savior attitude is pervasive in advocacy, and it inevitably shapes programming. Usually misconceived programming.”

Rather than lining up with a blood-soaked coalition, people of conscience need to expose Kony 2012 and its deadly agenda, which is guaranteed to sink the region even deeper into the morass of death. There are no simple answers. Any solution to the suffering of the peoples of the region must be rooted in a perspective that seriously addresses the legacy of colonialism and ongoing neo-colonialism and the resulting underdevelopment, ethnic conflict and political corruption.

Content may be reprinted with credit to LiberationNews.org.