E Wayne Ross – Page 122 – Critical Theories in Education

Charles Sullivan “Matewan Revisited”

[Thanks to Paul O. for the tip on this one.]

By Charles Sullivan

The history of America is the chronicle of class struggle. The current fight is the same fight that working class people have always waged. In the past there were three distinct classes: the upper class, the middle class and the underclass. The middle class is rapidly melding with the under class, leaving us with essentially two socioeconomic classes. In essence, what remain are the rich and the poor. The chasm between rich and poor has never been wider and it is growing every year.

For reasons that must be political, those in power expend much energy and capital denying that America is a class society. Recall how Poppy Bush used to accuse his political adversaries of conducting class warfare, even as his policies, like those of his son, do great harm to working people while benefiting the wealthy. Unrestrained capitalism is the opposite of Robin Hood and it reigns supreme in America. The hypocrisy of the elder Bush’s inane pronouncement is an insult to the intelligence of every working class citizen, who knows about class divisions first hand through long experience. In essence, what we have here is a predator and prey relationship. The rich are today preying upon the poor, just as they have always done.

This relationship is portrayed clearly and accurately through an examination of labor history. One particularly poignant example occurred in the hills of West Virginia in the spring of 1920. This was the battle of Matewan that pitted the mining companies against the coal miners who were desperately trying to organize a union. Far from being atypical of the oppression and wage slavery that characterizes America to this day, the events that unfolded in the coal fields of West Virginia are emblematic of class struggle, as documented by the historical evidence. An examination of these facts reveals the insult and insensitivity of Poppy Bush’s absurd proclamations against the working poor.
Few of us today can appreciate the atrocious conditions that working people once endured. Some of the worst working conditions in the world were encountered in the coal fields of West Virginia. Thousands of men and boys (child labor was also exploited in those days) died in the mines as a result of wanton neglect on the part of the mine owners. The lives of the coal miners were of no greater worth to the mining companies than a turnip. Workers were nothing more than property that was expendable and easily replaceable in the field. The horrid conditions that prevailed in places like Matewan, West Virginia, are almost beyond imagination.

Whole towns were under the oppressive dictatorship of the coal companies, which included the political electorate. Thus the coal companies assumed the role of God not only in the coal fields of West Virginia, but all across the land. Other corporations did the same. The coal miners lived in constant fear and intimidation of their bosses and their goon squads. Their housing was owned by the company. Entire towns were in essence owned by the company. The coal miners were the slaves on whose backs great fortunes were amassed for the mining companies and the robber barons. The mine owners lived like kings, while the miners scratched out a subsistence living in utter squalor. The miners had to purchase their tools, their food and supplies from company stores, whose prices were grossly inflated. The long hours of toil in the wretched and dangerous mines were paid in company scrip. Often at the end of an eighty hour work week, owing to the irregularities that always arose in keeping the company books, the miners actually owed the mining company money.

Those who tried to organize unions were summarily fired from their jobs and evicted from their housing. Many were routinely beaten and murdered by company thugs, such as the Felts Detective Agency. These beatings and murders occurred all across the nation, and those who administered them did so with impunity. The police and the National Guard were under the employ of the mining companies. As they are today, they were called forth to protect the wealth and property of the rich from the justice demanded by the working poor. There was no law and there was no justice for working people. The only protection the workers had was the union. Despite that kind of opposition, miners joined the union by the thousands in Matewan and vicinity in a display of courage that is rarely seen today.

Matewan was different from the norm in an important way: its police chief, Sid Hatfield, a former coal miner, and its mayor, C. Testerman, were both men of courage and moral integrity who stood up to the thugs hired by the mining companies to terrorize the miners and their families. Understandably, such courage and strength of character were an aberration. Under enormous pressure from armed thugs, lesser men in other parts of the country capitulated and cooperated with the corrupt power of the mining companies. These companies were essentially all powerful

Agents of the Felts Detective Agency had been unlawfully evicting union families from their homes, setting their belongings out in the rain. Sid Hatfield and Mayor Testerman attempted to halt the evictions, but to no avail. Then on the afternoon of May 19, 1920, accompanied by a group of armed miners, Hatfield attempted to arrest the detectives including Baldwin-Felts president Thomas Felts, and brothers Albert and Lee, who carried out the evictions. Hatfield and Testerman faced their heavily armed adversaries in the street. Someone fired a shot and a fierce gun battle ensued. In less than a minute eye witnesses reported that more than a hundred shots were fired. Killed in the first volley were Al Felts and mayor Testerman. When the shooting was over, seven detectives, including Lee Felts and two miners were dead or dying in the streets of Matewan. The incident became known as the Matewan Massacre.

The episode made Sid Hatfield a folk hero to working people throughout the world. Here was a man who not only faced the armed thugs hired by the mining company, he shot it out with them in the streets of Matewan and killed two of the notorious Felts brothers. Fifteen months later, however, Sid Hatfield was gunned down in a surprise attack by agents of the Felts Detective Agency on the steps of the McDowell County courthouse. No one was ever tried, much less convicted for his assassination. The murder touched off a fierce armed insurrection by the coal miners that involved more than ten thousand men.

This is the history of class conflict in America—one episode among countless thousands. But it is a history, common as it was, that is rarely told. You will not read about it in the text books used to teach history in our schools. Why? Because events like this tell the real story about America’s long war on working class people. It reveals how our nation’s wealthiest and most influential families obtained their positions of wealth and privilege. It is the kind of history that foments outrage at the injustice that still afflicts working class people to this day. It is a history that demonstrates that ordinary people can fight back and demand justice, even against impossible odds. Better to die a free man than live a slave.

So when I hear the products of class privilege, the Bush family, for example, accusing others of fomenting class warfare it makes me shake with rage because I know the history of my country in sordid detail. I know they are spewing lies that dishonor the countless thousands of working class people who were brutally oppressed and often murdered by their employers and their hired guns. I am also reminded that the Bush family fortune has been amassed like so many other dynasties—through the brutal exploitation of working people known as wage slavery. The Bush clan has no conception about what it is like to struggle, to sacrifice and to honor and uphold justice for ordinary people. If I were a plutocrat, if this were my legacy, I would not want the world to know about it either. It is a disgrace too vile to be put into words. This is what I call America’s secret history—the history those in power do not want you to know about. So spare me the banal talk about a free and democratic society. That is not what America is about.

This secret history explains current events perfectly. Working people are still fighting the same fight against the same foes as did Sid Hatfield and those coal miners at Matewan on that fateful day in 1920. The descendants of those people continue to work the coal fields of West Virginia and they continue to die in the mines. Under burgeoning capitalism the mining companies are now permitted to write the legislation that is supposed to provide for the safety of the miners. Thus the guns of the Felts Detective Agency have been rendered, for the time being, unnecessary. Why resort to violence when legalized bribery works so well? How little things have changed. Working class people continue to be the prey of their corporate employers with little recourse to the judiciary. Unionism, as timid and ineffective as it is these days, continues to wane as corporate power increases. It is the same old drama being played out in modern times by the descendants of the original players—and, like it or not, all of us are participants.

Now the vast majority of workers are ‘at will’ employees without any kind of protection from their employers. Thus, as in the days of Matewan, if a person wants to survive they must submit themselves to the indignity of being the property of their employers. America is a nation that was built upon slave labor. Migrating from job to job is no better than migrating from one master to another. In any case, the worker is the slave of the employer. The tradition continues to this day, although with far more subtlety than in the past. Our elected officials, if calling them so is not to make a mockery of the term, are increasingly under the employ of the ruling elite. The judiciary is stocked with corporate apologists anxious to continue the tradition of fleecing the workers and lining their own pockets with wealth they neither create nor earn. The fact that Industrial slavery bears a close and disturbing resemblance to its cousin chattel slavery is no accident. Its end product is almost as tragic, as the gap between rich and poor widens exponentially. As is the custom in America, the rich have gotten to where they are by riding the poor.

The character and the courage of Sid Hatfield and those coal miners at Matewan, West Virginia, are inspiring. Following their outstanding moral example, let us not capitulate to the modern thugs of American corporatocracy—to the military industrial complex and the champions of empire that would grind us under their heel. Let us read and reread labor history—America’s history—with a sense of hope and optimism, inspired by the example of Sid Hatfield and thousands of people like him. Someone has to stand up to the thugs who have always run this country for private wealth. We must, as history demonstrates so clearly, take heart and show some courage. We must stand for justice for all, no matter the personal cost. Otherwise, we are only paying homage to high minded ideals while betraying them with our misspent lives. We must stand together, shoulder to shoulder and face the enemy.

A life lived in the pursuit of justice for all is the only kind of life worth living. It is an examined life that requires character, courage and a capacity for critical thinking that can see beyond rhetoric and the mere symbols of freedom, to the bedrock of reality. It is a life that demands substance from us. The Wobblies had it right all along. The answer to justice, to world peace, is One Big Union. An injury to one is an injury to all is as true today as it was the day the phrase was coined. We should live by this credo. Justice demands courage and even bravado. As Thoreau so eloquently stated, “A man sits as many risks as he runs.”

American history, as dismal as it often is, is also the history of class struggle against oppression. Therein lies its greatest value—its eternal hope. It is the long continued fight that has always kept America from being what it could become—a bastion of democracy and hope, bristling with peace. This is because a privileged few do not want to share the wealth of this nation with those who create it. They intend to keep it for themselves, as their predecessors did. So we must keep alive the idea of One Big Union. It represents our best hope for halting the exportation of jobs that pits worker against worker across political boundaries. To accomplish this Herculean task requires that we have the courage and the wisdom to bring back the revolutionary unionism championed by people like Eugene Debs, Mother Jones, Emma Goldman and Big Bill Haywood. Sid Hatfield and mayor Testerman have already shown us the way. Do we have the fortitude and the courage to follow their example?

Note: the author gratefully acknowledges and thanks long time union organizer Anthony Debella for providing the inspirational impetus behind this piece.

Charles Sullivan is a photographer and free lance writer residing in the eastern panhandle of West Virginia. He welcomes your comments at earthdog@highstream.net

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Rouge Forum Update (March 27, 2006)

From Rich Gibson:

Dear Friends,

A massive groundswell of people rose up in the past week, more than a million people marching in the streets from the Carolinas to Chicago to LA for the right to a decent job, a living, and a place to be–and in opposition to the nationalist movement in the US that seeks to make them, and all of us, unfree. Clearly, people are willing to take action, even in this repressive period. At issue is, in part, what kind of action, and toward what end?

We have endorsed the next scheduled action, April 10, as a day of leaving work, school, and the routines of daily life to demonstrate once again.

In addition, we have endorsed the April 29th world-wide demonstrations against the wars, which also dovetails nicely with Mayday.

Detroit Teachers wildcatted again this week, a one day sickout strike against layoffs and cuts in pay.

Here is a fine piece by our colleagues, the Research Unit for Political Economy in India, writing on the reasons for the latest US deals with the Indian ruling class, and the race for imperial control. These are the same folks who wrote, Behind the Invasion of Iraq.

The Rouge Forum No Blood for Oil web page is updated.

Of particular interest is a piece by Chalmers Johnson, author of Sorrows Of Empire, on the crisis of the economy and the military budget and an example of mainstream US media coverage (60 Minutes) of the fizzled operations of the last months. CBS joins the psy-wars.

We note with some regret that Andrew Young, former civil rights activist, is now a Walmart Spokesperson. He appeared on the scene with courage and intelligence, goes out as a farce.

Helen Thomas: “Why did we go to war?”

George Bush finally let Helen Thomas ask him a question after four years of ducking her. She asked him a simple question: “Why did we go to war?” Three years after the start of the war, he still has no answer that makes sense.

Here’s the video from the Bush’s March 21 press conference

Welcome to Resisterville

There was significant media coverage of Allen Abney, a retiree from Kingsgate, B.C., who was recently arrested at the U.S. border on a federal warrant for deserting the U.S. Marines in 1968. Many folks firgured that Abney deserted because of ideological opposition to the Vietnam war. But last week, after being released from a military brig in the U.S., Abney had nothing but praise for the Marines and described his desertion as the result of youthful ignorance and a desire to visit home (Abney was born in the U.S., but raised in Canada).

While Abney doesn’t fit the profile of American war resisters who fled to Canada, the incident has focused the media on the issue of war resistance and in today’s Vancouver Sun there is a story about Nelson, B.C. the home to a community of Vietnam-era American war resisters.

Unlike Abney, the resisters profiled by Doug Ward remain anti-war and stedfast in their condemnation of U.S. military agression.

See the article below:Saturday » March 25 » 2006

Welcome to Resisterville
Unlike ex-marine Allen Abney, many Vietnam dissenters remain steadfast against the U.S.

Doug Ward
Vancouver Sun

Saturday, March 25, 2006

CREDIT: Peter Battistoni, Vancouver Sun
Jeff Mock, a Quaker-raised American who resisted the Vietnam-era policies of his government and moved to Nelson, says living here makes him glad his sons don’t have to deal with the Iraq war.
NELSON – It was 37 years ago, but Brian Bailey still remembers clearly the day a police officer in Berkeley, Calif. fired a load of buckshot that splintered Bailey’s motorcycle helmet, putting him on a road leading to the Slocan Valley in the West Kootenay.

“One of the cops tried to blow my head off with a shotgun,” said Bailey, getting riled up as he recalled what happened to him at the 1969 student demonstration near a piece of land protesters famously dubbed People’s Park.

“I was already upset about Richard Nixon being president and the Vietnam War. But getting shot was the last straw,” said Bailey, now 64, explaining why he quit his motorcycle repair shop and joined other friends in search of cheap land in B.C.

They found it near Nelson in 1970 and Bailey has been in the area since. His feelings about the Slocan Valley haven’t changed since the day he arrived. “Just look at the view out there,” said Bailey, sitting in the front room of a neighbour’s house, pointing to the panorama of snow-capped mountains. “You look at that and go: Wow.”

And his vitriol towards the current U.S. government is as unchecked as his long grey beard. “The only way I can describe my reaction to the American government is that I want to throw up whenever I think of it.”

Bailey is one of the estimated 100,000 Americans who moved from the U.S. to Canada because of the Vietnam War. Surprisingly, slightly more women came north than men, according to John Hagan, a University of Toronto professor and author of Northern Passage: American Vietnam War Resisters in Canada.

About 50,000 were draft-age war resisters or “draft dodgers.” About half these people, according to Hagan, remained in Canada. About 40 per cent of this group — 10,000 or so — remained in B.C., many in the Kootenays.

These Americans blended into Canadian society, becoming hockey dads and moms, MLAs, local politicians, professionals and entrepreneurs. The absorption of these Americans into Canadian life was so seamless that their historic migration is often forgotten, although every so often something happens that reminds us of their flight north to a much more peaceful Canada.

One continuing reminder is the American invasion of Iraq, which some say is turning into a quagmire reminiscent of the Vietnam War.

“The Iraq war has brought back memories of why I left the U.S.,” said Jeff Mock, a Nelson tofu-maker who fled to Canada in opposition to the Vietnam War.

“It’s made me glad that my two sons, who are of military service age, don’t have to deal with that.”

The Vietnam War era was also recalled earlier this month when Allen Abney, a retired man from Kingsgate, was arrested at the U.S. border on a federal warrant for deserting the U.S. Marines in 1968.

Initially, it was assumed by many that Abney had bolted from the Marines because of the Vietnam War. And that upon his release from a military brig in California last week, Abney might have harsh words about that war and the marines who placed him in custody.

But Abney did not fit the conventional profile of a Vietnam War-era resister. Abney was born in the U.S. but raised in Canada. He had wanted to be a marine throughout his youth and volunteered while living in Toronto.

Abney, now a 56-year-old grandfather, said that his decision to desert had nothing to do with either being opposed to the Vietnam War or being afraid to go.

“I just got to thinking one night, being dumb and stupid, that it would be nice to go back home.”

He said that the other war resisters came to Canada “out of their belief that the war was wrong, and I respect that position.” Abney added that this was not his view of the war.

Abney went on to praise the marines and “the young warriors” currently fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Sitting in the kitchen of his old character house in Nelson, Mock said Abney’s pro-military remarks didn’t reflect the Americans he knew who came to Canada.

“He [Abney] had been a kid who didn’t want to get himself shot, I suppose, and was afraid enough to come to Canada. But it’s not the reason I came to Canada or why most of the people that I know did.

“Most people I knew either believed that war was immoral or that the Vietnam War was immoral. I believed both of those things.”

Mock, 57, grew up near New York City in a pacifist Quaker family. He was offered conscientious objector status on religious grounds by his local draft board, which meant he wouldn’t have to serve in Vietnam.

But Mock couldn’t bring himself to accept an offer that was not available to other young Americans. And he wasn’t about to join the military. So prison time appeared inevitable.

“But my girlfriend didn’t want me going to jail and so we came to Canada instead.”

His girlfriend, Irene, drove Mock to Canada in a friend’s Volkswagen bus in 1970, eluding the agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation who were looking for him.

Bob Lerch also avoided going to Vietnam and now lives in the Slocan Valley where he owns a car repair shop called Organic Mechanix.

Sitting inside his garage, Lerch said he didn’t believe Abney’s statement that he regrets bolting from the marines.

“It’s hard for me to imagine him saying that all of a sudden his life was a mistake,” said Lerch, adding that “there’s lots of people who came up here and I’ve never heard anybody, who stayed here, say that.”

Lerch believes that Abney was pressured by the U.S. Marines to be pro-military upon his return to Canada. “If I had his choice, I’d do the same thing. I mean, in order not to go to prison, I’d say anything.”

Abney, in response to Lerch’s remark, said: “That comment is certainly not true. The marines didn’t pressure me one bit to say anything, one way or the other.”

Lerch doesn’t advertise his draft dodger status. He says on his auto shop’s website that he moved from New York City in 1974 to the Slocan Valley for a “lifestyle change.”

But Lerch, 59, is clearly proud of his decision not to go to Vietnam.

“Basically I didn’t want to kill anybody, especially a bunch of farmers,” said Lerch.

“The Vietnamese weren’t attacking the states. And I’d had friends who had been drafted and they came back so screwed up.”

Just as Lerch was about to be drafted into the army, a friend returned from Canada. “He told me: ‘You wouldn’t believe how nice it is up there.’ He was going back and asked if I wanted to come.”

Lerch crossed the border in 1970 and spent his first few years working in Vancouver, often on construction crews with other young Americans working illegally until they could get their landed immigrant status.

Eventually, he bought an old school bus and headed for the Maritimes to buy some land. On the way he stopped in the Slocan Valley and didn’t go any further east.

“I got here and said: ‘Wow. This is the nicest place I’ve ever been to in my whole life’ and I stayed.

“There were hundreds of other Americans here. And we were accepted even though we looked a little weird back then, being hippies.”

Many of the young Americans were helped by the descendants of an earlier wave of war resisters drawn to the Kootenays in the early 1900s — the Doukhobors, a sect of Christian pacifists who left Russia to avoid serving in the czar’s army.

Among the other Americans in the Slocan Valley were the parents of Aubrey Nealon, who wrote and directed A Simple Curve, a movie released earlier this year that tells a coming-of-age story about the son of hippie, draft-dodging American parents living in the valley.

“There were a lot of Americans here and they formed the largest subgroup in my little community of New Denver,” recalled Nealon.

He said that this well-educated, middle-class group of newcomers “not only fit in but they took charge in many ways. Many of them were trying to build a new and better way of living.”

Among the Americans Nealon knew growing up was Gary Wright, now the mayor of New Denver and chair of the Regional District of Central Kootenay.

Corky Evans, the MLA for Nelson-Creston, is another prominent American refugee. Evans has said that he came to Canada in 1969 with his wife and two step-children to give them a better life.

Evans, who settled in the Slocan Valley, described himself as a war resister but said he did not dodge the draft as his draft board would not have forced someone with a family to enlist. Indeed, he was granted deferment status a month after arriving here.

Nealon said that Wright and Evans are examples of how the war resisters brought new ideas and energy into the area.

“It’s made for an interesting cultural mix. You go to these small Kootenay towns and they don’t seem like your average tiny town in the middle of nowhere, which is what they are.

“There are three places on the main street of New Denver where you can get a delicious cup of cappuccino. It’s been like that for years and this is a town of only 600 people.”

The idea came to Issac Romano one day while he was sitting in a cafe on funky Baker Street in Nelson. There should be an event and a monument, he thought, to remind Canadians of the presence of Vietnam War resisters in Canada.

Romano, 57, was a family counsellor and longtime peace activist from Seattle with the touchy-feely, earnest air of a new-age therapist.

He’d been granted a deferment during the Vietnam War. He’d developed a strong respect for Canadian life through his connection with Or Shalom, the Vancouver synagogue attended by many left-wing Jews.

Romano came to Nelson from Seattle in 2001, drawn by a new job, and he became impressed by the numbers of American war resisters in the Kootenays. He decided something had to done to honour their contribution to the region and to the anti-Vietnam War movement.

Romano held a news conference in 2004 to announce his idea for a large bronze monument in the form of a man and a woman greeted by a Canadian with outstretched arms.

All hell broke lose.

A small story about the event in the Nelson Daily News made its way over the wire services to the right-wing TV network Fox News. The conservative base of the Republican party, including the Veterans of Foreign Wars, was incensed by Romano’s idea. The City of Nelson website was bombarded with e-mails from angry Americans.

The local council and chamber of commerce freaked out about the potential loss of American tourist dollars.

Many of the draft dodgers and war resisters living in the area were disappointed by the reaction of Nelson’s business class. Not so much because they wanted a monument — more because they didn’t like to see their community cave into fear of right-wing Americans.

Nelson resident Ernest Hekkanen, 59, left his Seattle home in 1969 and crossed the border at Blaine. He doesn’t mince words when talking about how many in Nelson turned against Romano’s plan for a monument.

“This is a little cloistered, parochial community that feels as though international difficulties should not impinge upon its middle-class existence,” said Hekkanen. “Most of them have about as much spine as a hunk of Jell-O.”

Under pressure, Romano withdrew the suggestion, but didn’t give up his idea of a gathering to recall the draft-dodger phenomenon.

The event is called the Our Way Home Reunion and it is set for July 6-9 at the Brilliant Cultural Centre in Castlegar. Romano has lined up an impressive list of speakers, including George McGovern, the former senator who was the presidential candidate for the Democrats in the 1972 U.S. election. Tom Hayden, the Sixties protest leader, is expected to attend. So are singers Buffy Saint-Marie and Holly Near.

Romano isn’t worried that Fox News will use the reunion to agitate its viewers — he’s happy to spark debate about the Vietnam War and the current Iraq war.

He said the furore over his efforts to honour draft dodgers living around Nelson has forced many Americans to reconsider the Vietnam War “by asking the question: ‘Why did good people leave?’ ”

Romano does not expect the Our Way Home Reunion will spark much opposition in the Kootenays. He said that local businessmen and politicians came to realize that the tumult over the monument “generated far more publicity for Nelson than all of the city’s paid-for advertising.”

The Los Angeles Times ran a front-page story about the draft dodgers in Nelson and the New York Times ran a feature article with the headline: “Greetings from Resisterville.”

Hekkanen, the Nelson-based artist and writer of a long list of self-published books, is one American refugee helping Romano with the Our Way Home project.

Hekkanen, who says that “I describe myself as a draft dodger with pride,” feels a duty to continue his opposition to the U.S. military-industrial complex.

“My feeling, even now, is that if you are not contributing to bringing down the Republican White House, then you are probably culpable of war crimes being committed in the Iraq.”

Earl Hamilton, a Nelson school teacher who moved to Canada from Michigan in 1970, is more ambivalent about the Our Way Home Reunion.

“Reunion? I’m not sure we were ever unified,” said Hamilton, sipping coffee at the Oso Negro Cafe, a landmark of Nelson’s alternative subculture.

Hamilton, 58, said he considers himself fully Canadian, not American, adding that he had little interest in seeing a monument erected to honour draft dodgers.

“It’s not something I want to memorialize. It’s like: I’m in my life. I don’t have a great feeling of camaraderie for American expatriates. It’s not my peer group.”

Not that Hamilton has lost his anti-war bent. Hamilton was given a draft deferment in 1969 and allowed to work in a university hospital as a janitor. But he decided to leave America when some other janitors responded to the deaths of four anti-war demonstrators at Kent State University by writing on a blackboard: National Guard 4, Kent State 0.

“I just told my supervisor that I’m not working here anymore,” recalled Hamilton. “I realized that I had had enough of the political culture of the U.S.”

Now Hamilton wonders whether Canada will welcome new American war resisters avoiding service in the Iraq war.

He believes the new Conservative government is too willing to please the Bush administration. “I don’t believe that Canada is now a haven for pacifists and conscientious objectors. It’s become a place where whatever America says goes.”

Hagan, the University of Toronto professor who has researched the Vietnam War resisters, plans to attend the Our Way Home Reunion.

Hagan, also a draft dodger, said that many resisters are now in their late middle-age — “a time when people might naturally think back about what happened.”

But the focus of many of these Vietnam War resisters isn’t just on the past. He knows many in Toronto who have helped spearhead efforts to give sanctuary to young Americans avoiding service in Iraq.

“When we came in the Sixties, we were able to settle in because there was a lot of support for us. There is a memory of that and a desire to provide it for a new set of arrivals.”

dward@png.canwest.com

– – –

COUNTING BODIES

More than 58,000 U.S. military personnel died in the Vietnam War, with about 300,000 wounded, according to World Book Encyclopedia.

According to the website Vietnam War, one million Vietnamese combatants and four million civilians were killed in the war.

The U.S. casualty number in Iraq, according to the Washington Post, as of March 17 stood at 2,310 (1,808 in hostile actions, 502 in non-hostile actions).

According to Iraqbodycount.net, Iraqi civilian deaths since March 20, 2003 are between 33,773 and 37,895.

Jensen & Wosnitzer: “Crash” is a white-supremacist movie.

Robert Jensen and Robert Wosnitzer’s ZNet commentary on the Oscar-winning best picture “Crash,” make an insightful argument about the film’s misdiagnosis of America’s race problem. The core problem is not racial intolerance, but rather white supremacy.

ZNet Commentary
Crash
March 24, 2006
By Robert Jensen and Robert Wosnitzer

“Crash” is a white-supremacist movie.

The Oscar-winning best picture — widely heralded, especially by white liberals, for advancing an honest discussion of race in the United States — is, in fact, a setback in the crucial project of forcing white America to come to terms the reality of race and racism, white supremacy and white privilege.

The central theme of the film is simple: Everyone is prejudiced — black, white, Asian, Iranian and, we assume, anyone from any other racial or ethnic group. We all carry around racial/ethnic baggage that’s packed with unfair stereotypes, long-stewing grievances, raw anger, and crazy fears. Even when we think we have made progress, we find ourselves caught in frustratingly complex racial webs from which we can’t seem to get untangled.

For most people — including the two of us — that’s painfully true; such untangling is a life’s work in which we can make progress but never feel finished. But that can obscure a more fundamental and important point: This state of affairs is the product of the actions of us white people. In the modern world, white elites invented race and racism to protect their power, and white people in general have accepted the privileges they get from the system and helped maintain it. The problem doesn’t spring from the individual prejudices that exist in various ways in all groups but from white supremacy, which is expressed not only by individuals but in systemic and institutional ways. There’s little hint of such understanding in the film, which makes it especially dangerous in a white-dominant society in which white people are eager to avoid confronting our privilege.

So, “Crash” is white supremacist because it minimizes the reality of white supremacy. Its faux humanism and simplistic message of tolerance directs attention away from a white-supremacist system and undermines white accountability for the maintenance of that system. We have no way of knowing whether this is the conscious intention of writer/director Paul Haggis, but it’s emerges as the film’s dominant message.

While viewing “Crash” may make some people, especially white people, uncomfortable during and immediately after viewing, the film seems designed, at a deeper level, to make white people feel better. As the film asks us to confront personal prejudices, it allows us white folk to evade our collective responsibility for white supremacy. In “Crash,” emotion trumps analysis, and psychology is more important than politics. The result: White people are off the hook.

The first step in putting white people back on the hook is pressing the case that the United States in 2006 is a white-supremacist society. Even with the elimination of formal apartheid and the lessening of the worst of the overt racism of the past, the term is still appropriate, in ideological and material terms.

The United States was founded, of course, on an ideology of the inherent superiority of white Europeans over non-whites that was used to justify the holocausts against indigenous people and Africans, which created the nation and propelled the U.S. economy into the industrial world. That ideology also has justified legal and extralegal exploitation of every non-white immigrant group.

Today, polite white folks renounce such claims of superiority. But scratch below that surface politeness and the multicultural rhetoric of most white people, and one finds that the assumptions about the superiority of the art, music, culture, politics, and philosophy rooted in white Europe are still very much alive. No poll can document these kinds of covert opinions, but one hears it in the angry and defensive reaction of white America when non-white people dare to point out that whites have unearned privilege. Watch the resistance from white America when any serious attempt is made to modify school or college curricula to reflect knowledge from other areas and peoples. The ideology of white supremacy is all around.

That ideology also helps white Americans ignore and/or rationalize the racialized disparities in the distribution of resources. Studies continue to demonstrate how, on average, whites are more likely than members of racial/ethnic minorities to be on top on measures of wealth and well-being. Looking specifically at the gap between white and black America, on some measures black Americans have fallen further behind white Americans during the so-called post-civil rights era. For example, the typical black family had 60 percent as much income as a white family in 1968, but only 58 percent as much in 2002. On those measures where there has been progress, closing the gap between black and white is decades, or centuries, away.

What does this white supremacy mean in day-to-day life? One recent study found that in the United States, a black applicant with no criminal record is less likely to receive a callback from a potential employer than a white applicant with a felony conviction. In other words, being black is more of a liability in finding a job than being a convicted criminal. Into this new century, such discrimination has remained constant.

That’s white supremacy. Many people, of all races, feel and express prejudice, but white supremacy is built into the attitudes, practices and institutions of the dominant white society. It’s not the product simply of individual failure but is woven into society, and the material consequences of it are dramatic.

It seems that the people who made “Crash” either don’t understand that, don’t care, or both. The character in the film who comes closest to articulating a systemic analysis of white supremacy is Anthony, the carjacker played by the rapper Ludacris. But putting the critique in the mouth of such a morally unattractive character undermines any argument he makes, and his analysis is presented as pseudo-revolutionary blather to be brushed aside as we follow the filmmakers on the real subject of the film — the psychology of the prejudice that infects us all.

That the characters in “Crash” — white and non-white alike — are complex and have a variety of flaws is not the problem; we don’t want films populated by one-dimensional caricatures, simplistically drawn to make a political point. Those kinds of political films rarely help us understand our personal or political struggles. But this film’s characters are drawn in ways that are ultimately reactionary.

Although the film follows a number of story lines, its politics are most clearly revealed in the interaction that two black women have with an openly racist white Los Angeles police officer played by Matt Dillon. During a bogus traffic stop, Dillon’s Officer Ryan sexually violates Christine, the upper-middle-class black woman played by Thandie Newton. But when fate later puts Ryan at the scene of an accident where Christine’s life is in danger, he risks his own life to save her, even when she at first reacts hysterically and rejects his help. The white male is redeemed by his heroism. The black woman, reduced to incoherence by the trauma of the accident, can only be silently grateful for his transcendence.

Even more important to the film’s message is Ryan’s verbal abuse of Shaniqua, a black case manager at an insurance company (played by Loretta Devine). She bears Ryan’s racism with dignity as he dumps his frustration with the insurance company’s rules about care of his father onto her, in the form of an angry and ignorant rant against affirmative action. She is empathetic with Ryan’s struggle but unwilling to accept his abuse, appearing to be one of the few reasonable characters in the film. But not for long.

In a key moment at the end of the film, Shaniqua is rear-ended at a traffic light and emerges from her car angry at the Asian driver who has hit her. “Don’t talk to me unless you speak American,” she shouts at the driver. As the camera pulls back, we are left to imagine the language she uses in venting her prejudice.

In stark contrast to Ryan and his racism is his police partner at the beginning of the film, Hanson (played by Ryan Phillippe). Younger and idealistic, Hanson tries to get Ryan to back off from the encounter with Christine and then reports Ryan’s racist behavior to his black lieutenant, Dixon (played by Keith David). Dixon doesn’t want the hassles of initiating a disciplinary action and Hanson is left to cope on his own, but he continues to try to do the right thing throughout the movie. Though he’s the white character most committed to racial justice, at the end of the film Hanson’s fear overcomes judgment in a tense moment, and he shoots and kills a black man. It’s certainly true that well-intentioned white people can harbor such fears rooted in racist training. But in the world “Crash” creates, Hanson’s deeper awareness of the nature of racism and attempts to combat it are irrelevant, while Ryan somehow magically overcomes his racism.

Let us be clear: “Crash” is not a racist movie, in the sense of crudely using overtly racist stereotypes. It certainly doesn’t present the white characters as uniformly good; most are clueless or corrupt. Two of the non-white characters (a Latino locksmith and an Iranian doctor) are the most virtuous in the film. The characters and plot lines are complex and often intriguing. But “Crash” remains a white-supremacist movie because of what it refuses to bring into the discussion.

At this point in our critique, defenders of the film have suggested to us that we expect too much, that movies tend to deal with issues at this personalized level and we can’t expect more. This is evasion. For example, whatever one thinks of its politics, another recent film, “Syriana,” presents a complex institutional analysis of U.S. foreign policy in an engaging fashion. It’s possible to produce a film that is politically sophisticated and commercially viable. Haggis is clearly talented, and there’s no reason to think he couldn’t have deepened the analysis in creative ways.

“Crash” fans also have offered this defense to us: In a culture that seems terrified of any open discussion of race, isn’t some attempt at an honest treatment of the complexity of the issue better than nothing? That’s a classic argument from false alternatives. Are we stuck with a choice between silence or bad analysis? Beyond that, in this case the answer may well be no. If “Crash” and similar efforts that personalize and psychologize the issue of race keep white America from an honest engagement with the structure and consequences of white supremacy, the ultimate effect may be reactionary. In that case, “nothing” may be better.

The problem of “Crash” can be summed up through one phrase from the studio’s promotional material, which asserts that the film “boldly reminds us of the importance of tolerance.”

That’s exactly the problem. On the surface, the film appears to be bold, speaking of race with the kind of raw emotion that is rare in this culture. But that emotion turns out, in the end, to be manipulative and diversionary. The problem is that the film can’t move beyond the concept of tolerance, and tolerance is not the solution to America’s race problem. White people can — and often do — learn to tolerate difference without ever disturbing the systemic, institutional nature of racism.

The core problem is not intolerance but white supremacy — and the way in which, day in and day out, white people accept white supremacy and the unearned privileges it brings.

“Crash” paints a multi-colored picture of race, and in a multi-racial society recognizing that diversity is important. Let’s just not forget that the color of racism is white.

Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege. He can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu. Robert Wosnitzer is associate producer of the forthcoming documentary on pornography “The Price of Pleasure.” He can be reached at robert.wosnitzer@mac.com.

American Sociological Association names “essential protest songs”

In the latest issue of the ASA sponsored journal Contexts, the editors compile a list of “essential protest songs.”

There are 14 songs on the list including standards as “We Shall Overcome,” Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’ ” and the 1930s union anthem “Which Side Are You On?”

You can listen to a selection of essential protest song clips here

Here’s the full list of songs with commentary by the editors of Contexts:

“Lift Every Voice and Sing.”
Lyrics by James Weldon Johnson; music by J. Rosamand Johnson. Key lyric: “We have come over a way that with tears has been watered / We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered.” Known as the “Black National Anthem”—the antidote
to “America, the Beautiful.”

“Which Side Are You On?”
By Florence Reece. “Don’t scab for the bosses, don’t listen to their lies / Us poor folks haven’t
got a chance unless we organize.” Written during the labor struggles in Harlan County, Kentucky, in the 1930s, it was later adopted by the civil rights movement.

“Strange Fruit.”
Performed by Billie Holiday. By Abel Meeropol (who later adopted the children of Julius and Ethel
Rosenberg). “Pastoral scene of the gallant south / The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth.” A chilling protest against lynching. Maybe the greatest protest song of all time.

“Pastures of Plenty.”
By Woody Guthrie. “Every state in this union us migrants has been /‘Long the edge of your cities you’ll
see us, and then / We’ve come with the dust and we’re gone in the wind.” Guthrie’s ode to America’s migrant workers.

“The Times They Are A-Changin’.”
By Bob Dylan. “There’s a battle outside and it’s raging / It’ll soon shake your windows
and rattle your walls.” Tough call between this and Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” “Masters of War,” “With God on Our Side,” etc., etc.

“We Shall Overcome.”
Adapted from a gospel song, the anthem of the civil rights movement. “Deep in my heart, I do
believe / We shall overcome some day.” Infinitely adaptable.

“Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me ‘Round.”
Also adapted from a Negro spiritual. “I’m gonna keep on walkin’, keep on talkin’ / Fightin’ for my equal rights.” Another powerful civil rights anthem.

“I Ain’t Marching Anymore.”
By Phil Ochs. “It’s always the old to lead us to the war / It’s always the young to fall / Now
look at all we’ve won with the saber and the gun / Tell me is it worth it all?” An antiwar classic, complete with a revisionist history of American militarism.

“For What It’s Worth.”
Performed by Crosby, Stills, and Nash. By Stephen Stills. “There’s something happening here /
What it is ain’t exactly clear / There’s a man with a gun over there / Telling me I’ve got to beware.” Eerily foreboding.

“Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud).”
By James Brown. “Now we demand a chance to do things for ourself / We’re tired of beatin’ our head against the wall and workin’ for someone else.” A Black Power anthem by the Godfather of
Soul.

“Respect.”
Performed by Aretha Franklin. By Otis Redding. “I ain’t gonna do you wrong while you’re gone / Ain’t gonna do you wrong ‘cause I don’t wanna / All I’m askin’ is for a little respect when you come home.” The personal is political.

“Redemption Song.”
By Bob Marley. “Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery / None but ourselves can free our
minds.” Marley’s “Get Up, Stand Up” is also a contender.

“Imagine.”
By John Lennon. “Imagine no possessions / I wonder if you can / No need for greed or hunger / A brotherhood of man.” Lennon as utopian socialist.

“Fight the Power.”
By Public Enemy. “Got to give us what we want / Gotta give us what we need / Our freedom of
speech is freedom or death / We got to fight the powers that be.” An exuberant hip-hop call to arms.

Pat Robertson: They are “racists, murderers, sexual deviants and supporters of Al-Qaeda, and THEY COULD BE TEACHING YOUR KIDS!”

Well, Rev. Pat Robertson is at it again.

The last time we paid attention to Rev. Pat he was warning the residents of Dover, PA that they’d face god’s wrath for voting in a school board that advocates science, rather than religion, in the science curriculum.

And before that Rev. Pat was appealing to the Bush administration to “take out” Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Now that didn’t seem very Christian.

Now, Robertson, the fundamentalist Christian, theocrat, founder of the Christian Coalition, fascist, host of the popular television show the 700 Club, and former Republican presidential candidate called liberal professors “racists, murderers, sexual deviants and supporters of Al-Qaeda” on his March 21 broadcast.

HERE’S THE VIDEO: “America’s 101 Worst Professors”

According to People for the American Way, on the 700 Club on Tuesday, March 21, 2006,

Robertson displayed characteristic anger and frustration at what right-wingers proclaim is another manifestation of liberalism in this country while reviewing (and hawking for sale on the CBN website) the new book by extremist David Horowitz titled, The Professors: The 101 most dangerous academics in America. Robertson waxed glowingly about the book which he says sheds light on the radical academics at American universities claiming, however, that it is just a “short list” of the “thirty to forty thousand” left wing professors who he calls “termites that have worked into the woodwork of our academic society and it’s APPALLING.”

Rev. Robertson launched an attack on “radical” liberal professors saying; “They are racists, murderers, sexual deviants and supporters of Al-Qaeda – and they could be teaching your kids!”

Later in the program he told his viewers, “These guys are out and out communists, they are radicals, they are, you know, some of them killers, and they are propagandists of the first order…you don’t want your child to be brainwashed by these radicals, you just don’t want it to happen. Not only brainwashed but beat up, they beat these people up, cower them into submission. AGGGHHH!!!!’

According to Inside Higher Ed: “David Horowitz, in e-mail interviews Wednesday, acknowledged that he could not show that any of the professors he criticizes in his book actually killed anyone, although he said some may meet the legal test for having helped others to kill. He slammed the Florida legislative report as irrelevant … So who are the murderers Robertson was talking about? Horowitz in his book does not attribute any individual deaths to any of the professors who make his list, but the book jacket does mention “murderers.””

The Virginian Pilot reports that “Pat Robertson’s television ministry continues to ride a wave of ever-mounting contributions, which have almost doubled in less than a decade” and that donors gave $160 million dollars to Robertson’s CBN network in 2005 – an increase of 21% over the previous year.

UNFORGIVABLE LIAR… If Woody Guthrie lived today he might write, “Some men rob you with a six gun, others with a microphone.”

from the March issue of Rock & Rap Confidential….

UNFORGIVABLE LIAR… If Woody Guthrie lived today he might write, “Some men rob you with a six gun, others with a microphone.”

In January, Bono announced his latest campaign to save the poor through capitalism–or rather, the other way around. This is Red, a marketing scam which finds the increasingly deranged U2 frontman in business with Nike, Converse, The Gap, Giorgio Armani and American Express. Red products include Converse sneakers made from “African mudcloth,” “vintage” Gap t-shirts, Armani wraparound sunglasses, and a red American Express card. The companies will donate “a portion” of their profits to fighting AIDS in Africa, the continent for whose poor Bono claims to be the spokesman. This portion is for the most part unspecified (American Express promises 1% of spending). Nor is it specified whether Bono takes a cut–presumably he would be crowing if he weren’t, as he did when U2 pimped iPods for free.

“It’s just a couple of degrees from becoming a Saturday Night Live skit,” says Noel Beasley of the UNITE/HERE textile workers union. “”It’s like if you took Bob Dylan’s ‘The Times They Are A-Changing,’ used it to pitch Rolex watches and tried to convince people that if they bought enough luxury goods they could make a revolution. It’s ludicrous on its face.”

Financial Times termed Red “the latest in a series of marketing experiments by companies worried that television advertising is losing its punch. Many of these efforts are based on the idea of using good works or services as a way to get consumer attention.” The term for this, in respectable marketing circles, is “corporate social opportunity.”

As Beasley said on Kick Out the Jams, Dave Marsh’s Sirius radio show, “This is obviously the economic wet dream of every retailer and credit card loan shark in the world, if you can pitch consumerism and credit card debt as the salvation of the planet, while garment workers and shoe workers are starving to death and literally burning to death in horrific conditions in places like Burma and Thailand.” As a member of the executive committee of the International Textile, Leather and Garment Workers Foundation, Beasley regularly monitors sweatshop and slave labor conditions around the globe, up close and in person.

Bono announced his scheme at Davos, Switzerland, where he attended the World
Economic Forum, a meeting of leaders of the world’s richest countries. According to Financial Times, he got the Red idea from Robert Rubin, one of the architects of Clintonomics.

Bono explicitly believes that only such powerful insiders can effect meaningful change. Capitalism controls everything, and therefore, only capitalist solutions can be “effective.”

In Caracas, Venezuela, the World Social Forum took place at the same time as the Davos conference. The WSF is a meeting of leaders and activists from around the globe, from poor nations as well as rich ones. It is dedicated to the proposition that social justice occurs only when people govern themselves. The World Social Forum is the sound of some of the world’s have-nots speaking for themselves, which Bono sees as counter-productive. But today, five South American nations are run by governments that believe otherwise, while the countries where schemes like Red operate, particularly Britain and the U.S., allow their populations to grow poorer and more powerless by the day.

Bono claims to be a disciple of Martin Luther King. Dr. King spoke of the “triple evils”–racism, war and poverty–as inextricably connected. He eventually concluded that opposing one of them without opposing all of them didn’t make any sense. So Dr. King risked his relationship with the LBJ administration by first attacking the war in Vietnam, then starting the Poor Peoples Campaign, which raised exactly the same issues as the World Social Forum.

Bono and his ilk want to convince good-hearted folks that there is no need for the lowly to move. As long as Bono cuddles with the mighty, poverty and AIDS in Africa are being powerfully addressed. So Bono, “spokesman for the poor,” meets with Bush and never mentions Iraq or New Orleans.

For the past several years, Bono has argued that African nations need to be relieved of their multibillion dollar debt to rich countries. Much of that debt has been erased. This has produced no tangible reduction in poverty. Bono has issued pronouncements about increased U.S. aid to Africa after every one of his meetings with George Bush and his senior officials. That increase never comes and, as detailed by an article last summer in the U2 fanzine Rolling Stone, the way what little aid there is gets dispensed makes conditions worse.

The 2007 World Social Forum will be held, fittingly enough, in Africa. An offshoot, the U.S. Social Forum, will be held next year in Atlanta, a symbolic return to the South which gave birth to Martin Luther King’s Poor People’s Campaign. Both of these massive gatherings (20,000 people are expected in Atlanta, 300,000 in Africa) will be suffused with culture, as artists from around the world speak directly with poor people, not about them from afar. The sound of a certain Irish pop star, off shilling for sweatshop syndicates and their middlemen, will be heard only faintly, if at all.

To subscribe to Rock & Rap Confidential, send $15 for one year (12 issues) to RRC, Box 341305, Los Angeles CA 90034.

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Vancouver part of global anti-war rally

On the third anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq, over 5,000 people marched through Vancouver today in solidarity with thousands around the globe in massive protests against the US imperialism.

Vancouver protestors began their march at the south side of the Burrard Street Bridge then down Robson and Georgia Streets before arriving at the Vancouver Art Gallery downtown. The crowd at the Art Gallery has been made up of families, students, and seniors, and advocacy groups including the members of StopWar.ca, Mobilization Against War and Occupation, Communist Party of Canada, B.C. Teachers Federation, Vancouver Raging Grannies, The Rouge Forum, and many more.

A number of speakers took to the podium including an American war deserter Klye Snyder, who spoke of his disillusionment about the US military involvement in Iraq and a member of the Christian Peacemaker Teams who has just returned from the region.

Check out Howard Zinn’s latest ZNet Commentary: “Lessons of Iraq War Start With US History”

ZNet Commentary
Lessons of Iraq War Start With US History March 18, 2006
By Howard Zinn

On the third anniversary of President Bush’s Iraq debacle, it’s important to consider why the administration so easily fooled so many people into supporting the war.

I believe there are two reasons, which go deep into our national culture.

One is an absence of historical perspective. The other is an inability to think outside the boundaries of nationalism.

If we don’t know history, then we are ready meat for carnivorous politicians and the intellectuals and journalists who supply the carving knives. But if we know some history, if we know how many times presidents have lied to us, we will not be fooled again.

President Polk lied to the nation about the reason for going to war with Mexico in 1846. It wasn’t that Mexico “shed American blood upon the American soil” but that Polk, and the slave-owning aristocracy, coveted half of Mexico.

President McKinley lied in 1898 about the reason for invading Cuba, saying we wanted to liberate the Cubans from Spanish control, but the truth is that he really wanted Spain out of Cuba so that the island could be open to United Fruit and other American corporations. He also lied about the reasons for our war in the Philippines, claiming we only wanted to “civilize” the Filipinos, while the real reason was to own a valuable piece of real estate in the far Pacific, even if we had to kill hundreds of thousands of Filipinos to accomplish that.

President Wilson lied about the reasons for entering the First World War, saying it was a war to “make the world safe for democracy,” when it was really a war to make the world safe for the rising American power.

President Truman lied when he said the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima because it was “a military target.”

And everyone lied about Vietnam — President Kennedy about the extent of our involvement, President Johnson about the Gulf of Tonkin and President Nixon about the secret bombing of Cambodia. They all claimed the war was to keep South Vietnam free of communism, but really wanted to keep South Vietnam as an American outpost at the edge of the Asian continent.

President Reagan lied about the invasion of Grenada, claiming falsely that it was a threat to the United States.

The elder Bush lied about the invasion of Panama, leading to the death of thousands of ordinary citizens in that country. And he lied again about the reason for attacking Iraq in 1991 — hardly to defend the integrity of Kuwait, rather to assert U.S. power in the oil-rich Middle East.

There is an even bigger lie: the arrogant idea that this country is the center of the universe, exceptionally virtuous, admirable, superior.

If our starting point for evaluating the world around us is the firm belief that this nation is somehow endowed by Providence with unique qualities that make it morally superior to every other nation on Earth, then we are not likely to question the president when he says we are sending our troops here or there, or bombing this or that, in order to spread our values — democracy, liberty, and let’s not forget free enterprise — to some God-forsaken (literally) place in the world.

But we must face some facts that disturb the idea of a uniquely virtuous nation.

We must face our long history of ethnic cleansing, in which the U.S.
government drove millions of Indians off their land by means of massacres and forced evacuations.

We must face our long history, still not behind us, of slavery, segregation and racism.

And we must face the lingering memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

It is not a history of which we can be proud.

Our leaders have taken it for granted, and planted the belief in the minds of many people that we are entitled, because of our moral superiority, to dominate the world. Both the Republican and Democratic Parties have embraced this notion.

But what is the idea of our moral superiority based on?

A more honest estimate of ourselves as a nation would prepare us all for the next barrage of lies that will accompany the next proposal to inflict our power on some other part of the world.

It might also inspire us to create a different history for ourselves, by taking our country away from the liars who govern it, and by rejecting nationalist arrogance, so that we can join people around the world in the common cause of peace and justice.

Howard Zinn, who served as a bombardier in the Air Force in World War II, is the author of A People’s History of the United States [ http://tinyurl.com/gqjvs ] (HarperCollins, 1995). He is also the co-author, with Anthony Arnove, of Voices of a People’s History of the United States [
http://tinyurl.com/gja83 ] (Seven Stories Press, 2004).