Desiree
Hellegers heeft een uitgebreid artikel geschreven over de door de
VS georganiseerde en geregisseerde coup tegen het socialistische
bewind van Salvador Allende op 11 september 1973 (de eerste 9/11).
Hellegers
begint haar artikel met de vraag op Facebook van haar vriendengroep waar zij zich bevonden
gedurende belangrijke gebeurtenissen als de 9/11 aanvallen op de Twin
Towers en de moord op John F. Kennedy in 1963. Ze vraagt zich af of
ze later op de huidige tijd zal terugkijken als een korte pauze in
het afzakken van de VS naar een ‘full blown’ fascistische staat (het
aantreden van Biden als VS president ziet ze dan als pauze*). Als dat gebeurt
zal ook de klimaatverandering verder worden aangejaagd door de VS,
wat overigens ook gebeurde onder Obama, die zelfs toestemming gaf
voor de bouw van een enorme kolencentrale aan de rand van een uiterst
belangrijk natuurgebied de Sundarbans dit over de grens met India in dit natuurgebied, op de kant behorend tot Bangladesh………
Onder Obama werd de
VS de op één na grootste steenkoolexporteur, de absolute nummer 1 is het als de VS zo
door de klimaatverandering geteisterde Australië dat nu nog 1
miljoen ton steenkool per dag exporteert en daar binnenkort nog een
fikse schep bovenop doet, als de nieuwste en grootste
steenkoolterminal ter wereld wordt geopend, waarvoor een zeekanaal dwars door het Groot
Barrièrerif werd gegraven…… Het is maar de vraag of Biden inderdaad een andere koers zal inslaan, immers ook hij is een marionet van de oliemaatschappijen, het militair-industrieel complex en de financiële maffia…….*
Ook
besteedt Hellegers aandacht aan de illegale oorlog van de VS tegen
het Noord-Vietnamese volk en bijvoorbeeld de rol van Henry Kissinger,
een uitermate smerige oorlogsmisdadiger die al lang in Scheveningen
gevangen had moeten zitten (na te zijn berecht door het
Internationaal Strafhof >> ICC)… Echter deze schoft, die
schunnig genoeg ook de Nobelprijs voor de Vrede kreeg, zal gewoon in
een bed buiten de gevangenis sterven, zoals zoveel witte
oorlogsmisdadigers……
Hellegers wijst o.a. op de triomf van het huidige Chileense volk dat in een
referendum eiste dat de grondwet die door Pinochet in 1980 werd
opgesteld wordt vervangen door een nieuwe grondwet en waarmee men nu
bezig is deze op te stellen.
‘Terug
naar Chili van 1973’ en de bloedige coup van fascist,
massamoordenaar, verkrachter en martelbeul Pinochet, die zoals gezegd
werd gesteund door de VS (ofwel de CIA, zonder deze hulp was de coup mislukt!!).
Hellegers spreekt veel over de politiek activist, protestzanger en
schrijver Victor Jara, die eveneens werd vermoord na de bloedige
staatsgreep in 1973, samen met minstens 3.000 anderen, o.a. bestaande
uit intellectuelen, studenten, professoren, advocaten en politiek activisten.
Lees
het uitgebreide artikel van Hellegers en zegt het voort, de reguliere
media hebben amper aandacht voor de enorme invloed van de VS die
zoals gezegd ook de grondslag was voor de coup in het Chili van
1973….. (overigens heeft de VS voor en na die coup nog meer staatsgrepen
met wapens, organisatie en regie gesteund in Latijns Amerika, zoals
die in Guatemala, Honduras, Brazilië en die tegen de socialistische president
Morales van Bolivia….) In het artikel verder een vergelijking van Victor Jara met Martiun Luther King en een korte beschuwing over het ijskoude inhumane neoliberalisme, geïntroduceerd door de duivels Margareth Thatcher, de Britse ex-premier en C-acteur en VS president Ronald Reagan, een politieke ideologie die de meeste westerse landen schunnig genoeg nog steeds volgen….. (‘onze’ huidige valse premier Rutte stelt wel dat hij het neoliberalisme niet meer als leidraad neemt, echter dat is de zoveelste leugen van deze aartsleugenaar!!)
CounterPunch
January
1, 2021
Victor
Jara’s Hands: An Anti-Fascist Memoir-festo and Brief Personal
History of Neoliberalism
You can easily carbon
date your friends on Facebook based on where they were during any
major milestone in U.S. history. As a university professor teaching
now for decades at what we euphemistically call a “land grant”
university, many of my students these days were born after 9-11–into
the U.S.’s seemingly endless “War on Terror.” It’s a war that
some of their family members died in, but one that few of them seem
to know much about.
Last month, older
friends on Facebook who came of age in the 1960s were busy reflecting
on what they were doing when they heard the news that JFK had been
assassinated. Personally, I had only recently graduated from diapers
to plastic pants and was likely occupied with important matters like
trying to do the twist in front of the TV while my grandmother
clapped and sloshed Scotch all over her TV table. But like most
Americans who have not washed down decades of Rush Limbaugh with
great swigs of QAnon Kool-Aid, I can’t help but wonder how we will
look back at this moment in history. Is this the moment we turn the
tide, or is it a brief respite from the country’s descent into
full-blown fascism? The latter scenario would mean, of course, full
speed ahead into climate collapse, given that the U.S. military is
hands down the single largest carbon emissions machine on the planet,
and our collective dust speck is already close to the boiling point.
May you live in
interesting times. You got that right. These times are so interesting
that we’ve had a lame duck president holed up in the White House
consulting with his legal team from the Island of Malevolent Misfit
Toys about the possibilities for declaring martial law to overturn
the results of the election and it’s not the top story.
That stands to reason,
I guess, when you’ve got a pandemic death count equivalent of a
hundred 9-11s, and across the country bodies stacking up like
cordwood in overstuffed mobile morgue units.
It’s hard to sustain
the level of national alert so many of us felt during the run up to
the election and the vote count, when Trump’s
automatic-weapon-waving goon squads were busy battering on windows at
voting precincts or sky-writing “Surrender Gretchen” over the
Michigan State House. A meme was making the rounds at the time on
Facebook: American politics as Night of the Living Dead. Personally,
I was starting to feel like an insomnia-addled Lady Macbeth who’d
been mainlining Halloween candy or days, and as in all things, I
blamed my lovely spouse, who had shopped for Halloween candy like he
was stocking up for Y2K.
Like me, my spouse
knows how to brace for the worst, a skill we bonded over when we met
organizing against the second Gulf War. One of the biggest
misconceptions about the anti-war “movement,” if such a thing
exists right now, is that peace activists somehow hate veterans.
Since well before the war in Vietnam, the U.S. military has given
veterans critical insight into the American war machine, along with
heavy helpings of trauma and self-loathing. Some of my favorite peace
activists are veterans, my spouse chief and foremost among them. We
bonded organizing protests and staging a die-in in front of the
Portland federal building. It was one of those “what are you doing
after the die-in?” kinds of courtships.
I don’t remember
exactly when I began thinking of Victor Jara’s hands and how they’d
been crushed by Chilean soldiers in the early days of the
U.S.-sponsored Chilean coup in 1973. I do know, though, that as my
spouse and I took a left turn to drop our ballots off at our local
library, Victor Jara had been on both our minds. It wasn’t a total
coincidence, given that only a day or two before, on October 25,
Chileans had voted overwhelmingly in favor of drafting a new
constitution.
The referendum was a
concession wrenched from President Sebastian Piñera following a year
of street protests and civil unrest. The vote was a definitive
kiss-off
to the Chilean constitution of 1980, enacted under the regime of
General Augusto Pinochet.
Living in the U.S.,
you’d never know that Chile had had its own national disaster on
September 11, nearly three decades before the U.S.
Not many Americans can
define neoliberalism, let alone know that on September 11, 1973, it
was ushered into Chile by U.S.-made tanks and at the butt of
U.S.-made guns—automatic weapons of the sort Trump’s “very
fine” friends never seem to tire of waving. And not at all unlike
the militarized Portland Police, and the BORTAC and Homeland Security
armies that spent all summer pounding and traumatizing friends of
mine in the streets of Portland, and spraying them with chemical
weapons long ago judged too dangerous to use in war, the health
effects being so severe and long term.
It was on September
11, 1973, that Richard Nixon and his henchman Henry Kissinger swept
Pinochet to power as the front man for the U.S.-sponsored
“experiment” in neoliberalism. A folksinger-songwriter, often
referred to as “Chile’s Bob Dylan,” Victor Jara would be the
most visible of more than 3,000 Chileans executed by Pinochet’s
death squads in September, as the coup began. You can get a quick
overview of the horrors that the U.S. helped unleash on Chileans in
the 1970s by watching the 2019 Netflix documentary Massacre
at the Stadium.
Shortly after
Pinochet’s reign of terror began, an estimated five thousand were
detained at a Santiago stadium—then named Estadio Chile, and since
renamed Estadio Victor Jara—and another twenty thousand at the
Estadio Nacional across town. Professors, students, musicians, farm
and factory workers were crowded shoulder to shoulder and sorted into
lines to live or die, to be interrogated, beaten, tortured, and/or
murdered. At Estadio Chile, more than seventy were executed on site,
while others were “disappeared.” Today a quote painted on the
back of the Estadio Nacional reads: “Un
pueblo sin memoria es un pueblo sin futuro” – “A people
without memory are a people without a future.”
Jara grew up poor, in
a family of farmworkers, but went on to become a theater director and
teacher, and to achieve international visibility with songs like
“Manifesto,” which speaks to Jara’s understanding of art
as a critical tool in struggles for justice, as an instrument of
decolonizing resistance, of spiritual, material, and ecological
liberation.
“I don’t sing for
the love of singing, /or because I have a good voice,” sang
Jara, “I sing because my guitar/has both feeling and reason. It
has a heart of earth/and the wings of a dove….”
Jara’s music was
inspired by his mother Amanda Martínez’s love of folk music rooted
in her Indigenous Mapuche heritage; his music was also shaped by a
Catholic education that included a brief period in the seminary.
Jara’s music was embraced in the 1960s and ‘70s by American folk
heavies like Pete Seeger and Joan Baez. Arlo Guthrie and Holly Near
are among the American songwriters who have since written tribute
songs. In the run-up to the election of Allende, Jara’s version of
the song “Venceremos” or “We Will Overcome,” became the
anthem of Allende’s Popular Unity Coalition, and also figured
centrally in eyewitness accounts of Jara’s death. Pinochet’s
U.S.-supported forces beat and tortured him, smashing his wrists.
At
some point in the stadium, Jara reportedly sang to the other
prisoners “Venceremos,” a song he’d adapted with new lyrics
that had egged Allende on to victory. Before he was executed, shot
more than 40 times by Pinochet’s U.S.-funded forces, Jara wrote his
final song: “What horror the face of fascism creates!/They carry
out their plans with knife-like precision./Nothing matters to
them./To them, blood equals medals,/slaughter is an act of
heroism./Oh God, is this the world that you created?”
No human cost was too
high to pay to usher in neoliberalism, to eviscerate the gains that
labor had made under Allende’s Popular Unity Coalition, and to
maintain a steady flow of cheap copper, fruit and fish to the U.S.
under the auspices of “trade liberalization.” The new
constitution passed under Pinochet’s dictatorship rolled back the
reforms instituted under Allende. It expanded the power of the
presidency and enshrined private property and corporate profits over
social needs; Pinochet rolled back taxes on corporations and the
wealthy, and eliminated a host of government services. State-owned
companies, public housing, education, health care, and pensions were
all privatized, turned into profit centers for corporations and the
wealthy. The constitution written under Pinochet limited reforms,
and the gap today between rich and poor in Chile is one of the
highest in Latin America.
Jara may be
technically dead, but if you do a bit of digging around on the
internet, you’ll see evidence of his long afterlife; hence the
title of a documentary about his impact on musicians in particular:
The
Resurrection of Victor Jara.
Tens of thousands of hands have gone on playing Jara’s songs in the
nearly fifty years since his torture and murder in the stadium. Jara,
says Chilean musician Horacio Salinas, in the documentary, “could
create a ceremonial effect with his music.” On youtube, you can
find countless videos of musicians playing Jara’s songs, and songs
written in tribute to him, including my personal favorite, “Victor
Jara’s Hands,” by Joey Burns of the Tucson-based indie-rock
band Calexico, sung alternately in Spanish and English: “Songs of
the birds like hands/ call the earth to witness/ Sever from fear
before taking flight.”
And for the past year,
as across the streets of the U.S. Black Lives Matter activists have
demanded justice for George Floyd and the defunding of police
departments that consume the lion’s share of city budgets across
the country, Jara has been resurrected again and again–in an
all-star Chilean studio recording–and on the streets of Chile.
At an October 25, 2019 march in Santiago with a crowd estimated at
more than a million, people sang together Jara’s anti-war anthem
“El Derecho De Vivir En Paz,” or “The Right to Live in Peace,”
while countless
people played along on the guitar.
This past year,
workers in Chile have risen up again to demand a world in which
workers do more than just struggle to survive, one in which everyone
has a right to not just bread, but roses, music, and art.
Over the past year,
Chilean women have created their own distinctive, woman-centered
actions on the streets of Chile, with thousands collectively
performing the song “Un
Violador en Tu Camino,” or “A Rapist in Your Path,” in a
public rite of resistance to rape culture and femicide.
The song was inspired
by the work of the renowned Argentinian-Brazilian feminist
anthropologist/bioethicist Rita
Laura Segato. The song calls out the role of police and the
courts in perpetrating and perpetuating sexual violence that repeats,
on a smaller scale, the systemic rape and torture of women that
happened under Pinochet, and that is a central feature of fascism.
If the goal in
Chile—as it would be later in Iraq—was, as Naomi
Klein has argued–to disorient or “shock” the country into
submitting to a radically different and patently exploitative
economic system, the system that was imposed was also more rigidly
patriarchal. Sexual violence and degradation were integral
parts of Pinochet’s fascist playbook. But as Chileans battle the
legacy of Pinochet, this rite of feminist resistance, together with
other longstanding organizing, is propelling Chile to break new
ground internationally: Chile will be the first country in the world
with a constitutional assembly comprised equally
of women and men.
I turned twelve the
month that Pinochet came to power, and I have no memory whatsoever of
hearing about the murder of Jara, the mutilation of his hands, or the
thousands of Chileans who were tortured or disappeared. Looking back,
I find this fact stranger for the fact that I grew up within miles of
the White House. And when I look back on growing up in two very white
suburbs on the edge of Washington D.C., it might as well have been
Apartheid South Africa, the lines of demarcation between the Black
inner city; Georgetown, where my father was a professor; and the
white suburbs, were so clear and stark.
My first inklings of
the Chilean coup came in 1976, when the political violence of the
Pinochet regime erupted in Washington, D.C. I was fifteen, and a
friend of my older sister was dating Pablo Letelier, the son of
Orlando Letelier, when the latter was blown to pieces in a
car bombing, along with his co-worker Ronni Karpen Moffett.
Orlando Letelier had been a close associate of Allende and remained
until his death an outspoken critic of Pinochet, who was eventually
pegged for the bombing, though a fat lot of good that did.
By the age of fifteen
in 1976, I was not a complete newbie when it came to assassinations.
Just months before the Chilean Coup, in July of 1973, Colonel
Yosef Alon, a 42-year-old an Israeli Air Force pilot and military
attaché, whose daughter Yael rode the bus with us to school in the
morning, was assassinated in their driveway.
But Alon’s
assassination was not the first to have entered the sphere of my
privileged white childhood. My guess is that would have been the
Yablonski murders on New Year’s Eve, 1969.
We attended a
parochial school at the time called The Little Flower School, which
made the news not too long ago as the grade school alma mater of
Brett Kavanaugh. I was eight and my sister was seven when we learned
that the in-laws of one of the teachers at Little Flower—“Mrs.
Yablonski”—had all
been mowed down in their Pennsylvania home: Chip Yablonski, the
President of the United Mine Workers Union, his wife Margaret, and
their daughter Charlotte Yablonski.
I imagine this was
around the time I came home one day from school to find myself locked
out of the house, and when I banged on the window and peered inside,
I found my two older siblings had staged their own murder, knives
lying on the floor, a theatrical flourish of ketchup here and there.
Perhaps I’ve coped with my third-grade trauma by picturing myself
as a stony-faced critic who found the scene unconvincing, their
characters lacking in development.
The field of
Epigenetics assumes that stress is genetically transmitted. I don’t
need to know that my genetic fibers are somehow entangled in my
parents’ to understand that I’ve carried some of their trauma
into my own life. I grew up listening to—and, at times taking notes
on—my parents’ stories of trauma. My mother’s stories were
about growing up the child of a working-class single mother too poor
to raise her. She told stories about kids who accidentally jumped off
trains onto chainsaws, and about her experience dressing dead bodies
as a young student nurse on a deserted ward.
My father’s trauma
centered around the May 10, 1940, Nazi invasion of the Netherlands.
Barely a month short of his fourteenth birthday, he ended up lying in
a ditch next to his eighty-year-old grandmother, mortars flying,
trees bursting into flames overhead. His family narrowly made it
across the border before it closed. My father had four brothers,
including twins, one of whom, my Uncle Pierre, had suffered brain
damage from oxygen deprivation during delivery. My father lived with
the knowledge throughout his life that something as small as a hand
visibly shaking as a man pockets his papers, and they might have
landed in Westerbork or Auschwitz rather than in England, and his
brothers might have been medically tortured and dissected.
I know exactly where I
was when my father’s life ended on May 8, V.E. Day, 1979, just
outside Amsterdam. I was accompanying him on his lecture tour, the
chance to see Europe a high school graduation present. I was at my
uncle’s house, my father’s body still warm on the couch before
me, where he’d reclined after diagnosing his own heart attack. He
died just two days before the thirty-ninth anniversary of the Nazi
invasion of the Netherlands in 1940. The last destination I visited
with my father was Anne Frank’s “Secret Annex.” War, as I
learned on that trip, throws out shockwaves and unexploded
ordinance—both physical and emotional—that explode across
generations, and can shave decades off a single life.
While the “Neoliberal
Experiment” began in Chile in 1973 with tanks and guns—and on a
smaller scale in New York City with the manufactured financial crisis
of 1975—Reagan would become its American figurehead, its
presidential mad social scientist. I was in my second year at
Georgetown when Reagan was inaugurated, and I can remember exactly
where I was when Reagan was elected 40 years ago, on November 4,
1980. I was at the Republican election watch party at some tony D.C.
hotel, the details documented somewhere in a newspaper article buried
deep in my office closet.
In the fall of 1980, I
was in my second-year writing for the more liberal of Georgetown’s
two student newspapers, The
Voice.
Whether the story was assigned to me or I chose it out of some
perverse curiosity or out of an unshakeable conviction that
Republicans had better hors d’oeuvres, I can’t quite remember.
While I wasn’t the most savvy reporter at the time, I can say that
voting for Reagan was as unthinkable to me then as now. And if memory
serves, I covered the election party with all the rhetorical gravitas
of a monkey throwing shit at their new zookeepers.
I would go on to
attend the inauguration in D.C., again out of the kind of curiosity
that one might feel toward newly–landed
Martians walking the red carpet from their space capsule. I was a
sophomore and busy running from one panicked deadline to the other,
but Reagan’s inaugural speech got my attention. “[A]mong all the
nations of the earth,” as Reagan
would have it, “[The U.S. was] special…The freedom and the
dignity of the individual have been more available and assured” in
the U.S. “than in any other place on Earth,” Reagan claimed.
What I missed the
first time around, though, was his distillation of neoliberal
principles: The one barrier to the “individual liberty” of
citizen/workers in a country “without ethnic or racial divisions”
was government itself. “It is time,” Reagan proclaimed, “to
check and reverse the growth of government which shows signs of
having grown beyond the consent of the governed.” While Reagan
deftly tipped his hat to working people—to “men and women who
raise our food, patrol our streets, man our mines and our factories,
teach our children,” and on and on—for Reagan, as for Trump, the
joke was on working people.
The years I spent at
Georgetown in the wake of my father’s death provided a crash course
in the importance of the social safety net that Ronald Reagan was
hell bent on gutting. At the time, if I was somewhat oblivious to the
nuances of Reagan’s political agenda, it was likely because I was
occupied a good bit of the time with trying not to have a nervous
breakdown. My personal social safety net at the time consisted of
Social Security Survivor’s Benefits, four years of free tuition to
Georgetown–where my father had taught for more than a decade–and
something I never thought very much about having: white skin. My
father’s death sent my mother off her fragile rails, and within six
months of Reagan’s inauguration, during the summer of 1981, my
sister and I were homeless.
My sister and I
learned that summer that with white skin, student I.D.’s, and a
keen eye out for security guards, there are ways of getting by on a
college campus rent-free. At the time, I didn’t think much about
the role that whiteness played in stopping us from falling any
further. I was oblivious to the fact that the safety net we found in
sleeping in vacant dorms would not have been available to us had we
been Black or brown. As it was, there would be no cops, no Karens
staring skeptically at our student I.D.’s, no guns pointed in our
faces, no one asking if we were enrolled or if we’d paid summer
rent for the dorm rooms. That experience, together with my father’s
death, would radically remap my life for decades to come.
+++
When neoliberalism
arrived in Chile, Victor Jara and working class supporters of
Socialist President Salvador Allende were under no illusions about
whose benefits the coup would serve.
If neoliberalism was
brought into Chile with guns and tanks, in the U.S., it was done with
smoke and mirrors. Reagan was inaugurated forty years ago this
January on a platform based on the self-interested lies and
deceptions crafted by the so-called “Chicago Boys”––the
architects of neoliberalism. Reagan greased his personal path to the
White House on the neoliberal snake oil of “Trickle Down Economics”
and Free
Market Fundamentalism. And while Jimmy
Carter had already gotten the ball rolling, Reagan would jump
start the neoliberal bait and switch transfer of funds from public
housing, education, and welfare, to policing, prisons, and endless
war.
Ronald Reagan was as
eager to shill for trickle-down economics and gutting
the social safety net as he’d been for the House Unamerican
Activities Committee and the warmongers at General Electric.
Meanwhile, in the UK, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was happily
breaking the glass ceiling for women intent on dropping bombs on
babies and exploiting working families. On opposite sides of the
pond, Thatcher
and Reagan were simultaneously slashing corporate taxes,
deregulating the financial industry—and setting the stage for waves
of future financial crises. And both of them were intent on breaking
labor.
Though my siblings and
I were all given four years of free tuition, in the 1980s, you didn’t
have to have a scholarship—or a parent who was a professor—to
walk away from a four-year degree debt-free or close to it. In 1983,
the year I graduated, tuition at a public university barely topped a
thousand
a year.But public universities had already been on Reagan’s hit
list in the 1960s when he was governor of California, and students at
Berkeley were busy mobilizing for free speech, civil rights, and an
end to the Vietnam War.
To Reagan, Berkeley
students were nothing more than unruly “welfare bums”; free
tuition was their dole, and Reagan was hell bent on sending them
“back
to work.”
Defunding higher
education and slapping students with debt was, Reagan understood, a
path to reign in “beatniks, radicals and filthy speech advocates….”
Today California spends more money incarcerating people than it does
educating them—from K-12 through university. In the U.S.
today, tuition at public universities is ten
times higher than it was when I graduated in 1983. Inflation
counts for less
than a third of the increase.
Over the past forty
years, public universities have been steadily transformed into
student debt delivery machines operated on the backs of debt-strapped
adjuncts. University presidents, who routinely make five times more
than governors, sell students—as “customers”—on the fiction
that History–along with Literature, Women’s Studies, Comparative
Ethnic Studies, Philosophy, and the Arts–are frivolous luxuries we
can no longer afford to fully fund. The Gipper might be pleased today
to see 18-22-year-olds signing off on documents they’d need MBAs in
finance to understand and then emerging as desperate and pliable
indentured servants for corporations. Even pre-COVID, 48% of
university students in the U.S. were at risk of, or already,
experiencing houselessness.
Historian Howard Zinn
observed, “If you don’t know history, it’s as if you were born
yesterday,” and that lack of knowledge is convenient for corporate
interests intent on red-baiting and enlisting workers to rail against
social programs and benefits that their own grandparents struggled
mightily for. I may have learned nothing while I was at Georgetown
about the U.S.’s role in the Chilean coup that killed Victor Jara,
but I did learn a few things about what can happen to white American
nuns who are labeled Communist sympathizers for getting too cozy with
Indigenous farmworkers in Central America struggling for some very
basic forms of justice.
In 1981, I stumbled
across a talk Daniel Berrigan was giving on campus. Berrigan, I’ve
long since learned was a rock star of the American peace movement. By
the early 1970s, Berrigan,
a Jesuit priest, poet, playwright, and professor, had made the FBI’s
Most Wanted List for burning draft files in the parking lot of the
Catonsville, MD draft board with homemade napalm in 1968, and then
going underground to dodge the charges so he could keep organizing
other actions.
“Apologies, good
friends, for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead
of children,” Berrigan famously said of the action. The American
banality of evil in a nutshell.
On this particular day
in 1981, though, I knew nothing about Berrigan, who quickly
surrendered the floor anyway to a middle-aged Catholic couple, the
parents of one Jeanne Donovan, a “Maryknoll lay missioner.” And
the story the couple told went something like this: on December 2,
1980, this nice, idealistic young Catholic woman was raped
and murdered, executed at close range—along with three nuns,
Ita Ford, Maura Clarke, and Dorothy Kazel. And suddenly Donovan’s
parents had a chilling political awakening, as they began to
understand the role that U.S. military advisors and U.S.-funded and
-trained death
squads played throughout Central–and much of Latin–America in
repressing labor organizing and movements for social justice.
Donovan’s parents were extremely convincing. I couldn’t come up
with any plausible communist plot that would explain these two
straight-laced Catholic squares having to talk about the rape and
murder of their daughter.
If the 1980 crimes
against the nuns and Donovan occurred in the final month of Carter’s
administration, the perpetrators knew that it would be left to Reagan
to answer for it. It would be Reagan’s job to rationalize the rape
and murder of nuns as acceptable collateral damage in the U.S.’s
holy war against Communists. The chief spinner of malevolent tall
tales about Donovan and the nuns would be a professor of political
science at Georgetown, Reagan’s newly appointed ambassador to the
U.N.: Jeane Kirkpatrick. Kirkpatrick is remembered as a “principal
architect” of the bloodbath the U.S. helped fund and unleash
throughout Central America.
Questioned by
reporters, Kirkpatrick was eager to put the matter to rest, to drive
rhetorical nails into coffins that held the bodies of Donovan and
nuns that had been dragged out of the ground by ropes around their
ankles. The nuns, Kirkpatrick told TheTampa
Tribune,
“were not just nuns. The nuns were also political activists.”
They were aligned, she
claimed, with guerillas of the Farabundo Marti National
Liberation Front—the FMLN.
I have another
somewhat fonder Kirkpatrick-related memory from that same Spring
semester at Georgetown, one in which Kirkpatrick is standing at a
podium delivering a commencement address and, slowly graduating
seniors begin to rise and quietly turn their backs on her. Their
message was clear, impressive, and unapologetic: Kirkpatrick didn’t
deserve an honorary degree, and Georgetown had done them a disservice
by pretending otherwise. What Kirkpatrick did, in fact, deserve–the
student action clearly conveyed–was to be tried as a war
criminal at the Hague.
There’s a famous
quote from a Brazilian archbishop named Dom Helder Camara that
encapsulates the distinction between charity and social justice:
“When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint; when I ask why
the poor have no food, they call me a Communist.” Union organizing,
demands for the redistribution of stolen Indigenous lands, and
anything else that threatened the profits of U.S. corporations would
be labelled—and battled– under Reagan as part of an international
Communist threat orchestrated by Cuba and the Soviet Union.
By the Fall of ‘81,
having had my own brief and very privileged run-in with
houselessness, I started volunteering at shelters in D.C. That
experience gave me a small window into the
ways in which poverty
served up daily reminders to D.C.’s Black residents of just how
disposable they were to the city’s white elite and any god they
might construct in their own image. Forty years of neoliberalism and
gentrification have only intensified Black poverty in D.C. And
poverty, coupled with the daily toll of racism in the U.S., can shave
years–or decades–off a life. Today white privilege in
Washington, D.C. translates into seventeen additional years of
living. Seventeen
years.
In 1981, the “Great
Communicator” was busy cranking up his racist propaganda machine to
rally low income white voters against their own best interests.
Reagan managed to sell a sizable portion of the white working class
on the patently obvious lie that the majority of welfare recipients
were not only Black but living as “queens.”
It turns out that all kinds of white folks would happily collaborate
in slashing benefits they were desperately going to need in the
future that Reagan’s administration was setting in motion–one in
which jobs would become the U.S’s main global export.
“The Gipper”
happily picked up the mantle of Nixon’s War on Drugs and ran with
it. He stoked terror at the prospect of Black crack “fiends”
running amok in inner city war zones, and SWAT teams began invading
and terrorizing Black neighborhoods. As Michelle Alexander explains
in The
New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness,
Reagan put the U.S. squarely on the path to becoming the global
leader in locking people up. Prisons and militarized policing at home
and abroad would begin sucking up enormous amounts of money that
could have gone to housing, health care, and public education.
As expensive as
in-state college tuition is these days, the annual cost of a prison
bed in most states is equivalent to four
years of in-state college tuition.
In 2017 in California, the cost of a
single prison bed exceeded the cost of a year’s tuition and
living expenses at Harvard.
Prisons and immigrant
detention facilities generate huge profits for a tiny elite, while
brutalizing everyone else, including the people
who work there. But Nixon, Kissinger, and Pinochet were all
well aware that once people caught on to the swindle, the bait and
switch trickle-down-free-market government-for-the-corporations game,
there was a good chance they would need guns, tanks, and plenty of
tear gas to hold back the rebellion.
Predictably one of the
first casualties of the “neoliberal Experiment” would be people
living in public housing. They would increasingly land on city
streets and sidewalks, and the lucky ones in shelters like the ones I
worked at in Seattle in the mid ‘80s. Between 1978–midway through
the Carter administration–and 1983, midway through Reagan’s first
term, the HUD budget was slashed by nearly three quarters. It went
from “$83
billion
to a little more than $18
billion
(in 2004 constant dollars) and shelters opened throughout the United
States.”
No administration to
date–Democrat or Republican–has made a serious move to
restore the budget to its level in 1978, which is why today,
prisons—along with military bases—are now by far the country’s
largest supplier of public housing.
And so, decades into
the U.S.’s “neoliberal experiment,” it’s not unusual in
Portland, LA. or Seattle to see walkers and wheelchairs next to tents
on the street. And the real human misery—the economic and housing
fallout–from COVID-19 has yet to fully register. In 2019, 117
people shuffled off their mortal coils on the streets and
sidewalks of D.C. In L.A., 1039
died on the street, no bed to cushion their aching bones, no roof
overhead, no privacy, no sanitation, no dignity.
If speeches by Martin
Luther King, Jr. were high school seniors, hands down, the one voted
least likely to be read by American school children would be his 1967
sermon “Beyond
Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence.”
As radical as the
“military industrial complex” might sound the first time
Americans hear it, the term wasn’t the demon spawn of Karl Marx, or
the Weather Underground. President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s speech
writer coined the term in the
farewell speech he wrote for him.
This was in 1961, back
when the orderly succession of putatively democratically elected
presidents was a given in the U.S., no matter how many coups
Eisenhower and the
Dulles Brothers had busied themselves orchestrating in Guatemala,
Iran, Indonesia, the Philippines, and God–and historians–only
know where else. Jack and Jackie and their Camelot myth-making
press machine were about to sweep into the White House, followed by
more military advisors and troops into Vietnam.
MLK would paint the
consequences of the military industrial complex in far starker, more
vivid, human and urgent terms than Eisenhower. The U.S., Dr. King
seems to have suggested, was a war junkie–and it was a given that
war and racism went hand in hand. The Vietnam War, King argued, was
poisoning the country with racism and hatred:
This business of
burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes
with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into
the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark
and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically
deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love.
The sniper fire that
cut King down exactly a year later to the day—on April 4, 1968 in
Memphis—likely said as much about his 1967 speech as it did his
support for Memphis Sanitation workers. In his 1967 speech King
famously compared the war in Vietnam to a “Demonic destructive
suction tube” that vacuumed up funds that might have otherwise gone
to LBJ’s “War on Poverty.”
If you want to get a
really good idea of how much war just cost the U.S. in the time it
took you to read this article, check out the National Priorities
Project. The military budget for 2020 alone at $738
billion, , would be enough to provide “24.6 million [year-long]
Hospital Stays for COVID-19 Patients,” “20.96 million [four year
] Scholarships for University Students,” or “23.65 million People
receiving $600 weekly unemployment insurance payments for 1 Year.”
There’s plenty of money. It’s just helping the super-rich, who
are profiting at all our expenses.
King condemned in no
uncertain terms the massive aerial spraying of the defoliant Agent
Orange as akin to Nazi medical experimentation. “What do [the
Vietnamese] think as we test out our latest weapons on them,” asked
King, “just as Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in
the concentration camps of Europe?” Today in the U.S., the test
subjects are the kids in Detroit drinking water contaminated
with lead, while Nestles is pumping, bottling, and profiting to
the tune of 400
gallons a minute of fresh Michigan water; the Water Protectors at
Standing Rock drenched for months with pepper spray, tear gas, and
reportedly other chemical agents, along with water in freezing
and subzero temperatures; the Black Lives Matter activists
sprayed—sprayed along with hundreds of houseless people—all
summer on the streets of Portland with chemical
weapons banned for use in war; the BIPOC, elderly, and people
with disabilities, dying
at vastly higher rates of COVID-19.
And meanwhile, Vietnam
is witnessing the third generation born with Agent Orange-related
health effects, from missing eyes and limbs to spinal bifida and
severe intellectual disabilities. The Middle East is littered with
depleted uranium, cancer rates are soaring, and babies are born with
a wide range of “congenital
anomalies.”
By 1967, King had
struck up a friendship with the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat
Hanh. And by ‘67, King, like every other major organizer in the
Civil Rights Movement, had been pegged by the FBI as a Communist.
Make of it what you will, it seems likely to me that given enough
time on earth, King and Jara might have had long talks, written songs
together, formed a fast and deep friendship. In his song “Derecho
De Vivir En Paz”–or “The Right to Live in Peace”–released
on his 1971 album, Jara wrote of “Indochina… the place/beyond the
wide sea,/where they ruin the flower/ with genocide and napalm.”
He and King were
definitely on the same page about the Vietnam War and so much more.
Feminists, in
particular, have aptly spoken of our collective relationship to Trump
as akin to domestic or intimate partner violence, with Trump a
gaslighting batterer. But as metaphors go, battering and gaslighting
are also fitting descriptions of the Chicago Boys’ neoliberal Magic
Trick— brought into Chile, and later the Middle East, with guns and
tanks. It’s the magic trick ordinary Americans have watched this
year, as we’ve been fleeced of taxes that have gone to fatten the
unimaginable wealth of a handful of billionaires, and to endless
weapons and wars that have made the U.S. the hands down leader of the
global arms trade. Martin Luther King, Jr. warned us in 1967 that “A
nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military
defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual
death.” Fifty years later, at the end of the Trump presidency, we
seem to be rapidly approaching garlic and wooden stake territory.
Still too many
Democrats are breathing a sigh of relief now that the
Batterer-in-Chief has been handed his eviction papers, and they are
looking to Biden as our collective white knight, our national pater
familias.
But anyone who knows anything about the dynamics of battering will
tell you that the myth of the White Knight is a racist and
patriarchal set up for repeating the cycle of abuse. We’re sitting
now on the razor’s edge of fascism, and fascism isn’t interested
in electoral cycles. We can’t count on having another four years to
sort the situation out.
The RootsAction “No
Honeymoon for Biden” campaign, embraced by Nina Turner,
recognizes the urgency of the situation and would go a long way
toward undoing the damage done by fifty years of neoliberalism. It
would shift funds from militarism and mass incarceration to universal
healthcare and a more inclusive, multi-racial “Green New Deal”
that would fund free higher education. The campaign also calls for a
$15 federal minimum wage and for Biden to cancel student debt across
the board. Research has shown that wiping out existing student debt
would be shot
in the arm for the economy. We need to pull back from our
domestic and global cycle of battering and make government work for
working people if we are going to stop a free fall into fascism and
climate chaos.
Finally, there are a
lot of lessons the U.S. could draw from the Chilean fight against
fascism and the legacy of Pinochet. The global spark that Las Tesis
set off this past year with street performances that drew thousands
of women to witness collectively to their shared experience of sexual
harassment and assault is a testimony to the power of art to mobilize
resistance and speak truth to power. And the immortal life of Victor
Jara–his presence this past year on the streets of Santiago,
where thousands of hands fluttered across guitars–testifies
to the power of art to preserve history even in the face of guns,
tanks and bullets bent on wiping it out.
Now, more than ever,
we need to demand reinvestment in the arts—from K-12 to higher
education. To paraphrase the quote Woody Guthrie famously scrawled
across his guitar: we need art to kill fascism. What better reminder
than the hollow man in the White House of the frustration life
without art generates? We need art to foster empathy, to remind us of
our collective humanity, to preserve in our national memory records
of those who stood for justice, and those who collaborated to
undermine it. We need art to preserve history, to sustain and
energize us, to give us courage for the long struggle ahead.
Dedicated to the
memory of Roxane Elizabeth Roberts (November 5, 1952-December 24,
2018).
Desiree Hellegers
is a co-founder and affiliated faculty of the Collective for Social
and Environmental Justice at Washington State University Vancouver.
and a member of the Socialist-Feminist Old Mole Variety Hour
Collective on KBOO, Portland, Oregon’s community-supported radio
station.
=====================================
*
‘Beetje dom’ om te geloven dat de situatie in de VS en haar
buitenlandbeleid zal veranderen met oorlogsmisdadiger en
mensenrechtenschender Biden…… Bovendien zit Biden in de zak van
de financiële maffia en daarmee in die van de oliemaatschappijen,
het militair-industrieel complex, de farmaceutische maffia en andere
grote misdadige bedrijven >> hoe kan je ook maar enige
verandering verwachten van zo’n figuur??!!! Toevallig werd vanmorgen op de BBC gemeld dat een aantal grote bedrijven en banken hun steun stoppen aan republikeinen die achter Trump blijven staan, ofwel deze bedrijven kopen de politiek niet alleen voorafgaand aan de verkiezingen, maar doen dat doorlopend, hoe kan je dan nog spreken van een democratie, als de politici volledig in de zak zitten van bedrijven….?? (om nog maar te zwijgen over het belemmeren van de stembusgang voor een groot aantal VS burgers)
Zie ook: ‘Met de winst van Biden is het fascisme in de VS bepaald niet weggestemd‘ (en zie zeker de links in dat bericht over de ‘geweldige’ of beter gezegd gewelddadige oorlogsmisdadiger Joe Biden)
‘Feest in Chili: fascistische grondwet verdwijnt voor een nieuwe!!‘
‘Chili groot aantal (zwaar) gewonden bij voortdurende protesten‘
‘Protesten Chili en Ecuador: geweld tegen demonstranten gesteund door massamedia‘ (en zie de links in dat bericht)
‘Chili, de protesten en de verslaggeving‘ (en zie de links in dat bericht, o.a. over het Amazonewoud en de strijd van burgers tegen oliemaatschappijen, maar ook over de situatie in Brazilië en Venezuela)
‘Chili en de gestolen baby’s, alweer met een ‘mooie rol’ van de rk kerk‘
‘Venezuela is nog lang niet verslagen door de VS‘
‘Pinochet (ex-dictator Chili) werd 20 jaar geleden gearresteerd in Londen‘
‘9/11: de VS heeft niets geleerd……‘
‘VS buitenlandbeleid sinds WOII: een lange lijst van staatsgrepen en oorlogen……….‘
‘List of wars involving the United States‘
‘VS: openlijke militaire oefening met terreurgroep in Syrië……‘
‘NAVO gaat VS helpen in Zuid-Amerika terreur uit te oefenen: Colombia lid van de NAVO………‘
‘VS commando’s vechten o.a. in Midden- en Zuid-Amerika, aldus het VS ministerie van oorlog………‘
‘De VS, een duivels imperium, dat achter haar psychopathisch moordende troepen staat??‘
‘De war on drugs is veel dodelijker dan over het algemeen gedacht‘
‘VS vermoordde meer dan 20 miljoen mensen sinds het einde van WOII……..‘
‘CIA en 70 jaar desinformatie in Europese opiniebladen…………‘
Voor meer berichten over de steenkoolcentrale in de Sundarbans, vul deze naam in op het zoekvlak rechts bovenin deze pagina. Dat geldt ook voor andere namen en instanties die genoemd woorden in het artikel van Hellegers (de ruimte voor labels is wat mij betreft te klein, t.w. 140 tekens)
