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January
30, 2002
Michael
Ratner
Why
the US Must Adhere
to the Geneva Convention
Susan
Block
The
Great Pretzel Swallower
and Guantanamo Porn
January
29, 2002
Gary Leupp
Why
This War Was, and Remains, Utterly Wrong
Alexander
Cockburn
The
Birds of Kandahar
Patrick
Cockburn
Afghan
Opium Trade
Back in Business
January
28, 2002
Larry
Chin
Brosnahan
for the Defense
Mokhiber/Weissman
Tyranny
of the Bottom Line
George
E. Curry
Civil
Rights Nominee Called Affirmative Action "Racist"
Sen. Russ
Feingold
Campaign
Finance Reform?
Think Enron
John Chuckman
Liberal?
Media?
January
27, 2002
Mokhiber
and Weissman
Enron's
Drip, Drip, Drip
Tom Turnipseed
MLK
Jr.'s Dream Perverted
January
26, 2002
Norman
Madarsz
Adieu,
Bourdieu
January
25, 2002
National
Lawyers Guild
Know
Your Rights
Alexander
Cockburn
You
Call This Terrorism?
CounterPunch
Wire
Cal
Energy Crisis Hoax:
It Wasn't A Shortage,
It Was a Shakedown
Tariq
Ali
Kashmir,
Klinghoffer,
the Kurds and Chomsky
Nadine
Strossen
Protecting
MLK Jr.'s Legacy:
Justice and Liberty After 9/11
January
24, 2002
Robert
Fisk
Turkey
Targets Chomsky
Dean Baker
Lying
on Top:
Ken Lay One of Many
David
Vest
Idiot
Wind
January
23, 2002
Terry
Waite
Guantanamo
Prisoners:
Justice or Revenge?
Molly
Secours
The
Case of Abu-Ali:
Racism and the Death Penalty
Robert
Jensen
Speak
Out, Get Slimed
January
22, 2002
Brendan
Cooney
Moby-Dick
and the Hunt
for Osama bin Laden
Rick Giombetti
Progressive
Pols for Enron?
Judith
Resnik
Invading
the Courts?
Kevin
Alexander Gray
The
Crisis in Black Leadership
January
21, 2002
Marjorie
Cohn
Will
Walker's Words
Be Used Against Him?
Ahmad
Faruqui
MLK
Jr. and the Palestinians
January
19. 2002
Jordan
Green
Enron
Stole Our Future
January
18, 2002
Tom Turnipseed
The
Enron Model
Walt Brasch
Enron
at the White House
CounterPunch
Wire
Human
Rights Group Says Guantanamo Prisoners Must
Be Treated as POWs
January
17, 2002
Gideon
Levy
Bulldozing
Rafah
Uri Avnery
That
Weapons Shipment
January
16, 2002
John Chuckman
The
Angel and the Pretzel
Lawrence
McGuire
Subverting
the
Geneva Convention
Kathy
Kelly
An
Open Letter to
Richard Perle on Iraq
January
15, 2002
George
Monbiot
Greenpeace,
Lord Melchett
and the Business of Betrayal
Jack McCarthy
Follow
the Pretzel
William
Blum
Atta
and the Times:
Follow the Changing Story
Edward
Said
Emerging
Alternatives
in Palestine
A Photographic Journal of Life
in an Afghan Refugee Camp
By Judith Mann
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
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Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
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War Diary
CIA's Assassination Plan a History of
Torture in US Prisons
bin Laden and Bush
Business Connections
Aisha Ikramuddin on the Hidden Hype
of US Food Bombs
Peter Linebaugh on
Pakistan
Christopher Hitchens' Love for Mrs. Thatcher
Jiang Zemin Tells Bush:
Nuke 'Em
Search
CounterPunch
Read Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
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Reviews of Gore:
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January
30, 2002
Eliding the Truth:
Proud to Be an
American?
By Jay Moore
I spent a recent weekend in Plymouth, Massachusetts.
Plymouth, to remind you, is the place where American folklore,
if not necessarily American history, got its first start. It
is the location where a small group of English exiles arrived
in 1620 seeking freedom for their form of Christian religion.
They were almost totally inept when it came to living in the
new land, and many of them perished in the cold and hunger of
that first long hard winter. But the new colony was rescued from
oblivion by some kindhearted members of the Wampanoags who brought
them gifts of food and then taught them how to grow the local
crops, corn, beans and squashes. Every American school child
out of kindergarten can recite back their teacher's parable of
Thanksgiving in which the newcomers and the local people sat
down in cheerful amity to share an abundant harvest meal together.
Plymouth is full of Pilgrim memorabilia
and some Pilgrim kitsch. There are statues of the Pilgrim leaders,
for whom the hotels and motor inns are named today, in their
dark capes and peaked hats along the street near the waterfront.
There is the famous Plymouth Rock, surrounded by a marble colonnade,
where the Pilgrims supposedly first stepped ashore long ago.
Among other attractions for today's visitors, there is the inevitable
Pilgrim Wax Museum and there is the "Mayflower II",
a replica of the Pilgrims' ship, floating in the harbor and,
in the summertime, taking aboard crowds of tourists. No doubt
one of the odder places in this town is at an inn named for an
early Pilgrim governor. This inn advertizes a Pilgrim-themed
recreation room with a hot tub that surmounts a plastic-molded
Plymouth Rock and the wooden bow of Mayfloweresque ship housing
a water slide and spouting warm bilge water into the swimming
pool. It must truly be seen to be believed.
On a hill overlooking the whole downtown
waterfront scene is a statue of Massasoit, the friendly Wampanoag
chief, with his hand raised high in greeting. Yet, try as one
might, there is nothing to be found in Plymouth's downtown public
spaces that acknowledges what subsequently happened to the Wampanoags,
or other Indians, with the "first settlement" of America.
For all their essential early help, the Wampanoags by the later
seventeenth century had gotten in the way of the white newcomers'
avid land hunger. When Indians around New England united to resist
further losses of their territory and rose up in 1675 in what
the Pilgrims and Puritans called "King Philip's War"
-- "King Philip" was the current Wampanoag leader,
Metacom - hundreds of Indian men, women and children alike were
slaughtered without mercy or were cruelly allowed to starve to
death or were rounded up and shipped off into slavery. This was
justified in the whites' minds by their conviction that they
were a chosen people of God and that the Indians were uncivilized
heathen.
How many school children are taught about
these facts, too? Very few. Plymouth is a standing metaphor for
how the inconvenient facts are so often elided in the retelling
of American history in favor of comforting, simpleminded folk
tales. A couple of year ago, a group of American Indians and
their supporters from around New England assembled in Plymouth
on Thanksgiving Day and tried to march through the town to remind
the tourists and the townies about the real history of American
genocide against the original inhabitants. Tellingly, they were
beset before they could go very far by the local constabulary;
some of them were beaten and then arrested for trying to be heard
with their unwanted story amidst the town's other self-congratulatory
events. No doubt, as with other dissidents, the Indian marchers
were labeled, without any irony, as "un-American".
Today Plymouth, like many other parts
of the U.S. in the aftermath of 911, is replete with displays
of flags and other overt signs of patriotism, including all those
expensive gas-guzzling SUV's sporting their "United We Stand"
and "Proud to be an American" stickers. Yet, there
seems not much of a clue among most persons in Plymouth, or elsewhere,
about why somebody somewhere might have gotten so very angry
as to have perpetrated such an atrocity against the United States.
Little wonder that this might be the case when the nation's history,
if it is taught much at all, is put over in such a fashion, as
at Plymouth, as a form of indoctrination in a sort of national
mythology in which Americans are a special breed with God on
their side who can basically do no wrong.
Yes, there is much to be proud of and
celebrate in American history. In particular, there are all the
inspiring experiences and stories of the various groups of immigrants
coming to these shores, one after another, and continuing right
up to the present day. Like the Pilgrims, many of them struggled
so very hard to overcome adversities and to better themselves
and their descendants. There are also all the great stories of
the often-persecuted and imprisoned American dissidents, free-thinkers
and activists, of one sort or another, from the seventeenth century's
Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams to the Dave Dellingers and
Mumia Abu-Jamals of today, who have had the courage to challenge
the prevailing power-structures and conventional ways of thinking.
When I teach American history, I delight
in telling these kinds of stories -- although it needs to be
pointed out that these kind of stories do not constitute some
kind of American exceptionalism that sets the U.S. apart from,
and above, other peoples. Such stories can be located throughout
the histories of peoples all over our complex and lovely Planet
Earth.
However, at the same time, interwoven
with this positive history in ways that are often very hard to
take apart from it and to treat as separate entities, there exists
in American history an equally long, terribly shameful history
of exploitation, racism and violence directed against other peoples
both inside and outside the U.S. I cannot be proud of these things.
I cannot forget that these things have taken place and help to
whitewash the history of this country. Nor can I close my eyes
to the fact that similar, indeed often uncannily similar, things
continue to be happening today. The wrongful history that also
began back in the seventeenth century has not come to an end.
Much as it did with the Indians and enslaved
Africans in earlier centuries on this continent, the U.S. is
exploiting the labors and resources from people all around the
world, most notably as a pertinent background to the present
conflict, the oil wealth in the Middle East. Nowadays, this foreign
imperialism helps to explain our relative prosperity in the U.S.
-- and all those SUV's on the highways -- as much or more than
any hard, diligent work performed by the descendants of the Pilgrims
or of the others seeking freedom and a better life who came and
settled here next.
The U.S. is supporting Israel. Very much
in the mold of our own earlier history, this is another settler
colony which, believing itself entitled by God, is stealing land
from the native inhabitants, the Palestinians, and is driving
those who are left onto impoverished apartheid-style reservations.
Repression and torture techniques are
taught at places like the infamous School of the Americas. Billions
of our tax dollars are being spent on weapons systems to intimidate
and put down Third World rebel groups and nationalistic leaders
who might want to retain for their own populations some fairer
proportion of what ought to be humanity's common bounty of nature
and to enjoy some greater control over their own national destinies.
We end up paying for this spending on violence in more ways then
one. The horrible "blowback" of September 11th is another
one of them.
Now, even huger allotments of this kind
of mistaken spending are being sold to us by our leaders in the
ostensible name of our "national interests"overseas
and for the sake of protecting "national security"
here on the home front. The truth is quite different: This is
actually about protecting U.S. corporate investments overseas
and enabling the even further enrichment in this country of the
Military-Industrial Complex, which Wall Street indicators show,
while much of the rest of the domestic economy tanks, is set
to benefit immensely from America's new war that is seemingly
without end and from the Bush administration's enormous largesse.
Another excuse was needed after the ending of the Cold War to
keep military spending at high levels and to make further cuts
into human services. "Terrorism" has become the answer,
the new anti-communism bogeyman.
This is not meant to justify scalping
(which some historians think the Indians actually picked up from
the white settlers who put bounties on Indian scalps) or any
modern-day acts of terrorism against civilians (which certainly
were taught to the likes of Osama bin Laden by the CIA in the
previous Afghan War against the Soviets). But, let's be frank,
why shouldn't Metacom and the Wampanoags and other Indians have
been angry at the English invaders who showed up uninvited, took
what they could take with their superior weapons, and wouldn't
go away? Why shouldn't Arabs and people in many other parts of
the Third World today be considerably incensed likewise at the
U.S.?
Above all, shouldn't we ourselves be
angry at the unjust things being done to other human beings in
our names, and with our tax dollars, by those in the corporate
boardrooms and in the halls of political power -- often one and
the same -- who actually call the shots in this country?
Telling the full truth, including all
the less-palatable facts about America's historical past, might
help to illuminate the present. Events like 911 might be better
understood - indeed, prevented. At least, if American citizens
would get a more complete understanding of our history, we wouldn't
be so much at loss in making sense out of why we are not always
perceived in much of the rest of the world as being the "good
guys". The Germans and the Japanese have begun to come to
grips with the heavily mixed bags of their own respective histories,
and they have become somewhat better and more humble countries
for it, I think. It is full time for us in the U.S. to do the
same.
Maybe then I can feel right about putting
a "Proud to Be an American" sticker on my vehicle,
along with the ones that say "Thinking Globally, Acting
Locally" and "Justice Not War".
Jay Moore
teaches history at the University of Vermont in Burlington. He
is also the man behind Jay's
Leftist and Progressive Internet Resources Directory.
He can be reached at: pieinsky@igc.org
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