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White House press secretary Robert Gibbs let loose on leftist critics of the administration the other day:

"I hear these people saying he's like George Bush. Those people ought to be drug tested," Gibbs said. "I mean, it's crazy. ... They will be satisfied when we have Canadian healthcare and we've eliminated the Pentagon. That's not reality. ... They wouldn’t be satisfied if Dennis Kucinich was president."


Frankly I think this should cost him his job, which is not something I say lightly. It won't, though, because he's only saying what everyone in the White House is thinking. But outbursts like this, and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel's lovely 'f*cking retards' comment last year, and so on, are going to cost the Democrats dearly on election day this year and in 2012. They can't afford to keep insulting the folks who are most likely to contribute, to volunteer, and to vote on their behalf. They may think they can rely solely on the wealthy donors who flocked to them in 2008, but they can't.

These outbursts also show what they're thinking: we're leftists, they've billed themselves as "leftists," therefore we owe them our vote, our support, and our praise. But leftist bloggers don't work for the Democratic party, and this is what really annoys them. In 2009 they established "Common Purpose," an initiative to essentially get leftist bloggers to start spreading White House talking points for them. Well, hey, it works for the Right, right? ;)

But let's get to the real meat of the problem, which is: the Obama administration is doing a lot of the same things that annoyed leftist bloggers when the Bush administration did them. Leftists complained then, and complain now, not because they are anti-Republican partisan hacks, but because they are anti-injustice.

Foremost in my mind, and the one that I think 20, 30 years from now is going to really tarnish Obama's legacy: the establishment of a permanent authority whose purpose is to imprison people -- citizens and non-citizens -- indefinitely without trial. This is an indelible blemish on the American human rights record akin to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. But they "stopped torture" (they didn't, but they said they would), and they "tried" to close the prison at Guantanamo, so we should be happy, right?

Continuing the war in Afghanistan despite the apparent absence of any evidence that it's making the US safer from Islamist terrorism? There's that, too. People can oppose the war for rational reasons that don't involve the desire to replace the Pentagon with a hippie flower garden. Then there's: appointing bankster wolves to watch the economic henhouse... refusing to prosecute telecoms for their willingness to aid DHS in their program of mass invasion of privacy without search warrants... refusing to prosecute agents who committed torture or investigate detainee deaths or accounts of torture... refusing to investigate the Katrina disaster... and these are all things Democrats did of their own free will without being able to blame them on Republican obstructionism.

So this is not, as the White House wants to paint it, a matter of being upset because the public option was taken out of the health care bill or because other legislative compromises were made to pass bills. Yes, those things suck too, but they are forgivable and they can be fixed. But it turns out we're really bad at paying no attention to the man behind the curtain.
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I think I'm finally ready to comment on the Israel/Palestine situation. Because something finally clicked into place for me, something deep enough that now I feel like saying to myself, "Thanks, Captain Obvious," though it is not something that is ever talked about and therefore seems to be the invisible elephant in the room.

The historical perspective is shunned in American discourse. Maybe it's a consequence of not having much of our own, I don't know. But the relevant historical perspective here is this: 3,400 years of history in which Jewish people have not been allowed to live in peace by any of their neighbors. There are times and places where there have been exceptions but all have proven without exception to be temporary. The figure that puts this in perspective for me is the estimate by writer James Carroll that the Jewish population of the world today would be 200 million, instead of 13.5 million, if not for all of the wars and persecutions that have occurred since the Roman-Jewish war 1,870 years ago.

So when you add that history to the history of aggression against the modern state of Israel, it is not perhaps completely outlandish to conclude that Israel will never have peace, so it can at least ensure its own survival and security. From this perspective, peace overtures and alliances are doomed to ultimate failure, and so are only a means to buy time. From this perspective, international public relations are irrelevant; it doesn't matter what the world thinks of their retaliations against Hamas in Gaza, or their building of settlements in the West Bank, or their raid this weekend on a flotilla in the Mediterranean, because they believe whether or not they act peacefully, inevitably the world will turn to condemnation and war.

There's a chilling, unassailable logic at work here. You cannot prove to someone who believes this way that it could well be a self-fulfilling prophesy. If peace talks fail, it only seems to prove the point. If allies criticize and withdraw, it is not seen as an indication that they should change their strategy; it looks like proof they are right.

Another dimension to this perspective is the conclusion that even if what Israel is doing in the West Bank and Gaza is wrong, it is justifiable on the grounds that it buys future generations of Jews in Israel a better chance at survival. Frankly... I find that last sentence heartbreaking. But I think it is the heart which drives policies which any of us should objectively find revolting. I hope the people who do them are as revolted when they consider their own acts, but I think I can begin to understand where they are coming from if they cannot see an alternative. I don't know how the rest of the world can say, in a way that will get through, "Yes, we're as aware of all the history as you are, but really, trust us; stop this and there will be peace."

The one thing that undermines this perspective is that not all Jews agree with it. The argument that Jews who disagree with the Israeli strategy are "self-loathing" only goes so far, especially when for example among the activists in the Gaza aid flotilla is a Jewish holocaust survivor. In a prominent recent article in the New York Review of Books, Peter Beinart wrote:

In 2003, several prominent Jewish philanthropists hired Republican pollster Frank Luntz to explain why American Jewish college students were not more vigorously rebutting campus criticism of Israel. In response, he unwittingly produced the most damning indictment of the organized American Jewish community that I have ever seen.

The philanthropists wanted to know what Jewish students thought about Israel. Luntz found that they mostly didn’t. “Six times we have brought Jewish youth together as a group to talk about their Jewishness and connection to Israel,” he reported. “Six times the topic of Israel did not come up until it was prompted. Six times these Jewish youth used the word ‘they‘ rather than ‘us‘ to describe the situation.”


Beinart goes on to argue that the liberal plank of the American Jewish community has proven more willing to distance itself from Israel than from leftist critics of Israeli policy.

I don't really have an answer to this. There is no nation of the world which does not have blood on its hands; how therefore can any nation assure Israel that if they stand down from their hard line, there will never be another holocaust or even another invasion? In the meantime, what is the toll of their hard line stance on their humanity?
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Kyrgyzstan is a central Asian nation which shares a border with China (the Tien Shan mountains form the natural border between them). It's a secular Muslim country. The Silk Road passed through it, and historically it is tied to the Mongolian Khanates and was at the center of the Manichaean sphere of influence.

Most Americans have probably never heard of it, though we have a military base there, a former Soviet base we are leasing from the Kyrgyz government. It's a strategic supply point for US forces in Afghanistan. The base is there so that it wouldn't be in Pakistan, which would be problematic for numerous reasons, and also because relations soured with the Uzbek government and the US had to close its base there.

Yesterday many of the Kyrgyz people took to the streets to complain about rapid rises in utility bills and the cost of living, and in the ensuing street violence -- over 100 people were killed -- the protesters ousted the president and overthrew the government. So far I haven't heard anything about how spontaneous this was versus whether it was arranged by the opposition (who was curiously poised to assume power quickly). I think, though, this is the kind of scenario that keeps CIA folks up at night. The lease on the military base expires in June and the new junta has not expressed much interest in renewing it.
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Politico is reporting that Ron Paul has proposed a plan to deal with the Indian Ocean pirate situation: issue letters of marque and reprisal. This idea is an old favorite of Constitution-wonks, and sounds reasonable until you think about what it would mean.

What would result is the formation of a para-Navy, a private company hired and empowered to conduct naval combat operations against pirates in the Indian Ocean. A maritime Blackwater, more or less. Accountable to no-one. Essentially assured zero reprisals in the event of human rights violations on the open sea, and with the seal of approval of the US government. "Those fishermen looked like pirates to me!"

I'd be hard pressed to imagine a worse idea. (Actually, "nuke the pirates" sounds like a worse idea, but only just worse.)
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Jon Stewart skewers CNBC's business news shows for their role in selling the poison kool-aid:

Read more... )

And, sorry to do this to ya, but, he also skewers Obama's Iraq policy:

Read more... )
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Note - the video has some triggery graphic stuff at the beginning.

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I've seen this reported in a few places: Iceland, one of the most prosperous nations in the world, is in full financial collapse.
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My prediction is, we have about three days, at best, before Pakistan declares war on the United States, because of crap like this.

When that happens, we have about two and a half to four weeks before the mission in Afghanistan becomes a logistical nightmare. Afghanistan is landlocked. How do US troops and supplies get there? They fly through Pakistan. Where else they gonna go, Iran?

...Hmm. Uh oh.
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I suppose the mass media is downplaying this because they think it's ancient history and no one will care. But if there are people alive now who remember it, it's not ancient history.

As the Chinese-backed North Korean army rapidly overran South Korea in 1950, they released leftists whom the southern regime had rounded up in mass arrests and recruited them to help administer their occupation. When southern Korean leaders learned this was going on, they decided to slaughter their political prisoners en masse rather than allow them to be freed and assist the North Korean regime.

It will never be known how many people were thusly murdered, but an estimate of 100,000 is called by at least one historian "very conservative." US General Douglas MacArthur was aware of the mass executions and numerous men under his command colluded in them.

On June 29, 1950, as the southern army and its U.S. advisers retreated southward, reports from Seoul said the conquering northerners had emptied the southern capital's prisons, and ex-inmates were reinforcing the new occupation regime.

In a confidential narrative he later wrote for Army historians, Lt. Col. Rollins S. Emmerich, a senior U.S. adviser, described what then happened in the southern port city of Busan, formerly known as Pusan.

Emmerich was told by a subordinate that a South Korean regimental commander, determined to keep Busan’s political prisoners from joining the enemy, planned "to execute some 3,500 suspected peace-time Communists, locked up in the local prison," according to the declassified 78-page narrative, first uncovered by the newspaper Busan Ilbo at the U.S. National Archives.

Emmerich wrote that he summoned the Korean, Col. Kim Chong-won, and told him the enemy would not reach Busan in a few days as Kim feared, and that "atrocities could not be condoned."

But the American then indicated conditional acceptance of the plan.

"Colonel Kim promised not to execute the prisoners until the situation became more critical," wrote Emmerich, who died in 1986. "Colonel Kim was told that if the enemy did arrive to the outskirts of (Busan) he would be permitted to open the gates of the prison and shoot the prisoners with machine guns."

... Emmerich wrote that soon after his session with Kim, he met with South Korean officials in Daegu, 55 miles north of Busan, and persuaded them "at that time" not to execute 4,500 prisoners immediately, as planned. Within weeks, hundreds were being executed in the Daegu area.

from U.S. ignored Korea killings; Ally executed 100,000, new research shows


In a way, this is of a piece with US forces operating under rules of engagement that called for the killing of literally anyone who moved.

On 26 July the US 8th Army, the highest level of command in Korea, issued orders to stop all Korean civilians. 'No, repeat, no refugees will be permitted to cross battle lines at any time. Movement of all Koreans in group will cease immediately.' On the very same day the first major disaster involving civilians struck.

The stone bridge near the village of No Gun Ri spans a small stream. It is similar to a great many others that cross the landscape of South Korea, except that the walls of this bridge were, until very recently, pockmarked by hundreds of bullet holes. On the very day that the US 8th Army delivered its stop refugee order in July 1950, up to 400 South Korean civilians gathered by the bridge were killed by US forces from the 7th Cavalry Regiment. Some were shot above the bridge, on the railroad tracks. Others were strafed by US planes. More were killed under the arches in an ordeal that local survivors say lasted for three days.

persepolis

Apr. 22nd, 2008 03:44 pm
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[livejournal.com profile] cowgrrl and i saw Persepolis on Sunday, and found it to be engaging and moving. The flow of storytelling has been tweaked a bit from the graphic novels on which they are based, but the substance of it is still the same.

I'm not really sure how to comment on it. It doesn't really require much comment; the movie (and the autobiographical graphic novels by exiled Iranian Marjane Satrapi on which they were based) speak well and plainly for themselves.

What struck me most was the way the movie illustrates, by giving anecdotes of day to day life in an authoritarian society, how irrelevant ideology really is to the practice of authoritarianism. It is at its heart, at every level of interaction -- from the personal and interpersonal to the institutional -- a system that gives bullies almost free reign.

I think, too, in portraying the simple human desires of the people around her, she exposes the flaws in the common conception that the Iranian people are somehow fundamentally more barbaric than Westerners -- the underlying attitude that by having a more brutish nature they subtly invite authoritarianism or prevent a more egalitarian society from taking hold. She invites the American or British viewer (without beating her over the head with a stick) to examine the ways in which her own governments have intervened in the political shape of Iran to push it towards authoritarianism. The name she chose for the work, "Persepolis," must have been chosen to invite us to contemplate the long history of Iranian civilization.
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If you haven't seen the Yahoo!/60 Minutes video segments on the ship breaking industry in Bangladesh, i recommend you do.

At one point in the series of segments, a commentator says something like, this is capitalism at its most raw and gritty. A beach drenched with dumped oil, chemicals, asbestos, debris, and who knows what else. A wealthy Bangladeshi buys the ships as-is from Western companies, who would otherwise have to pay expensive disposal costs in their own countries, and sails them right up onto the beach where laborers, many of them children, tear them down rivet by rivet. They have no training or protective gear and about 50 die every year in accidents; and goddess only knows how many more die from inhaling smoke and other chemical exposures.

But you know? It's too easy to blame capitalism. Yes, this particular instance is the result of a capitalist mechanism. But it's not as if we haven't seen environmental disasters and poor working conditions in socialist countries, either. No, the underlying mechanism here is racism, classism, and neo-colonialism, and the way to fix it lies in deeply re-examining our ethics of taking -- and in this case, our ethics of dumping.
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Reza Aslan has made a few waves with a piece in the Washington Post addressing the self-congratulatory idea being tossed around by the talking heads, of Barack Obama's "soft power:"

The argument usually goes something like this: Imagine that a young Muslim boy in, say, Egypt, is watching television when suddenly he sees this black man -- the grandson of a Kenyan Muslim, no less! -- who spent a small part of his childhood in Indonesia, taking the oath of office as president of the United States. Suddenly, the boy realizes that the United States is not the demonic, anti-Islamic place he's always been told it was. Meanwhile, all around the Muslim world, other young would-be jihadists have a similar epiphany. "Maybe Osama bin Laden is wrong," they think. "Maybe America is not so bad after all."

Mind you, it is not anything this new president says or does that changes their minds. As the conservative pundit Andrew Sullivan describes this imaginary scene in his recent paean to Obama in the Atlantic Monthly, it is Obama's face -- just his face -- that "proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can."

As someone who once was that young Muslim boy everyone seems to be imagining (albeit in Iran rather than Egypt), I'll let you in on a secret: He could not care less who the president of the United States is. He is totally unconcerned with whatever barriers a black (or female, for that matter) president would be breaking. He couldn't name three U.S. presidents if he tried. He cares only about one thing: what the United States will do.


I think Aslan is overstating the case a bit -- in some places of the world at least, they do indeed care about whether or not the son of a Kenyan man becomes president of the United States. And even if people in various parts of the world get excited about the religious and racial implications of an Obama victory, the honeymoon will be quickly over if US troops do not soon leave their country, or if we maintain trade policies that impoverish children worldwide.

But Aslan does bring us to an important point, which is, namely, that the pundit-ocrats are already patting themselves on the back for living in such an enlightened country that we could actually elect a black man president.

Not to say it won't be a big thing, but we do not get medals just for voting for a black man. We don't get brownie points. We don't get to toot our own horn far and wide and proclaim that we are enlightened and crap. Fighting racism is not a series of feel-good proclamations, like parades on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. It's about righting the tangible harms and inequalities that have been done to people, and which hurt them physically and mentally every day of their lives. We cannot simply elect a black man president and then proclaim that racism is a thing of the past when there are still, when there are still, tens of thousands of New Orleans residents displaced from their homes.
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It's worse than you knew in Pakistan. Barnett Rubin writes:

I called a friend in Lahore this morning. The obstacles [to holding the election on January 8 as scheduled] are not just that electoral materials (possibly including those prepared for rigging) were destroyed in the rioting. The country's infrastructure is under severe stress. In Lahore there are only 7 hours of electricity a day, and water pressure is also reported to be unreliable (I know those of you in Kabul may not feel their pain). Optic fiber lines were cut in Sindh, blacking out telecommunications for a while. The front page of Dawn online yields the following: There has been massive damage to the country's rail network. Fuel is in short supply, and the shortages are likely to get worse. The stock market and the currency are both crashing. Government ministers are charging "foreign elements" (i.e. India) with organizing the riots, a useful excuse for martial law.

In Pakistan there is a massive outburst of rage against Musharraf and everything associated with his government, including the government's claim that it has evidence that the Pakistani Taliban, led by Baitullah Mahsud, carried out the assassination. I still lean toward the hypothesis that the operation was carried out by organizations connected to al-Qaida. Given the relationship of the Pakistani military to jihadi organizations that by no means absolves the Musharraf regime of responsibility.


Some are charging now that Benazir Bhutto was scheduled to meet, only a few hours after the moment when she was assassinated, with two US legislators to give them evidence that Musharraf was planning to rig the election.

Of course, now that the cover-up is a fait accompli and evidence has been destroyed or buried, Scotland Yard is sending people to assist in the investigation. When they toss up their hands in frustration and leave with nothing, Musharraf will be able to bolster his plausible deniability by claiming that even independent investigators could find nothing.
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The American Indian Movement yesterday launched a new, interesting discourse on authority and colonialism, in declaring their intention to dissolve the treaties between the Lakota nation and the United States of America and seek international recognition as a soveriegn nation.

I have to confess, i read about what happened yesterday with a great deal of joy, but also a considerable amount of worry. The AIM is not well regarded by the US federal government and, assuming the feds don't just ignore this completely, they are likely to find themselves being designated a terrorist organization.

If that happens, any US citizen who expresses support for their cause would be considered by the federal government to be a terrorist sympathizer. Let that sink in for a moment.

Consider these two different articles describing yesterday's event:

Read more... )

Here's what i want to draw my attention to, because it's essential to how the world and the US federal government are going to respond to this. The first article describes the Lakota delegation as a collection of freedom-seeking activists who pointedly do not represent the official tribal governments. The second article characterizes the delegation as a collection of Lakota tribal leaders, and treats their declaration as if it has official force.

So, what does this mean? Essentially the move is being done by a collection of influential activists who are denouncing the authority of their official tribal governments and claiming for themselves the authority to negotiate with the United Nations on behalf of the Lakota people.

Can they do that?

Well, that's a hell of a question, isn't it?

Who has the right to speak 'on behalf of' someone else? Well ideally, someone can only speak for you if you have individually granted them that authority. But functionally it's just not possible to get individual assent from every single person.

I'm not familiar enough with the AIM or with Russell Means and his allies to know how much popular backing and authority they have within the Lakota nation. I think, though, that they are acting on their own and counting on widespread popular support for their actions within the Lakota nation: a sort of after-the-fact delegation of authority from the populace to speak for them. The underlying chance they're taking is that a significant number of Lakota Indians will even notice it. So whether or not Means & co. can claim to speak for the Lakota people will become clear over time.

In the meantime, it may be said that they perceive a need to speak out, even without that official, on-paper authority which we all pretend comes from democratic elections. They perceive that they live under an unjust hegemony and feel driven by conscience to speak out against it and to seek allies, to seek like-minded people who have the position and authority to give assistance. As such, they're taking a chance that in claiming authority before the fact it will materialize after the fact when a 'critical mass' of people act as though they have it.

Which is why AIM is seeking the assistance and recognition of the new South American Superpower.

In any case, isn't this basically what a prophet does? I mean, setting aside religious and spiritual dimensions, a prophet is basically someone who speaks on our behalf before the rest of us even know that a thing needs to be said. I'm not saying Russell Means & co. are prophets (you can each be the judge of that), but i am saying that we don't always know who is and who isn't a prophet until after the fact.
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We are witnessing the emergence of a South American superpower. There's barely any mention of it in the U.S. media of course, but the governments of several South American nations just recently formed the Bank of the South, a leftist-Socialist answer to the neo-colonialist IMF and World Bank, and are talking about creating a unified South American currency.
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The Gap has gone into full PR-damage control mode after it was revealed that one of their vendors was selling them clothing made by literal child slaves.

They have plausible deniability of course, because they buy from vendors who hired subcontractors to make their clothing. And they probably are actually appalled by the problem itself, not just by the criticism they're facing. They never told anyone to purchase children as slaves... they just gave their business to whoever could come up with clothing at the lowest price.

The Marxian term for the process at work here is commodity fetishism, which is a distortion in social priorities brought about by putting price tags on things. It's a distortion which blinkers us to the causal effects of our decision-making, the long-range or distant ethical ramifications of continuous cost-cutting and profit-maximization.

One aspect of this distortion is the devaluation, and subsequent discarding, of children.

In the agricultural and pastoral economy, children are a boon and blessing; in the urbanized economic model, they are (economically speaking) a burden. It is not a simple matter of children working on farms and ranches but not working in markets or factories - throughout most of history (including the present), children have occupied a place in the urban division of labor. No, the real issue is that in an urban economy people are separated from the wealth they create. They make things or perform services, for which they receive a wage which is not - which is never - equal to the average revenue product of their labor. What that means, in plain language, is that a person is never paid a wage equal to the value their labor creates.

That extra value is sucked up by the upper class. This is how it is that the gap between rich and poor tends to grow, and this is part of what i have, for two years now, referred to as slow-motion cannibalism.

Simply by virtue of existing in an urbanized society, an individual wage earner can statistically expect their net value to decrease over time. Some people manage to improve their lot; for every one who does, there are two or three who sink further into the whole. This is reflected in our financial life by perpetual debt; unless one owns property and capital, one is in debt forever to landlords and to banks. And to a poor family which has little of worth to give a child upon their birth, a child is an economic drain from the instant she or he is born.

It is a drain that people are willing to bear because of love. But being in debt makes you vulnerable. And a family that starts out with a margin of zero is on very thin ice indeed. Any kind of mishap - an illness, a drought, an inopportune death, and suddenly the unthinkable becomes the inevitable.

There are certain realities that are not altered by economic or political philosophy, and one of these realities is that the survival and caretaking of an individual human child represents a tremendous investment, of time, energy... even of love.

However, because of the way commodity fetishism works, this investment is not recognized as such. It is not recognized as an undertaking which creates value, even though it does. Viewed through dollar-sign-colored-glasses, the investment of raising a child is invisible, contrasted with the investment of buying a new piece of factory equipment.

When bankers run into problems, other capitalists and the government rush to prop them up. But when parents run into problems, they are on their own, a problem exacerbated by the urban breakdown of the extended family. On their own, with no prospects of aid or rescue, a desperate family will turn to horrific measures to survive - selling a child into slavery, or prostituting them, or killing them.

As an alternate vision, imagine a society that does recognize and give value to the investment of child-raising. Imagine a society where parents who run into difficulty are able to draw upon assistance based on the capital of their investment in the future. This would have to be a society where people ask, "How does this benefit us?" instead of, "How does this benefit me?"

We are only a state of mind away from it.
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Not that it's been mentioned in US news anywhere, but yesterday the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution on the rights of indigenous people which has been in negotiation for 20 years.

Four nations voted against it: the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. What do these nations have in common? Huge tracts of land and vast amounts of natural resources which were stolen from indigenous people.

Critics in Canada, New Zealand, and Australia are vocal about their country's "no" vote. Here in the US? I think the media's still talking about how 'fat' Britney Spears looks now.

The State Department is concerned that this will impact US relations with Indian tribes. Most galling for the empire, i think, is Part V which requires the consent of all indigenous nations before laws can be passed which affect them.

Defenders of the vote in Australia and New Zealand have echoed the old racist refrain that it gives "one group special rights over another." It just sickens me every time i see challenges to one's privilege and efforts to bring about equality interpreted as "reverse -ism."
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Watertown, Massachusetts: not exactly a small town, but compared to the cities around it - Boston, Waltham, Cambridge, Newton, Belmont - it feels like a small New England town.

And up until Tuesday night, Watertown was a participant in the Anti-Defamation League's "No Place For Hate" program.

This wasn't the first time that the city council had been asked to debate the matter. A previous resident had been 'offended' by the town's affiliation with the program because it included homophobia among the things which will not be tolerated. At that time, the town council maintained its affiliation with the program.

However, when the ADL's head made a statement saying that the US Congress should stay out of the contentious debate over whether the massacres of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire in 1915-1917 constituted a genocide, he alienated the Town of Watertown.

See, Watertown is home to the second-largest Armenian-American community in the United States. Many of the people who live here are the descendants of genocide survivors.

What Abraham Foxman said specifically was, "The Turks and Armenians need to revisit their past. The Jewish community shouldn't be the arbiter of that history. And I don't think the U.S. Congress should be the arbiter either." Currently, the United States does not recognize the Armenian Genocide and is unlikely to do so, though the matter did come up for debate in Congress recently.

As TedF observed at BlueMassGroup: "How astonishing for a major Jewish figure to take this view! How would we Jews react to, say, an Iranian group lobbying Congress against recognition of the Shoah on the grounds that 'the Jews and the Germans need to revist their past' and that 'the Iranian community shouldn't be the arbiter of that history?'"

It didn't help that Foxman said that to dismantle the NPFH program in Watertown would be "bigoted."

At what sounds like a contentious meeting, the town council voted 8-0 to remove the town's affiliation with the ADL program. The sign in Watertown Square declaring the city "no place for hate" was taken down within an hour.

In the struggle for justice, there is no place for turtling. It's easy to stand up and cite one's own grievances. It takes a lot more courage to stand up for someone else's, when one could easily remain silent and avoid the risks involved with standing up.

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