The Israeli Terror

I was in Olympia, Washington driving towards Evergreen State College when I got a phone call from someone in the occupied West Bank of Palestine. An Evergreen graduate named Rachel Corrie had been killed a few days before by an Israeli soldier in an armored bulldozer, and someone with an Australian accent on my cell phone named Tom was wondering whether it was OK for the International Solidarity Movement to use the lyrics to a song I had just written about the incident on their website. Rachel's murder was followed quickly by the murder of a British ISM activist named Tom Hurndall.

And now, almost six years to the day after the murder of Rachel Corrie, my friend and comrade Tristan Anderson has been critically injured by the IDF. He joins ISM activist Brian Avery, who was also shot in the face. Brian survived, seriously disfigured but otherwise intact. Tristan lies in a coma in a hospital near Tel Aviv and may or may not be as lucky as Brian. His brain was exposed by the tear gas canister fired at close range at his face, and as I write, large parts of his frontal lobe have had to be removed by the surgeons.

Rachel, Tom, Brian and Tristan join the ranks of the thousands of Palestinians and Lebanese civilians killed and the tens of thousands maimed by the IDF since 2000 alone. Being privileged foreigners (at least before they were killed or maimed), they did not have the opportunity to join the ranks of the millions of Palestinians and Lebanese who have been driven into desperate poverty, malnourishment and homelessness by the Israeli invasion and occupation of their lands.

There are many other contemporary and historical examples of genocidal regimes. A few of them – contemporary Turkey, Indonesia or, chiefly among them, the United States – lay claim to the notion that they are democratic countries. Others, such as Saddam's Iraq, apartheid South Africa, and Nazi Germany also made such claims, but nobody believed them. It's challenging to make comparisons between them, at least in terms of trying to figure out which one should deserve the title of Most Genocidal Regime. There are issues of scale, longevity and historical circumstances that make such judgements difficult. Other types of comparisons, though, are not only easy to make, but seem as unavoidable as the elephant in the living room.

It probably didn't help that as the Israeli military was laying siege to the Gaza Strip two months ago I was on a tour of Australia, free from my responsibilities as a father and thus with more free time than I ever have when I'm home these days. I did then what I normally do in my free time – read. The book I happened to be reading at the time was one I had been meaning to read for decades, which I had just picked up at a book store during a visit to Canada – William Shirer's 1,200-page tome, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. As Israel's massive armored divisions and ultra-modern Air Force was laying waste to an already-occupied walled ghetto filled with nearly starving refugees armed with nothing more than rocks and the occasional small arms, mostly home-made, I was reading about the siege of the Warsaw Ghetto.

The comparisons are not exact. At the height of what was then widely known as the Nazi Terror, in Auschwitz the SS killed thousands of Jews and Russians every day. No such gas chambers exist or have ever existed in Israel. But for those of you reading this who have not already decided that I am a self-loathing Jew or some kind of anti-Semite, I would like to share with you some of the streams of consciousness that were passing through my head as I was attending protests in Australia against the bombing of Gaza, in between the unavoidable visits to the ubiquitous Australian war memorials and the next chapter of Shirer's history of Nazi Germany.

There I was, bearing witness to the siege of a walled ghetto already under occupation. There have been many sieges of cities over the centuries, but sieges of already-occupied walled ghettoes are far fewer, and for any student of history the similarities are obvious, the comparisons inevitable.

When I first visited Israel in 1999 I was struck by what a nation of trauma survivors it was. I was reminded immediately of my first visit to Ireland some years before, where the great famine that wiped out half the population over a century before seemed like it had happened perhaps a generation ago. In Israel the Nazi Holocaust seemed to have happened yesterday, and in the mindset of many Israelis it seemed as if it were carried out by Palestinians rather than Germans. I encountered anti-Arab racism daily in Israel. When I sang songs about the horrors of the sanctions against Iraq (around a half million Iraqi children dead as a direct result at that point according to UNICEF) I was told by middle-class, middle-aged Israeli folk music fans that killing Iraqi children was OK because they were just going to grow up to become terrorists anyway. I was told that “the Arab mindset” was hopelessly backwards and that They just wanted to “drive us into the sea.” (I even heard Israeli Jews refer to “Latin numerals” when it was clear from the context that they meant Arabic numerals – a Freudian slip I'm sure.)

Most of the Israeli Jews I met seemed confident of the historical persecution of Jews in the Middle East. Actual history bears no resemblance to their version of it, but this did not get in the way of their fantasies. It was in Europe where the Catholic Church and the Nazi movement carried out pogroms and built death camps, not in the Muslim world, but these Jews identified culturally with their European inquisitors, not with their historical Muslim and Christian friends with whom their Arab and Persian Jewish brethren had lived in peace for thousands of years.

And now after decades of the so-called “peace process” Israel's new Foreign Minister openly advocates for the ethnic cleansing of Israel, for the driving out of the million or so Palestinians living within Israel's 1948 borders. In this nation of survivors of the Nazi Terror, race laws reign supreme. There is one set of laws for Jews, and another set of laws for everyone else. As in Nazi Germany, “everyone else” is then divided into groups with relative privileges in comparison with each other (for example, “Israeli Arabs” vs. West Bank Palestinians vs. those condemned to live in Gaza, the world's largest open-air prison and the most densely-populated place on Earth).

Like the Zionists, the Nazis also came to power on the backs of trauma and claims of victimhood. For decades, history has been written by the victors, so it is hard to imagine how well Hitler was able to sell the case to the German people (and to many others around the world) that Germany was a nation oppressed by their neighbors as well as by “the enemy within,” the Jews.

Millions of Germans had been slaughtered -- along with millions of Russians, French, Brits, Australians, etc. -- in the War to End All Wars (WWI). German Jews were disproportionately of a leftwing persuasion, and many of the leaders of the social democrats who signed the Treaty of Versailles were, in fact, Jewish. Thus the Jews could be blamed for Germany's defeat (never mind the Kaiser's imperial ambitions) and could also somehow be blamed for the devastating economic depression that followed it (never mind the fact that much of the rest of the world was also in the throes of a similarly devastating depression). The Nazi solution to the “Jewish problem” was to create a society based on racial laws that systematically discriminated against Jews, took away their property, prevented them from joining the military or doing any number of other jobs, drove them out of the country or into ghettoes around which the Nazis built walls, and then ultimately invaded many of the countries into which the Jewish refugees had fled, laid siege to the ghettoes, starving and ultimately killing most of the residents.

Fast forward a few years to 1948, to Obama's Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel's father and others in the Zionist movement. The propaganda to try to encourage Jewish emigration to Palestine was that Palestine was a “land without a people for a people without a land,” but the Zionist movement actually on the ground in Palestine knew better. For them, the Palestinian people were all too real, and were an obstacle, a problem to be fixed through systematic, brutal ethnic cleansing. The Zionist movement in Palestine, followed by the State of Israel, dealt with the Palestinian problem (that is, the problem of the existence of Palestinians), by creating a society based on racial laws that systematically discriminated against Palestinians, took away their property, prevented them from joining the military, drove them out of the country or into ghettoes around which the Jews built walls, and then ultimately invaded many of the countries into which the Palestinian refugees had fled, laying siege to their cities, ghettoes and refugee camps, starving and killing thousands upon thousands of the residents, oftentimes in the form of wholesale slaughter that in some instances rivalled the intensity of the Nazi genocide.

The Irgun and other groups whom the British administrators of Palestine referred to as terrorists blew up buses full of Palestinian civilians, attacked Palestinian towns and cities with naval bombardment, laid siege to towns with tanks and automatic weapons on three sides in order to force the residents to flee. This is how the Zionist movement formed their state, this was the Israeli “war of independence.”

The Zionists who were flooding into Palestine and quickly changing the demographics of Palestinian society claimed they were being persecuted. There were many isolated incidents that could be called persecution, and many more incidents of Zionist settlers in pre-1948 Palestine persecuting the residents with whom they were sharing a country. By the same token, the Nazis made mostly baseless claims that German-speaking citizens of Poland and Czechoslovakia were being persecuted – the Germans were being persecuted and had to defend themselves by invading their neighbors. By the time the Nazis invaded and occupied France, and Britain finally decided to make good on its treaty obligations and fight fascism, the Nazis could – quite rightly – claim that they had been attacked by Britain. The Germans were the victims of Britain was the Nazi line.

Fast forward again to 1948. The Arab countries neighboring Palestine belatedly sent in a force to defend their fellow Arabs from the Zionists – a force that was numerically and militarily no match for the Zionist army and was quickly defeated. But in the annals of Zionist propaganda this was not Arabs coming to the defense of their brethren who were being slaughtered and driven from their land, it was an “unprovoked attack,” like the British assault on poor Germany. Like the Germans surrounded by hostile neighbors bent on keeping the Germans down, “the Arabs” wanted to “wipe Israel off the map.”

One of Hitler's favorite methods of managing, at least in the Nazi-run press, of appearing to be the voice of reason in the face of his “war-mongering” European neighbors was to make a pretense of “peace negotiations” which were generally last-minute ultimatums that could be accepted or not without any actual negotiating at all. For example, Czechoslovakia (and its ostensible allies, Britain and France) was told it could give up the Sudetenland and other Czech territories and thus avert destruction at the hands of the German military. It actually acquiesced to all German demands (with the encouragement of Britain and France) and was annexed by Germany anyway, on the grounds that the Czechs were being unreasonable, that Czechs were terrorizing ethnic Germans within its borders, etc.

Similarly, the Israeli government regularly asserts that if countries like Syria and Lebanon and political movements like Hamas would only “recognize Israel's right to exist” then there could be peace. The Arab states are consistently portrayed by Israel as the unreasonable parties, and any efforts on the parts of Arab countries to obey the will of the majority of their people and stand up to Israel's daily theft of Palestinian land and slaughter of Palestinian people is portrayed by Israeli leaders as proof that they want to “wipe Israel off the map.” Yet when the Israeli government is asked the very simple question, where are your borders, no answer is forthcoming. Like Nazi Germany, the neighboring countries are expected to acquiesce to all Israeli demands or be portrayed as the aggressors. But how can any reasonable country be expected to recognize a nation that will not itself recognize its own borders? What is Israel, and where does it end and its neighbors' lands begin? Also, on what grounds should Israel be recognized, when it is daily involved in violating all sorts of international laws, daily involved in theft and murder, daily involved with the subjugation of the Palestinian people, and refuses to give back land it took by force of arms from Lebanon and Syria?

Resistance to Nazi tyranny within Germany or in occupied countries was dealt with through incredible brutality. Entire families of dissidents would routinely be sent to concentration camps and often killed. If an occupation soldier was killed, collective punishment was the modus operandi of the Nazi regime. Oftentimes a hundred people in a village would be killed in retribution for the murder of one German soldier.

Similarly, whereas the families of partisans would be sent to the camps, the houses of the families of resistance fighters from the West Bank and Gaza are routinely destroyed. An attack on Israeli territory is routinely responded to (even when the attack itself was generally a response) with massively disproportionate collective punishment, including attacks by helicopter gunships on densely-populated areas where multiple families are killed in order to take out one Hamas or other political leader. Border closures resulting in loss of employment for hundreds of thousands are another routine Israeli response to any resistance to their occupation. Thousands of children and adults are routinely arrested and held indefinitely in Israeli prisons without ever being charged (in courts that are themselves illegitimate anyway). As in Nazi-occupied Europe, no Palestinian man or boy can ever be confident that he will not be dragged out of bed on any given night, taken from his home and arrested.

We are told by the Israeli government not to pay attention to the numbers, that proportionality doesn't matter. There often seems to be a clear effort on the part of the IDF and its political leaders to kill a hundred Palestinians for every Israeli killed, as was the case in the most recent Israeli slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza. If proportionality is irrelevant and morality has no numerical measure, then presumably it would be morally justifiable from the Israeli government perspective if a hundred Israelis were killed for every Palestinian the IDF shoots, but if such a thing were to happen we could be sure to hear from the Israelis all about Palestinian monstrousness, no doubt. This, however, is extremely unlikely ever to happen, since there is no Palestinian military, no Palestinian tanks, no Palestinian Air Force, etc. It's jet fighters versus home-made bombs and ineffective “rocklets” that rarely hit any target.

The Nazis became famous for, among other things, developing methods of torture that make the Spanish Inquisition look humane. Israel has also excelled at developing new ways to cause horrible physical and emotional suffering to human beings. During the most recent Israeli “war” against Lebanon, among the many buildings demolished from the air was the old Khiam Prison in southern Lebanon. When I visited Lebanon in 2005 I toured the Khiam Prison, which was in an area abandoned by the Israelis in 2000 after years of fighting between the IDF, their Lebanese collaborators, and Hezbollah. In Khiam Prison one could see where the US military got its ideas for torturing Iraqis at Abu Ghraib. There were specially-designed boxes just big enough for a man to kneel, far too small to stand up or lie down, in which men would be held for weeks at a time and subjected day and night to loud music, regularly taken out of their boxes to be beaten.

We are told by the Israelis that the massive civilian death toll among Palestinians is unavoidable, since Palestinian “terrorists” hide among the civilian population when they carry out their attacks on occupation soldiers. We are also told that the Palestinians are targeting civilians in the (now almost nonexistent) suicide attacks inside Israel. It's an interesting form of two-faced logic, since the main form of transportation used by Israeli soldiers are public buses. This is abundantly obvious to anyone who takes a public bus in Israel. In this highly militarized society where most men and women over the age of eighteen are either active-duty soldiers or reservists, you can hardly find a public bus that is not transporting at least one uniformed soldier with a machine gun hanging off of his shoulder.

It's also an interesting form of dual logic, since the ghetto fighters of Warsaw so justifiably revered by Israeli society were fighting entirely from civilian areas, since they were themselves civilians, fighting from and for their homes, armed with home-made or occasionally smuggled weapons, just like the Palestinian fighters today.

The Nazis found collaborators within the Jews of Warsaw, who became their Jewish Police, or Judenrat. Prior to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, it was the Judenrat who arrested or rounded up Jews wanted by the Nazis, and brought them to the border of the ghetto, to be safely (for the Nazis) handed over, and generally sent to their deaths. Taking a page from this history, the Oslo “peace process” involved a dividing up of Palestinian territory into areas A, B and C. Area A is the downtown, or the area within the ghetto walls that now surround so many of the bombed-out shells that were once thriving Palestinian towns and cities. Area A is the part that Israelis have generously allowed to be policed by Fatah, which has increasingly become, in the eyes of many Palestinians, Israeli collaborators. Israel regularly invades Area A parts of the West Bank whenever it wants to, but otherwise it tries to get the Fatah police to do their policing for them.

Hamas, which refuses to go along with the program, is then painted as a terrorist group that simply must be wiped out, because they doggedly refuse to be collaborators. Like the Jewish Fighting Organization (the ZOB was their Polish acronym) in Warsaw, Hamas does not deal gently with collaborators or with the Israeli occupation forces. Facing impossible, overwhelming odds and essentially certain death, Hamas does what they can to mount some kind of a resistance to the Israeli Terror. ZOB fighters referred to themselves as the “walking dead.” Like the ZOB and other valiant resistance groups throughout the history of every continent, Hamas also embraces martyrdom. Embracing martyrdom is often painted by Israelis and others as some kind of peculiar trait of “Islamic fundamentalists,” which is ridiculous and completely ahistorical, as well as an insult to the memory of the very ghetto fighters in Warsaw who helped inspire the Zionist state in the first place.

Hitler loved to portray his “Aryan” soldiers as icons of morality and good behavior, which of course was nonsense. Like the IDF, the German soldiers fought very well and bravely, especially from the inside of a tank. And like the IDF, who are also widely viewed within Israel as the world's most moral army, the German soldiers consistently engaged in acts of sadism against civilians throughout Nazi-occupied Europe. And like the IDF, they were almost never punished for such acts.

Reminders of the sadism that permeates the Israeli military are never far away, and are often described most eloquently by former occupation soldiers who turned against their commanders in the Knesset. (Thankfully, there are many such soldiers. Unfortunately, there aren't nearly enough of them to make a difference.) The tendency of IDF soldiers to shoot children in the head with live ammunition is well-known and well-documented.

I vividly recall the outrage of many of my Jewish Israeli fans when Ariel Sharon “visited” the Al-Aqsa Mosque, along with hundreds of soldiers, prompting some stone-throwing from local Palestinian youths, to which the soldiers responded with live ammunition, killing many, leading to the Al-Aqsa Intifada and thousands more deaths, overwhelmingly of Palestinian children.

My fans weren't outraged at Sharon, however, they were outraged at me for writing my first of a series of songs about the Israeli occupation, “Children of Jerusalem.” What many people took particular offense to was the line about the general (Sharon) grinning. They told me this couldn't be accurate, because IDF soldiers carried out their duties with a grim sense of necessity, never enjoying the killing of the kids who were always shot because they were in the way of the ubiquitous “Palestinian gunmen” who were always firing first, at the poor defenseless tanks which for some reason were in the middle of their cities. For my outrageous accusations they called me a fascist and all sorts of other things.

But unfortunately they're wrong. The soldiers often are grinning. Like the smirking soldier who was standing in the ambulance that was trying to transport Tristan Anderson to the hospital just a few days ago, refusing to move to allow the medics to close the door. Tristan was only one of a multitude of victims of the Israeli Terror, and this sadistic soldier was only one of many other sadistic Israeli soldiers obeying the whims of a government run by sadistic, racist men and women.

Israel bears many of the hallmarks of a fascist regime. What's more, it is, like Nazi Germany, a very popular regime among its people. Like Nazi Germany, it is justly reviled by people around the world, but actively supported by so many of its people. Like Nazi Germany, governments and corporations around the world prefer to profit from trading with it rather than standing up to it and isolating it. Like Nazi Germany, it is dependent on the outside world for food, fuel and other basic necessities of life.

Unlike Nazi Germany, Israel possesses hundreds of nuclear weapons. Unlike Nazi Germany, Israel is not going to be defeated militarily. But it can be defeated if the people of the world – especially in the US -- pressure their governments to recognize Israel for the aggressive, racist state that it fundamentally is and has been since 1948, cut off the aid and impose trade sanctions of the sort that were imposed on South Africa under apartheid. The beginning of the process of isolating this small country from the world community that allows it to prosper is to educate people about the true nature of Zionism.

The Middle East has been and must be shared by Muslims, Christians and Jews as it was since long before the Zionist armies expelled 700,000 Palestinians from their lands in 1948. Nothing, including the Nazi Holocaust, justifies what has been done and, most importantly, continues to be done to the Palestinians. The time is long since past to call the Jewish state out for the fundamentally racist regime that it is. In the name of the ghetto fighters of Warsaw, let us strive to see a world where no one needs to die with a stone in their hand trying to defend a starved, walled ghetto against an army of tanks and planes, where people like Tristan don't need to have their brains blown out for trying to prevent a wall from being built around yet another ghetto.

Click Here to Read More...

Some Thoughts on Obama

Friends around the world keep asking me questions. Are you excited? What do you think of Obama? Others are simply congratulating me. And I must say, it was a thrilling moment.

As a teenager, in 1984, I volunteered for the Mondale/Ferraro campaign, mostly pushing bumper stickers. An anti-nuclear group was doing this, in the belief that Mondale would be less likely to cause Armageddon. I grew up in an overwhelmingly white, Republican town. I was a news junky from an early age, though, and politically active in one way or another. Of the Democratic candidates my favorite was Jesse Jackson, but looking around me I reasoned he had a slim chance of getting elected.

As an adult, living in urban areas all over the US, I saw little to dispel this illusion. There were more African-Americans getting elected to political office, but usually we were talking about mayors of majority-Black cities or Congresswomen from hotbeds of progressivism like Berkeley. But here I was, hanging out with my toddler, listening to my favorite local band, the Pagan Jug Band, sitting in a pub in Portland, hearing that Barack Obama has been elected President.

My initial reaction was that of Jesse's. I got a lump in my throat, and tears came to my eyes, thinking about the insanity of all the suffering that has gone down for so many centuries, the homes, dreams, and bodies broken by slavery and racism. And in fact until very recently, on the news broadcasts when they would mention the number of Black people in the Congress, in order to be factually accurate they always had to include the caveat, "since Reconstruction." More than that is rarely said about this ten-year period of Union Army occupation that allowed something approximating democracy, and even serious land redistribution, to exist in the South, before the Union withdrew and the South was plunged into at least a century of Apartheid rule.

Whether South or North, the prisons are filled with mostly dark-skinned people from places where you can graduate from high school without having learned how to read, where you can get asthma from breathing the air, where the police shoot first and ask questions later. They're in prison, but Barack Obama's not, he's on the TV giving a humble victory speech, quoting Lincoln. And this crowd of mostly young white people around me at the pub are all cheering at the TV screen, shouting his name, laughing, crying, and drinking. I'm pretty sure they all voted for him. Or if some of them were slacking too much to get around to it, they would have voted for him.

I had just gone there to hear the music, but it turned into a spontaneous Obama party, at that pub and at pubs and sidewalks and streets in cities all across the US, and apparently in other parts of the world as well. I remember being near the front of a march of tens of thousands of people back in 1985 or so, seeing Jesse Jackson at the front of the march with many of his volunteers lining the marchers, all wearing football-style shirts that read "88" on them, for his next Presidential campaign effort. I remember seeing on the faces and the placards of this mostly white crowd of marchers, an admiration and affection for the man at the front of the march, and I was wishing the whole country could be more like this crowd. And I feel so gratified that all the people talking about the so-called Bradley effect were wrong, that a majority of our eligible voters (not counting those millions of ineligible felons) would really end up voting for Obama.

There was one black-clad young man from Olympia who happened to be at the crowded pub, which was more crowded than I had ever seen it before. He bummed a light from me and started to talk. "This is great, you know, but I just can't help but think, 'meanwhile, in Afghanistan...'"

Every party needs a spoiler, and here he was. Too cynical to be entirely swept up in the moment, he was worried about the possibility that Obama might actually follow through with his campaign promises and send more troops to Afghanistan. And then over the past few days, the news gets more and more grim. Rahm Emanuel, a zealous supporter of Israeli Apartheid for Secretary of State. Larry Summers, Clinton's chief advocate for the World Trade Organization and deregulation of the financial sector, is being suggested as an economic advisor. Joe Biden, who voted for the war in Iraq, is already his VP.

Obama is surrounding himself with folks from Bill Clinton's administration. I remember those eight years well, I was protesting his policies the whole time. Welfare was reformed and social spending was gutted even more. The prisons became even more crowded with nonviolent drug offenders. The sanctions and ongoing bombing campaign in Iraq that happened on Clinton's watch killed hundreds of thousands of children, and his Secretary of State said the price was worth it. NAFTA was passed and then the WTO was formed, all with Clinton's blessings. These trade deals that Clinton and most of his party supported plunged millions of people around the world into poverty and an early death. Yugoslavia and Iraq will glow for thousands of years because of the nuclear waste littering the land that fell during the Clinton years.

Of course, Clinton inherited the mess in Iraq, and Clinton certainly did not invent neoliberal economics, nor did Clinton start the process of the de-industrialization of the US, the growth of Mexican sweatshops, or the support of the death squad regime in Colombia. But he embraced all of that, and much, much more.

On the other hand, in previous generations, things were different. Before the export of America's manufacturing base, before all the free trade agreements, before real wages in the US lost half their value, the US was run by liberals. Liberals like FDR and Nixon. Nixon? Yes, well, I studied economics a little, and social spending in the US actually continued to increase from the time of FDR to the time of Nixon. It was under Nixon that the EPA, the NEA and other such institutions were born. It was after Nixon that the budget-cutting began in earnest. From FDR to Nixon, whether the administration was Democratic or Republican, social spending increased. Since Nixon, under Democratic and Republican administrations, social spending has decreased.

There have, of course, been variations. FDR enthusiastically bombed Japan into the stone age, killing millions of innocents. Eisenhower was a Republican president, he preferred to bomb Koreans and Vietnamese. Johnson bombed them a lot more, killing millions. Nixon did it, too, of course. All along the way, by and large, there was overwhelming bipartisan support for these policies. Not among the population, but among the elite who rule it.

Several days ago I was exchanging email messages about the state of the world with my good friend Terry Flynn, a professor of economics and the social sciences at Western Connecticut State University. In one email he wrote, "a damn interesting time. The hegemon is rocked. I'm sure we're witnessing a re-configuration of the global order on par with the post-WW2 period." I asked what kind of reconfiguration did he see happening, and this was his eloquent reply:

It's a shift from one hegemonic era to another. The U.S. took over from the U.K. after the war. But our time is up. Don't know which country or alliance will dominate in the next cycle. The major contenders are China and India. But Russia is working very hard to leverage its massive geopolitical presence, natural resources, and techno-military culture, despite huge demographic deficits in comparison with the former countries. Russia has Europe by the balls due to, e.g., Germany's utter dependency on Russian natural gas. And it's far superior to India and China in many important ways. It's still a fucking wreck in terms of law and economic and social policies. But this whole transition is probably a 20 year affair. I just think that the catastrophic U.S. response to 9/11 and the current financial crisis push the regime change hard against the U.S.

If Obama wins the election, he might very well be a fine negotiator for the new, diminished role for this country. He can sell it as enlightened internationalism, not the decline of the American Empire. Of course, the patriots here will insist on waving the flag and encouraging the barbarians to bring it on. They won't go down without a fight. However, the U.S. simply can't afford to sustain its customary role. And there's no reason that China will continue to lend money for us to do so.

Anyway, that's a taste of my thinking on this matter. Oh, by the way, I don't for one minute expect that the new regime will be any kinder to the working classes. They'll still be global capitalists with a lust for power. In principle, no better or worse than the present crew. But as our country is diminished we might start talking seriously about peace and environmental degradation, etc. That could be ironic.

The Democrats have gotten more corporate donations than the Republicans in this last election cycle. The corporate elite has mostly decided that the Dems are better for business now. Better to send them in to clean up the mess. Obama is most definitely his own man, and an extremely intelligent, eloquent, youthful, good-looking and well-organized one at that. He has a brilliant background in community organizing and a first-hand familiarity with reality, the realities, for starters, of poverty, racism and US foreign policy -- those realities that, among others, so desperately need to be changed. Not only is he his own man, but he's the man of the people, of so many people, who so enthusiastically have supported his campaign, going door to door as part of his well-oiled campaign machine, giving him hundreds of millions of dollars in small donations, packing stadiums around the country and around the world, and waiting in line for hours to vote for him in the polls.

But he is also the man of the corporations, of the banks, of the insurance industry, who have funded his campaign massively, and are expecting a dividend for their investments. And they're getting it already, in the form of the appointment of those "liberals" (whatever that means) who supported Clinton's wars, sanctions and neoliberal economic reforms.

Obama has promised to raise taxes on the rich back to what they were under Clinton. I haven't carefully studied the numbers, but I believe we are talking about increasing the income tax on anything above $100,000 from 35% to 38%. Nobody is talking about returning it to what it was when the Progressive Income Tax was formed -- 90%. He is talking about taking soldiers out of Iraq and sending them to Afghanistan -- not bringing them all home and cutting military spending by 90%, in line with international norms, and doing away with this rapacious empire. He is talking about the middle class, and sure, he had to do that to get elected, but when does he ever talk about the poor, the imprisoned millions, the thousands of homeless walking cadavers haunting the streets of every major American city? Every politician talks about building schools, but what about free education through graduate school like they have in most European countries?

No, the scope of debate is far more limited than that. It is a scope defined by that increasingly narrow grey area in between "conservative" and "liberal." There are distinctions, some of them important. That 3% tax increase will do good things for many people, I hope. Perhaps we won't start any new wars, I don't know. Perhaps we'll withdraw from Iraq, but I'll bet no reparations for what we've done there will be forthcoming. Perhaps there will be no new wars on our civil liberties in the next few years, but I'll bet the prison population will not get much smaller.

I hope I'm wrong. But if I am to be proven wrong and there are to be serious changes in the welfare of people in the US and around the world, it will only be as a result of a popular uprising of people calling for a real New Deal for the 21st century, an end to the empire, housing, health care and education for all, and so on. Because even if Obama secretly wants all of these things, as so many of us would desperately like to believe, he's going to need plenty of popular pressure to point to if any of these things are going to become reality. If he really is the socialist wealth redistributor his opponents said he is, he's going to need massive popular support just to avoid being impeached for treason by those corporate stooges who dominate both parties in the Congress.

And if, on the other hand, he really believes his own campaign promises of meager tax increases for the rich, raising the salaries of teachers a bit, fighting terrorism, passing more free trade agreements, being Israel's best friend, and so on, then what we have in store is another Democratic administration. Different kind of like Starbucks is different from McDonald's -- they both pay poverty wages and feed you shit, but Starbucks includes health insurance.

Click Here to Read More...

Some Thoughts on Utah Phillips

I was watching my baby daughter sleep in her carseat outside of the Sacramento airport about ten hours ago when I noticed a missed call from Brendan Phillips. He's in a band called Fast Rattler with several friends of mine, two of whom live in my new hometown of Portland, Oregon, one of whom needed a ride home from the Greyhound station. I called back, and soon thereafter heard the news from Brendan that his father had died the night before in his sleep, when his heart stopped beating.

I wouldn't want to elevate anybody to inappropriately high heights, but for me, Utah Phillips was a legend.

I first became familiar with the Utah Phillips phenomenon in the late 80's, when I was in my early twenties, working part-time as a prep cook at Morningtown in Seattle. I had recently read Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, and had been particularly enthralled by the early 20th Century section, the stories of the Industrial Workers of the World. So it was with great interest that I first discovered a greasy cassette there in the kitchen by the stereo, Utah Phillips Sings the Songs and Tells the Stories of the Industrial Workers of the World.

As a young radical, I had heard lots about the 1960's. There were (and are) plenty of veterans of the struggles of the 60's alive and well today. But the wildly tumultuous era of the first two decades of the 20th century is now (and pretty well was then) a thing entirely of history, with no one living anymore to tell the stories. And while long after the 60's there will be millions of hours of audio and video recorded for posterity, of the massive turn-of-the-century movement of the industrial working class there will be virtually none of that.

To hear Utah tell the stories of the strikes and the free speech fights, recounting hilariously the day-to-day tribulations of life in the hobo jungles and logging camps, singing about the humanity of historical figures such as Big Bill Haywood, Joe Hill or Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, was to bring alive an era that at that point only seemed to exist on paper, not in the reality of the senses. But Utah didn't feel like someone who was just telling stories from a bygone era -- it was more like he was a bridge to that era.

Hearing these songs and stories brought to life by him, I became infected by the idea that if people just knew this history in all it's beauty and grandeur, they would find the same hope for humanity and for the possibility for radical social change that I had just found through Utah.

Thus, I became a Wobbly singer, too. I began to stand on a street corner on University Way with a sign beside me that read, "Songs of the Seattle General Strike of 1919." I mostly sang songs I learned from listening to Utah's cassette, plus some other IWW songs I found in various obscure collections of folk music that I came across.

It was a couple years later that I first really discovered Utah Phillips, the songwriter. I had by this time immersed myself with great enthusiasm in the work of many contemporary performers in what gets called the folk music scene, and had developed a keen appreciation for the varied and brilliant songwriting of Jim Page and others. Then, in 1991, I came across Utah's new cassette, I've Got To Know, and soon thereafter heard a copy of a much earlier recording, Good Though.

Whether he's recounting stories from his own experiences or those of others doesn't matter. There is no need to know, for in the many hours Utah spent in his troubled youth talking with old, long-dead veterans of the rails and the IWW campaigns, a bridge from now to then was formed in this person, in his pen and in his deep, resonant voice. In Good Though I heard the distant past breathing and full of life in Utah's own compositions, just as they breathed in his renditions of older songs.

In I've Got To Know I heard an eloquent and current voice of opposition to the American Empire and the bombing of Iraq, rolled together seamlessly with the voices of deserters, draft dodgers and tax resisters of the previous century.

In reference to the power of lying propaganda, a friend of mine used to say it takes ten minutes of truth to counteract 24 hours of lies. But upon first hearing Utah's song, "Yellow Ribbon," it seemed to me that perhaps that ratio didn't give the power of truth enough credit. It seemed to me that if the modern soldiers of the empire would have a chance to hear Utah's monologues there about his anguish after his time in the Army in Korea, or the breathtakingly simple depiction of life under the junta in El Salvador in his song "Rice and Beans," they would just have to quit the military.

Utah made it clear in word and in deed that steeping yourself in the tradition was required of any good practitioner of the craft, and I did my best to follow in his footsteps and do just that. I learned lots of Utah's songs as well as the old songs he was playing. Making a living busking in the Boston subways for years, I ran into other folks who were doing just that, as well as writing great songs, such as Nathan Phillips (no relation). Nathan was from West Virginia, and did haunting versions of "The Green Rolling Hills of West Virginia," "Larimer Street," "All Used Up," and other songs. In different T stops at the same time, Nathan and I could often be found both singing the songs of Utah Phillips for the passersby.

Traveling around the US in the 1990's and since then, it seemed that Utah's music had, on a musical level, had the same kind of impact that Zinn's People's History or somewhat earlier works such as Jeremy Brecher's book, Strike!, had had in written form -- bringing alive vital history that had been all but forgotten. With Ani DiFranco's collaboration with Utah, this became doubly true, seemingly overnight, and this man who had had a loyal cult following before suddenly had, if not what might be called popularity, at least a loyal cult following that was now twice as big as it had been in the pre-Ani era.

I had had the pleasure of hearing Utah live in concert only once in the early 90's, doing a show with another great songwriter, Charlie King, in the Boston area. I was looking forward to hearing him play again around there in 1995, but what was to be a Utah Phillips concert turned into a benefit for Utah's medical expenses, when he had to suddenly drastically cut down on his touring, due to heart problems. I think there were about twenty different performers doing renditions of Utah Phillips' songs at Club Passim that night. I did "Yellow Ribbon."

Traveling in the same circles and putting out CDs on the same record label, it was fairly inevitable that we'd meet eventually. The first time was several years ago, if memory serves me, behind the stage at the annual protest against the School of the Americas in Columbus, Georgia. I think I successfully avoided seeming too painfully star-struck. Utah was complaining to me earnestly about how he didn't know what to do at these protests, didn't feel like he had good protest material. I think he did just fine, though I can't recall what he did.

Utah lived in Nevada City, and the last time I was there he came to the community radio station while I was appearing on a show. This was soon after Katrina, and I remember singing my song, "New Orleans," and Utah saying embarrassingly nice things. I was on a little tour with Norman Solomon speaking and me singing, and we had done an event the night before in town, which Utah was too tired to attend, if I recall.

Me, Utah, Norman, and my companion, Reiko, went over to a breakfast place after the radio show, talked and ate breakfast. Utah did most of the talking, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that his use of mysterious hobo colloquialisms and frequent references to obscure historical characters in twentieth-century American anarchist history was something he did off stage as well as on.

I've passed near enough to that part of California many times since then. Called once when I was nearby and he was out of town, doing a show in Boston. Otherwise I just thought about calling and dropping by, but didn't take the time. Life was happening, and taking a day or two off in Nevada City was always something that I never quite seemed to find the time for. Always figured next time I'll have more time, I'll call him then. It had been thirteen years since he found out about his heart problems, and he hadn't kicked the bucket yet... Of course, now I wish I had taken the time when I had the chance, and I'm sure there are many other people who feel the same way.

In any case, for those of us who knew his music, whether from recordings or concerts, for those of us who knew Utah from his stories on or off the stage, whether we knew him as that human bridge to the radical labor movement of yesterday, or as the voice of the modern-day hobos, or as that funky old guy that Ani did a couple of CDs with, Utah Phillips will be remembered and treasured by many.

He was undeniably a sort of musical-political-historical institution in his own day. He said he was a rumor in his own time. No question, one man's rumor is another man's legend, but who cares, it's just words anyway.

Click Here to Read More...

9/11 Truth Movement vs. 9/11 Truth

Or, who are these people and why do they keep yelling at me?

I found myself once again singing at an antiwar rally two weeks ago, and once again being confronted by a red-faced white man with an ominous hand-written sign reading, "9/11 was a lie." Most of the crowd was filing off for the post-rally march, aside from a few of my loyal fans who were sticking around for the rest of my set. Among them was the red-faced man, apparently not a fan, who walked towards the small stage with the wild-eyed certainty of a zealot.

"Wake up, David Rovics! David Rovics, wake up to the truth of 9/11!" He was screaming at the top of his lungs, standing about two feet from me. (I continued with the song.) In case I didn't get the message the first time, the red-faced man repeated his mantra. "Wake up! Wake up to the truth of 9/11!"

People like him, whoever he was, have become a fixture of antiwar and other protests since sometime soon after September 11th, 2001. They regularly call in to radio talk shows, they maintain many websites, produce innumerable documentaries, publish plenty of books, hold regular conferences, and show up with alarming predictability to heckle and denounce prominent progressive authors and activists at their speaking engagements.

Art Bell and company

For over a decade I've made a living as a touring musician. As a hardcore news junkie, when satellite radio came into existence I was one of its very first customers, and since I got one I've been able to saturate myself with BBC World Service and the English-language broadcasts of public radio from around the world to my heart's content. But for the many years before satellite radio, during my many late-night drives across the plains, deserts and corn fields of the US, choices were much slimmer.

In the early morning or late afternoon there was usually an NPR (Nationalist Petroleum Radio) station to be found, or, very occasionally, a Pacifica affiliate where I might listen to my favorite radio news programs, Democracy Now! and Free Speech Radio News. (At the very beginning, these programs could be heard on satellite radio via the Hispanic Radio Network, but that channel soon vanished from the satellite airwaves -- over one hundred choices offered, but no news channel to the left of Al Franken...)

But late at night, there were four choices. On the FM airwaves, commercial pop anti-music of various prefabricated genres brought to you by ClearChannel. On AM, you could choose from rightwing Christian evangelists, Rush Limbaugh and Art Bell. The evangelists don't really do anything for me, but when I was getting sleepy, I'd listen to Rush, because he's always good for waking me up -- the powerful desire to strangle someone tends to keep you alert. But most of the time, if I wasn't tired, I'd tune in to Art Bell.

For those unfamiliar with Art Bell's show, it was a corporate-sponsored, nightly, several-hour-long show that has since been passed on to other hosts last I heard, and can generally be found on at least two different AM signals anywhere in the country every weeknight, starting sometime after midnight, as I recall. He apparently broadcast from somewhere in Nevada near the infamous Area 51, where he and many of his guests seemed to believe the US military was experimenting with space aliens who had landed there some time ago.

His guests tended to be authors who had written books or made documentaries about aliens from outer space, telepathy, what all the ghosts are up to these days, Hitler being alive and living in the Antarctic, crop circles, and so on. Being a science fiction fan and one who has had personal experiences that have led me to at least consider the possibility that there is validity in some of these claims, about what Art called the paranormal, I listened with interest to Art and his guests, although usually it was fairly evident they were full of shit.

Listening to Art's guests and to the men (and very occasionally women) who called in, I remembered the excitement I felt as a child, before I developed a more three-dimensional understanding of the world around me, before I developed a fairly solid capability for critical thinking, before I began to understand how to read between the lines of the biases of the various authorities, experts and pundits out there in the textbooks, newspapers and airwaves. I remembered the excitement of having secrets with certain friends that only we "knew." My own pet theories as a child included the notion that cows were not as stupid as they looked, standing around chewing cud, that they were actually engaged in astral travel, using their apparent stupidity as a grand cover of some kind. I fairly well convinced myself in the existence of dragons and elves and other mythical creatures, long after I had realized there was no Santa Claus.

But the fantasy life of children can become very odd when practiced by grown men. Many, if not most, of Art's guests and callers seemed to believe that the things they "knew," such as their prevalent idea that the US military was hiding space aliens in Area 51, were phenomenae that only people like them and Art were being honest about. The rest of the media, society, and the powers-that-be were either ignorant about these realities, or, at least as often, were engaging in a huge, X-Files kind of coverup.

Especially in the context of a fundamentally alienated society, especially for a certain class of white men who seem to be somewhat on the margins of the US system of power and privilege, but are white and male enough to believe that they deserve better, the sort of feeling of brotherhood that comes with "knowing" something that the rest of society doesn't know is a powerful one. It's an obvious source of excitement, and gives people a sense of belonging. Without having had access to more rational ways of understanding their place in the world and the complexities of society, current events, history and power structures, they have found some kind of lens through which they can try to understand the world.

It's a faith-based sort of thing. These people are not looking for different points of view, they are looking for further confirmation of what they already believe -- and of course they share this with many, many others who we could call "people of faith," whether they are Christians who believe Jesus was the son of God, Muslims who believe there is one God, Allah is his name and Mohammed was his prophet, neoliberals who believe the unregulated market will make everybody rich, or Maoists who believe the Chinese cultural revolution was the greatest achievement of humankind. No evidence to the contrary will deter these people in their unswerving certainties.

What I always found most interesting as well as most disconcerting about listening to Art Bell, though, was how he would occasionally -- but regularly -- have on guests who were talking about very real and verifiable conspiracies. Things like the CIA's active role in the world drug trade, the State Department's role in overthrowing governments around the world, or the US, Saudi and Pakistani collaboration in creating, arming and funding the Taleban and Al-Qaeda.

Topics which the corporate media would almost never touch could find an occasional voice in Art Bell -- although Art was just as corporate-funded as ABC or CNN. It seemed that if most of the programming was clearly fantasy-based conspiracy theories, the corporate masters felt that it was politically acceptable to allow Art to have the occasional reality check. It would generally go unnoticed by most people, or be discounted as just another wacky conspiracy theory, so it was OK.

Fantasy undermining reality

And if giving a wide audience to the real conspiracies become harmless when they're presented within a sea of fictional conspiracies, the flip side of that is that the very legitimate investigative journalists such as Seymour Hersch and Robert Fisk who are uncovering and reporting on things like the US role in funding groups like Al-Qaeda can more easily get lost among the static, lost among the hundreds of documentaries purporting to prove that the World Trade Center was brought down by controlled explosives, that the planes that crashed into them were on autopilot and there really were no terrorists on board, that the cell phone conversations passengers had with their loved ones before they died were faked, that there was no plane that hit the Pentagon, and so on.

If you bother slogging through the volumes of books and stacks of documentaries that "9/11 Truth" people will foist on you if you let them, you will find that most of them are propaganda pieces and most of the "experts" are not experts in relevant fields. When you do look beyond this mass of misinformation for real experts, you will easily find pilots who can discount the claims of the Truthers that maneuvering the planes into the towers was a particularly challenging thing for people with only a little flight training to pull off. You will easily find mechanical engineers familiar with the structural flaws in the design of the WTC that allowed it to collapse in the first place, and physicists who can explain why such large buildings would appear to be imploding as if in a controlled demolition, or why people on the scene would have thought they were hearing explosions, etc. My purpose here is not to disprove all the hypothoses presented by the Truthers and their propaganda pieces -- if you want to look into "debunking the debunkers" yourself, there is plenty of information out there, and Popular Mechanics' issue on the subject is a good place to start.

The fact is, the scientific community, while certainly not immune to political pressure, is generally able to function with a grounding in actual science, and is not capable of participating, as a community, in some kind of mass conspiracy of silence or coverup. There is no way to bribe that many scientists. Too many of them believe in the importance of science for science's sake, in honesty. This can be amply demonstrated by the fact that with all the political pressure and money of the US government and ExxonMobil combined, there is still essentially unanimity among climate scientists worldwide that climate change is real, is caused by humans, and is dangerous for our species and others. Even after all the billions upon billions of dollars spent by the tobacco industry to obfuscate reality and bribe policymakers and the scientific community, the scientific community was able to study the issue and determine incontrovertibly the link between smoking cigarettes and lung cancer.

Sowing seeds of doubt

The "9/11 Truth Movement" undoubtedly is made up largely of earnest, decent people, the sorts of decent folks who make up most of Art Bell's guests and listeners. Since thousands of their fellow countrymen and women died on 9/11 and since this event -- whether it was a terrorist attack carried out by US-trained Mujahideen that could have been prevented, or an entirely "inside job" carried out by Dick Cheney with the aide of computers and plastic explosives, as many Truthers claim -- many people in many communities have become justifiably agitated and outraged by world-scale injustices, such as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and so on.

The old Art Bell listeners who used to be entertained by the fact that most people don't believe there are space aliens in Area 51 are now really extra worked up because the vast conspiracy they have come to believe in are resulting in the deaths of huge numbers of people around the world. And if the rest of us would just understand what they understand, everything would be different. If the media would report on reality as they see it, people would wake up and do something about this situation.

The particularly warped thing about this, though, is that the very media outlets, authors and activists who are doing their best to expose the very real conspiracies that are going on -- people like Amy Goodman and Democracy Now!, David Barsamian's Alternative Radio, Z Magazine, the Progressive Magazine, Norman Solomon and the Institute for Public Accuracy, Noam Chomsky, etc., seem to have become the primary targets of harassment by the Truthers.

Amy Goodman, Noam Chomsky, Norman Solomon and others are now regularly heckled at speaking events, and denounced on websites as "gatekeepers." They are seen, it seems, as being even worse than the corporate media, because while reasonable people know not to trust Fox or CNN, they have faith in the integrity of people like Amy Goodman.

You don't have to know Norman Solomon, Amy Goodman or her producers personally to see what nonsense this "gatekeeper" stuff is. You needn't ever have met Amy to know that she has risked her life, and very nearly lost her life, in her decades-long efforts to report the truth. You needn't know her producers personally to recognize that these are all earnest young progressives working long hours to create a daily news program they deeply believe in. The notion that all of her producers are somehow maintaining a code of silence in exchange for the privilege of having their names mentioned at the end of the broadcast, or in exchange for their nominally middle-class salaries, is preposterous.

However, judging from numerous emails I get and conversations I have with fans and acquaintances from around the US and elsewhere, the efforts of the Truthers to sow seeds of doubt among readers and listeners of progressive media is having some palpable impact. Increasingly, I hear from people who have vaguely heard something about this "gatekeeper" phenomenon, something about Ford Foundation money undermining the entire progressive media.

As is so often the case, there are little grains of truth in here that can fester in the minds of people who are not looking at the information critically. For the cops among the Truthers (of course it's a matter of the public record that the FBI and other such agencies regularly write "newspaper articles" -- propaganda or disinformation of whatever sort they deem useful which they disseminate through newspapers, websites, etc.), undermining the legitimacy of the progressive media is exactly their goal, because they don't want the population to know the truth or to trust those who are reporting it. For the more earnest elements among the Truthers, undermining the progressive media is also their goal, because they don't see it as being distinct from the corporate media anyway -- so whether earnest or insidious, the effect is the same.

The grain of truth, of course, is that government, corporate and foundation money have undoubtedly succeeded in making PBS and NPR a shell of it's former self. Foundation money has also had a debilitating impact on the nonprofit world, since support for essential but illegal activities such as civil disobedience on the part of nonprofits will tend to cause them to lose foundation support. Also, nonprofits are prevented by law from participating openly in the electoral process, or they lose their nonprofit status. If progressive media is being influenced by the relatively small amount of foundation money it receives, I don't see it.

It seems evident to me that shows like Democracy Now! are quite willing -- and indeed, are doing their best -- to make waves as much as possible. If they don't report a story it's because they don't think it's a story, or it's not an important enough one to bother with. In the case of "theories" like the notion that controlled demolition brought down the World Trade Center or there were no members of Al-Qaeda on board the airplanes, this narrative has received little coverage in the progressive media because, upon investigation, most decide it's patently ridiculous.

The real gatekeepers

Sometime in 2002 I wrote a song called "Reichstag Fire," in which I asked many of the questions the Truthers were asking. The point of the song was primarily to say that 9/11 has been used as an excuse for the US to carry out a genocidal crusade on much of the Muslim world, and to further the US government's bipartisan agenda of world domination and control of valuable resources in other countries, such as oil. (This is something Truthers and most other people in the world can generally agree on.) In the song I also posed questions which I now feel have been adequately explained.

Were there really Arab terrorists on board the planes? Yes. Did the CIA know an attack was imminent? Yes. I don't regret writing the song, or becoming a very minor celebrity within the 9/11 Truth Movement, because I think these questions needed to be asked, and answered. But while some questions can only remain unanswered until certain people within the US government become whistleblowers, other questions have been answered, and my answers (and those of most people who have looked into these things) and those of what now constitutes the Truth Movement differ wildly. Particularly because I have been seen by some as part of this movement (although I seem to be increasingly getting lumped into the "gatekeeper" camp), I felt compelled to write this essay.

The truth is, in fact, out there. Much of it is certainly still there to be discovered, but many fundamental, essential truths are already known. The truth -- that, for example, the CIA funded and armed Al-Qaeda and the Taleban, that a tiny minority of very wealthy people control much of the US government and the "mainstream" (corporate/"public") media, that the US military systematically goes around the world overthrowing democracies, propping up dictatorships, and killing millions of people with bombs -- is what the progressive media is reporting on hourly, daily, weekly or monthly. These are the truths that people in the US most need to "wake up" to. These are the truths that are systematically unreported or severely under-reported by the corporate press, which, even in the age of the internet, is still where the vast majority of people in the US get their news, and thus, their understanding of the world.

These corporate media entities and the genocidal, ecocidal plutocracy they serve are the "gatekeepers" that need to be exposed. The truths they are trying to hide from us are the truths that need to be understood, and acted upon. The progressive media that is trying to do just that needs to be supported, not undermined with essentially baseless accusations (legitimate criticisms and suggestions notwithstanding).

The people who are trying, with some degree of success, to undermine these basic endeavors of the progressive movement and the progressive media need to be exposed for what they are -- whether they fall into the category of well-meaning but misguided fanatics or undercover government agents quite purposefully and systematically working to spread disinformation and sow confusion and distrust. And, beyond any reasonable doubt, the "Truth Movement" contains both of these elements. To both of these groups I beseech you -- wake up! Wake up to the real, easily-verifiable conspiracies -- which are extremely big ones! -- and quit trying to distract us with all the nonsense about gatekeepers and controlled demolitions!

Click Here to Read More...

If I Can't Dance...

An Open Letter to the US Left on the Relevance of Culture

Being an activist is a hard, relatively thankless, generally unpaid job. There are some really wonderful people who are going to be offended by this essay, and I apologize in advance if you’re one of them, but what I say here had to be said. We’re all hopefully trying to make the world a better place, and sometimes that means having open disagreements. I welcome any and all feedback, public or private, and of course feel free to post and distribute this essay wherever you see fit.

Last weekend I sang at an antiwar protest in downtown Portland, Oregon, on the fifth anniversary of the ongoing slaughter in Iraq. In both its good and bad aspects, the event downtown was not unusual. Hard-working, unpaid activists from various organizations and networks put in long hours organizing, doing publicity, and sitting through lots of contentious meetings in the weeks and months leading up to the event. On the day of the event, different groups set up tents to network with the public and talk about matters of life and death. There was a stage with talented musicians of various musical genres performing throughout the day, and a rally with speakers in the afternoon, followed by a march. Attendance was pathetically low. In large part I’m sure this was due to the general sense of discouragement most people in the US seem to feel about our ability to effect change under the Bush regime. It was raining especially hard by west coast standards, and that also didn’t help.

The crowd grew to it’s peak size during the rally and march, but was almost nonexistent before the 2 pm rally. There was only a trickle of people visiting the various tents prior to the rally, and the musicians on the stage were playing to a largely nonexistent audience. The musical program, scheduled to happen from 10 am to 6 pm, was being billed as the World War None Festival. The term “festival” was contentious, however, and Pdx Peace, the local peace coalition responsible for the rally, couldn’t come to consensus on using the term “festival.” In their publicity they referred to the festival as an “action camp.” The vast majority of people have no idea what an “action camp” is, including me, and I’ve been actively involved in the progressive movement for my entire adult life. The local media, of course, also had no idea what an “action camp” was, and any publicity that could have been hoped for from them did not happen. Word did not spread about the event to any significant degree, at least in part because people didn’t know what they were supposed to be spreading the word about. Everybody from all political, social, class and ethnic backgrounds knows what a festival is, but certain elements within Pdx Peace didn’t want to use the term to describe what was quite obviously meant to be a festival (as well as a rally and march). Anybody above the age of three can tell you that when you have live music on a stage outdoors all day, that’s called a festival. But not Pdx Peace.

Why? I wasn’t at the meetings -- thankfully, I’m just a professional performer, not an organizer of anything other than my own concert tours, so I only know second-hand about what was said. There’s no need to name the names of individuals or the smaller groups involved with the coalition in this case -- the patterns are so common and so well-established that the names just don’t matter. Some people within the peace coalition were of the opinion that the war in Iraq was too serious a matter to have a festival connected to it. Because, I imagine, of some combination of factors including the nature of consensus decision-making, sectarianism on the part of a few, and muddled thinking on the part of some others, those who thought that a festival should happen -- and should be called a festival -- were overruled. My hat goes off to the World War None Festival organizers (a largely separate entity from Pdx Peace), and to those within Pdx Peace who tried and failed to call the festival what it was, and to organize a well-attended event.

As to those who succeeded in sabotaging the event, I ask, why is so much of the left in the US so attached to being so dreadfully boring? Why do so many people on the left apparently have no appreciation for the power and importance of culture? And when organizers, progressive media and others on the left do acknowledge culture, why is it usually kept on the sidelines? What are we trying to accomplish here?

It wasn’t always this way. Going back a hundred years, before we had a significant middle class in this country, before we had a Social Security system, Worker’s Compensation, Medicare, or anything approximating the actual (not just on paper) right to free speech, when most of the working class majority in this country were living in utter destitution and generally working (when they could find work) in extremely dangerous conditions for extremely long hours, often in jobs that required them to be itinerant, required them to forego the pleasure of having families that they might have a chance to see now and then, out of these conditions the Industrial Workers of the World was born.

The IWW at that time was a huge, militant union that could bring industrial production in the US to a halt, and on various regional levels, quite regularly did. It was a multi-ethnic union led by women and men of a wide variety of backgrounds, from all over the world. It’s most well-known member to this day was a singer-songwriter named Joe Hill, and he was only one of many of the musician-organizers that constituted both the leadership and membership of the IWW. While starving, striking, or being attacked by police on the streets of Seattle, Boston and everywhere in between, the IWW sang. Their publications were filled with poems, lyrics and cartoons. Everybody knew the songs and sung them daily. Some of the songs were instructive, meant to educate workers in effective organizing techniques. Others were battle cries of resistance, and still others celebrated victories or lamented defeats. Their cause was nothing short of the physical survival and spiritual dignity of the working class. They put their bodies on the line and were often killed and maimed for it, but they transformed this society profoundly, and they sang the whole way through. Was their cause serious? As serious as serious can get. And to this day, multitudes around the world remember the songs of Joe Hill, Ralph Chaplin, and T-Bone Slim, long after their speeches and pamphlets have been forgotten. Like many other singer-songwriters throughout the history of the class war, Joe Hill was executed by a firing squad in 1916. Why? Exactly because he was so serious -- a serious threat to the robber barons who ruled this country.

A very different, much more rigidly ideological organization that rose to prominence during the declining years of the IWW was the Communist Party. This is an organization whose early years are within the living memory of close friends of mine, such as my dear friend Bob Steck, who died last year at the age of 95, and spent most of his life fighting for humanity. I spent hundreds of hours over the course of many years interrogating Bob about his life and times (at least ten hours of which are recorded for posterity on cassettes somewhere). The Communist Party was very different from the IWW in many ways, but in it’s heyday it was also a huge, grassroots movement, whose leadership and membership took many cards from the IWW’s deck, including their emphasis on the vital importance of culture.

When Bob talked about the CP’s orientation with regards to organizing the revolution in the USA, he said there were three primary components: the unions, the streets, and the theater. Fighting for the welfare of the working class by organizing for the eight-hour day and decent wages (largely through the communist-led Congress of Industrial Organizations, the CIO), organizing the starving millions in the streets into the unions of the unemployed, and -- just as importantly -- fighting for the hearts and minds of the people through music, theater, and art. Among the musical vanguard of the communist movement of the 1930’s were people who are still household names today for millions of people in the US and around the world -- Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Paul Robeson, to name a few. Traveling theater companies brought the work of Clifford Odetts and Bertoldt Brecht to the people, educating and inspiring militant action throughout the US. I remember Bob describing the audience reaction to one of the early performances of Waiting for Lefty in New York City, the gasps of excitement and possibility in the packed theater when the actors on stage shouted those last lines of the play -- “Strike! Strike! Strike!” Ten curtain calls later, everyone in the theater was ready to take to the streets, and did.

Bob and his comrades organized and sang in New York, just as they sang going into battle in Spain in the first fight against fascism, the one in which the US was on the side of the fascists. Nothing unusual about that -- soldiers on every side in every war sing as they go into battle, whether the cause is just or unjust. They and their leadership, whether fascist or democrat, socialist or anarchist, know that the songs are just as powerful as the guns (regardless of what Tom Lehrer said). You can’t fire if you’re running away, and if you want to stand and fight you have to sing. Talk to anybody involved with the Civil Rights movement and they’ll tell you, if we weren’t singing, we surely would have lost heart and ran in the face of those hate-filled, racist police and their dogs, guns, and water cannon. Talk to anyone who lived through the 60’s -- who remembers any but the most eloquent of the speeches by the likes of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, or Mario Savio? But millions remember the songs. Bob Dylan, Buffy Sainte-Marie, James Brown, Aretha Franklin were the soundtrack to the struggle. Open any magazine or newspaper in this country to this day and you will find somewhere in the pages an unaccredited reference to a line in a Bob Dylan song. (Try it, it’s fun.)

Around the world it’s the same. Dedicated leftists may sit through the speeches of Fidel Castro or Hugo Chavez, but transcendent poetry of Pablo Neruda and the enchanting melodies of Silvio Rodriguez cross all political and class lines. You will have to try hard to find a Spanish-speaking person anywhere in the Americas who does not love the work of that Cuban communist, Silvio. You'll have to search hard to find a Latino who does not have a warm place in their heart for that murdered Chilean singer-songwriter, Victor Jara.

Talk to any Arab of any background, no matter how despondent they may be about the state of the Arab world, try to find one whose eyes do not light up when you merely mention the names Mahmoud Darwish, Marcel Khalife, Feyrouz, Um Khultum. Try to find anyone in Ireland but the most die-hard Loyalist who doesn’t tear up when listening to the music of Christy Moore, whatever they think of the IRA. And ask progressives on the streets of the US today how they came to hold their political views that led them to take the actions they are now taking, and as often as not you will hear answers like, “I discovered punk rock, the Clash changed my life,” or “I went to a concert of Public Enemy, and that was it.”

Music -- and art, poetry, theater -- is powerful (if it’s good). The powers that be know this well. Joe Hill and Victor Jara are only a small fraction of the musicians killed by the ruling classes for doing what they do. By the same token, those who run this country (and so many other countries) know the power of music and art to serve their purposes -- virtually every product on the shelf in every store in the US has a jingle to go along with it, and often brilliant artistic imagery to go along with the jingle, shouting at us from every billboard and TV commercial. (The ranks of Madison Avenue are filled with brilliant minds who would rather be doing something more fulfilling with their creative energy.)

Enter 2008. Knowing the essential power of music, the very industry that sells us music mass-produced in Nashville and LA has done their best to kill music. For decades, the few multi-billion-dollar corporations that control the music business and the commercial airwaves have done their best to teach us all that music is something to have in the background to comfort you as you try to get through another mind-numbing day of meaningless labor in some office building or department store. It’s something to help you seduce someone perhaps, or to help you get over a breakup. It is not something to inspire thought, action, or feelings of compassion for humanity (other than for your girlfriend or boyfriend).

There are always exceptions to prove the rule, but by and large, the writers and performers in Nashville and LA know what they’re being paid to do, and what they’re being paid not to do -- if it ever occurred to them to do anything else in the first place. But even more potently, all those millions of musicians aspiring to become stars, or at least to make a living at their craft, know either consciously or implicitly that any hope of success rides on imitating the garbage that comes out of these music factories. Of course, there are the many others who write and sing songs (and create art, plays, screenplays, etc.) out of a need to express themselves or even out of a desire to make a difference in the world, but they are systematically kept off of the airwaves, out of the record deals, relegated largely to the internet, very lucky if they might manage to make a living at their craft. Fundamentally, though, they are made to feel marginal, and are looked at by much of society as marginal, novelties, exotic. Although they are actually the mainstream of the (non-classical) musical tradition in the US and around the world, although the kind of music they create has been and is still loved by billions around the world for centuries, in the current climate, especially in present-day US society, they are a marginal few.

And no matter how enlightened we would like to think we are, the progressive movement is part of this society, for good and for ill. Most of us have swallowed this shallow understanding of what music is. The evidence is overwhelming. There are, of course, exceptions. Folks like the organizers of the annual protests outside the gates of Fort Benning, Georgia -- School of the Americas Watch -- are well aware of the potency of culture, and use music and art to great effect, inspiring and educating tens of thousands of participants every November.

On the other end of the spectrum are the ideologically-driven people who have turned hatred of culture into a sort of art. I have to smile when I think of the small minority of Islamist wackos who tried to storm the stage at one rally I sang at in DC in 2002, shouting, “No music! No music!” Security for the stage was being provided by the Nation of Islam, who faced off with this group of Islamists, who ultimately decided that throwing down with the Jewels of Islam behind the stage that day wasn’t in their best interests, apparently.

But much more prevalent, and therefore much scarier, are groups like the ANSWER “Coalition.” (I put “coalition” in quotes because I have yet to meet a member of a group that theoretically makes up the “coalition” that has had any say in what goes on at their rallies, although the leadership of ANSWER is of course happy to receive the bus-loads of people that their “coalition” members bring to their rallies, which seems to be the only thing that makes ANSWER a “coalition.”) ANSWER, last I heard, is run by the ultra-left sectarian group known as the Worker’s World Party, which I strongly suspect is working for the FBI. (Although as Ward Churchill says, you don’t need to be a cop to do a cop’s job.)

Millions of people in the US who regularly go to antiwar protests are unaware of who is organizing them. They just want to go to an antiwar protest. ANSWER has become almost synonymous with “antiwar protest,” to the extent that many people on the periphery of the left (such as most people who go to their protests) refer to antiwar protests as “ANSWER protests,” as in “I went to an ANSWER protest,” whether or not the protest was actually organized by ANSWER. (Just as many people say “I was listening to NPR” when they were actually listening to a community radio station that has nothing to do with NPR, broadcasting programs such as Democracy Now!, which the vast majority of NPR stations still will not touch with a ten foot pole.)

I always find it unnerving and intriguing that ANSWER protests always seem to be mentioned on NPR and broadcast on CSPAN, whereas rallies organized by the bigger and actual coalition, United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ), almost never manage to make it onto CSPAN or get covered by the corporate media. ANSWER always seems to get the permits, whereas UFPJ seems to be systematically denied them. Anyway, I digress (a little). I tend to avoid anything having to do with ANSWER or the little-known, shadowy Worker’s World Party, but a few years ago I was driving across Tennessee listening to CSPAN on my satellite radio, and they broadcast the full four hours of an ANSWER protest in DC. I sat through it because I wanted to hear it from beginning to end, for research purposes, and Tennessee is a long state to drive through from west to east, had to do something during that drive. There was one song in the four-hour rally. Although I’ve been an active member of the left for twenty years, I recognized almost none of the names of the people who spoke at the rally. Every speech was full of boring, tired rhetoric, as if they were out of a screenplay written by a rightwing screenwriter who was trying to make a mockery out of leftwing political rallies. Judging from the names of the organizations involved, very few of which I recognized either, they were mostly tiny little Worker’s World Party front groups. And since the Worker’s World Party apparently doesn’t have any musicians in their pocket, there was no music to speak of. (Or, quite probably I suspect, they don't want music at their rallies because they don't want their rallies to be interesting.)

ANSWER is an extreme example, but a big one that most progressives are unfortunately familiar with, whether they know who ANSWER (or Worker’s World) is or not. Inevitably, most people leave ANSWER protests feeling vaguely used and demoralized -- aside from those who manage to stay far enough away from the towers of speakers so they can avoid hearing all the mindless rhetoric pouring out of them. Contrast the mood with the protests at the gates of Fort Benning, where most people leave feeling hopeful and inspired.

I know I have no more hope of influencing the leadership of Worker’s World with this essay than I have of influencing the behavior of the New York City police department with it. But neither of these organizations are my target audience. Those who I hope to reach are those who are genuinely trying to create rallies and other events in the hopes of influencing and inspiring public opinion, in the hopes of inspiring people to action, in the hopes of winning allies among the apolitical or even among conservatives. The people I hope to reach are those who have been unwittingly influenced by the corporate music industry’s implicit definition of what music and culture is and is not.

And, here we go, I would count among this group most of the hard-working, loving and compassionate people who are organizing rallies, who are organizing actions, who are organizing unions, and who are creating progressive media on the radio, on community television and on the internet in the US today.

I’d like to pause for a moment to make a disclosure. I am a professional politically-oriented musician, what the corporate media (and many progressives) would call a “protest singer,” though I reject the term. I’m not sure what, if anything, I have to gain personally by publishing these thoughts, but I think it behooves me to point out that I am one of the lucky ones who has performed at rallies and in progressive and mainstream media for hundreds of thousands of people on a fairly regular basis throughout the world, and I would like to hope that my words here will not be understood as Rovics whining that he’s not famous enough. I speak here for culture generally, not for myself as an individual singer-songwriter.

My desire is to reach groups like Pdx Peace and their sister organizations throughout the country. These are genuinely democratic groups, real coalitions made up of real people, not sectarian, unaccountable groups like ANSWER. These are groups, in short, made up of my friends and comrades, but these are groups also made up of people who grew up in this society and therefore generally have a lot to learn about the power of culture to educate and inspire people. It is not good enough to have music on the stage as people are gathering to rally and as they are leaving to march. It’s not good enough to have a song or two sandwiched in between another half hour of speeches -- no matter how many organizations want to have speakers representing them on stage, or whatever other very legitimate excuses organizers have for making their events, once again, long and boring (even if they’re not as long or as boring as an ANSWER rally). It is not good enough for wonderful, influential radio/TV shows like Democracy Now! to have snippets of songs in between their interviews, when only two or three of those interviews each year are related to culture. It is a sorry state of affairs that NPR news shows do a better job of covering pop culture than Pacifica shows do in terms of covering leftwing culture.

The vast majority of the contemporary, very talented, dedicated musicians represented by, say, the "links" page on www.davidrovics.com, have rarely or never been invited to sing at a local or national protest rally (even if some few of us have, many times). The vast majority of progressive conferences do not even include a concert, or if they do, it's background music during dinner on Saturday night. I can count on one hand the number of times I have heard Democracy Now! or Free Speech Radio News mention that a great leftwing artist is doing a tour of the US. The number of fantastic musicians out there who have even been played during the station breaks on Democracy Now! is a tiny fraction of those that are out there -- of the dozens of musicians featured on my "links" page for example, only a small handful have even been played once. It is shameful that it's easier to get a national, mainstream radio show in the UK or Canada to plug a tour of such a musician than it is to get any national Pacifica program to do this.

Radical culture needs to be fostered and promoted, front and center, not sidelined as people are gathering, or when the radio stations are doing station ID's. Because if the point is to inspire people to action, a song is worth a hundred speeches. If the point is to educate people, a three-minute ballad is easily equal to any book. (They'll read the book after they hear the song, not the other way around.)

It is often said that we are in a battle for the hearts and minds of the people of this country. It is us versus CNN, NPR, Bush, Clinton, etc. In this battle, style matters, not just content. In this battle, it is absolutely imperative that we remember that it is not only the minds we need to win, but the hearts. At least in terms of the various forms of human communication, there is nothing on Earth more effective in winning hearts than music and art. We ignore or sideline music and art at our peril. It's time to listen to the music.

Click Here to Read More...

Raising Leila

Idle ramblings on raising babies and children (and burning down the schools).

I’ve been spending most of my time lately hanging out with a baby – my daughter, Leila. She’ll be two at the end of next month. I’m often with her from dawn to dusk, five or six days a week, while her mother attends medical school. Spending all this time with her, naturally she starts to rub off on me in a big way, like a contact high. In her presence I’m generally in a state of mild euphoria, accompanied by emotional fragility. Like I know I’m very small and new here, but as long as nothing bad happens too often, the world is basically a fascinating and exciting place, there to be constantly rediscovered.

She went through a brief phase of gasping in wonderment at occasions that impressed her. These days she’s more into clapping vigorously and yelling, “yay!” repeatedly, or yelling the word relevant to the impressive event, such as “smoothie!”, “food!”, “doggie!”, etc. When something impresses her quite a bit but maybe not quite enough to make her start clapping and yelling, such as last week when she witnessed a dog run a hundred feet and then jump in the air to catch a ball in mid-flight, she’ll often say, “that’s crazy!” She got that from her wonderful punk rock babysitter, Hannae. She learned other phrases from Hannae, and she uses them all in context. When a friend and I were each holding one of Leila’s hands and “flying” her through the air, she said recently, “I’m so happy!”

With many other phrases, she knows what she’s talking about, but she poses them as questions rather than statements, because these are phrases she’s often heard that seem to be associated with certain activities. For example, if I walk out the back door of my apartment she’ll climb out to join me, saying, “are you coming?” This means, “I’m coming.” One by one, these “questions” start turning into statements, as she starts figuring out which is which. Just as “shoomie” became “smoothie,” and “Eya” became “Leila.”

At no point did anyone try to “teach” her how to properly pronounce her name. No one ever tried to explain to her the difference between a statement and a question. She figures these things out “on her own,” by living, by interacting with people, by watching, listening, trying things out and seeing what happens. She rarely becomes frustrated by her mistakes.

Lately I’ve noticed sometimes when she’s developed expectations about the way something works, and then when it doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to, this can be a source of frustration. For example, she’s come to believe that when her pants are on, they’ll stay on unless she takes them off. Recently I had a pair of pants on her that were too big, and they kept inching their way down around her legs and she had to keep pulling them up, and after a while growled with frustration at this situation. (And I vowed to try harder to consistently dress her with clothes that fit properly.)

But generally, the world is new and undiscovered, and with an unfettered, creative approach to everything, fascinated by much of what she encounters in the world, applying the scientific method to every new situation, Leila goes forth. The more time I spend with little kids, the more I become convinced that they all start out like Leila – brilliant, graceful, full of enthusiasm for life, full of a desire to discover and enjoy the world, to understand everything there is to understand, to learn every new language they encounter.

Leila speaks two languages, mostly – her mother’s native French and my English. She mixes French and English with whoever she’s talking to, but mostly she tunes in to the language that people speak and uses that one. After a while she learns all the same words and phrases in both languages, but for the first while a new word or phrase will only be in one of the languages. “Cheese” is usually still “mage” (short for “fromage”), “pants” are usually “pantalon.” For some things that especially excite her, though, she learns to say it in both languages, and more immediately, in the hope that one of these words will work and someone will give her some – such as “ice cream” (“glas,” “helado”).

Recently my friend Reiko visited from Japan. I was encouraging her to speak Japanese with Leila. With Reiko’s enthusiastic warmth, I was sure it wouldn’t matter to Leila what language she was speaking anyway. Leila seemed to light up even brighter when she heard Reiko speaking Japanese. It was as if she was thinking, I’ve never heard people talk like this before! This is new and exciting! Let’s see, I’ll repeat what she just said and see what happens, see how people react, see what this means, cool... Within hours she had learned “oishi” (“yummy”), and “moshi-moshi” (“hello” when answering a telephone).

The thing is, nice new people, good food, and telephones are all very interesting, so naturally those are some good first words to learn in any new language. What grownups do – and even more, what older kids do – is automatically interesting. Walking up and down stairs, putting on and taking off clothes, talking (and especially talking on the phone), reading, writing. Other things are just innately fun, like swimming or taking a bath, playing in the park, or drinking smoothies. From Leila’s perspective, it seems, all of these sorts of things should be done often and well, if they are things that require mastery, and to one degree or another everything does.

When Leila encounters something she wants to master, such as, for example, climbing and descending staircases, she sets about the activity like a scientist playing a game. She enjoys the effort, the successes, and never seems to mind the “failures,” which she clearly views as learning experiences. Unless they cause physical pain or the fear of it, like if she falls down a stair or almost falls and needs to be rescued (on the very rare occasions she really loses it, I’ve generally been nearby enough to catch her before she falls down more than one stair). But in the case of physical pain from falling or crashing into something, she usually cries for a second or two, wants a brief hug, and then wants to get down and get right back into whatever she was doing that caused the damage, to figure out what went wrong and do it better.

Emotional pain is far worse than getting the wind knocked out of you for Leila. When she understood recently that I was getting on an airplane to go away for several weeks (for a tour), she was very upset and cried hard and heartbreakingly for quite a while. On a couple of occasions her mom’s housemate’s cat, Oliver, swatted at her when he was tired of being bothered. He’s a bit moody as cats often are, and not the most baby-friendly of them. Usually he’ll walk off in a huff after she tries to pat him for a few seconds, but sometimes he’ll tolerate a bit more of it, while other times he’ll swat at her instead of walking away. Leila doesn’t like it when he walks away, but when he swats at her she feels devastated and betrayed, it seems. When she’s crying about something like that, she seems to want to let me know what it is that’s upsetting her, so the last time this happened, in the midst of her sobs, she was saying “Meow! Meow!”

I felt like crying with her and laughing at her at the same time, but I did neither. What I feel compelled to do when she’s crying is hold her, which she generally likes. But the last time the cat swatted at her it wasn’t what she wanted. While still crying and obviously feeling hurt by Oliver, she wanted to work it out with him. He hadn’t walked away yet, and she wanted to try to work things out with him somehow, figure out what was going on. The truth is, if she figures it out, she’ll be the first, ‘cause he swats at everybody now and then. The rest of us just aren’t particularly bothered by it, because we know he’s a cat and cats can be like that (and anyway, he never draws blood from humans, unlike some other cats I’ve known).

Whether things are hard or easy, potentially painful or not, Leila dives into it. Nobody has ever needed to “teach” her how to do these things. Nor has anyone ever had to encourage her to learn new things, she just does new things all the time out of a love of life and an obvious, unhidden fascination with the world. No one has told her about the scientific method of figuring things out – her little brain did that all by itself, from the very beginning.

During her first year or so she lived in a house with no stairs. Around the time she was figuring out how to walk, we were staying at a place with a staircase for a few months. The stairs became a central fascination. At first, someone would always watch her like a hawk, but that rarely proved necessary, and after a short while it was clear that Leila just wouldn’t do things that she felt might result in falling down the stairs. She desperately wanted to be able to walk up and down the stairs with no hands like big people do, but she knew she couldn’t do this on her own, so she’d want to hold someone’s hand and go up and down the stairs that way. At least her hands weren’t touching the stairs, she seemed to be thinking. But she wanted to be able to do the stairs without help, so she improvised and taught herself how to crawl up them and crawl down them going backwards. She tried going down forwards on her butt, too, but that didn’t work as well so she ultimately settled on going backwards. When she was ready to start doing stairs by holding onto the railing, she did, and did so successfully. After a while she started doing stairs without holding onto anything. Each step of the way she’d challenge herself as much as seemed safe, never more, without ever needing anyone to say “don’t do this” or “don’t do that” or “that’s dangerous,” “be careful,” etc.

Leila is also learning to play the ukelele in the same manner. I have never “taught” her how to hold it, how to pick or strum the strings, etc. I just play it regularly for our enjoyment in my (our) apartment. I have several of them around, and of course they’re small enough for any baby to play. Sometimes she’ll pick one up while I’m playing another, but most often she’ll pick up the one I had been playing after I put it down. She hasn’t started fingering chords yet, but she holds it in the usual position (like I do), one hand holding the neck and the other hand playing the strings. She picks individual strings and strums as well, and sometimes sings while she’s doing these things. She sings beautifully, matches pitches, and may have perfect pitch (I haven’t tried to figure that out for sure and I don’t think it matters either way whether she has it or not). She likes music, and frequently requests this as an activity. I always have a guitar sitting on a guitar stand in the living room. She’ll walk up to it and gently strum the strings (only once accidentally knocking it over, which is easy to do with those little three-legged guitar stands), and she’ll say, “play music?”

Ours is a symbiotic relationship. We’re always doing something that we both enjoy doing, pretty much. If she’s doing something obsessively for a half hour, like climbing up and down a new staircase a hundred times or so (demonstrating brilliantly that babies do not have short attention spans if they’re into what they’re doing), I’ll tend to read the AP wire on my fancy new cell phone. When she’s done and wants to do something more interactive, I just put the phone back in my pocket and we go do something else. It seems to me there’s no particular reason for us to do stuff that one of us doesn’t enjoy, since there are so many things we both enjoy. Often, finding activities of mutual interest leads to me learning new things.

For example, I play music for a living, and it’s good to practice playing, writing songs, etc. (It’s also good for me to get to answer my email on a regular basis so I can book gigs and such, but that’s boring for Leila so I only do it when she’s napping.) I usually play guitar with a pick. But anytime I pick up the guitar and start picking, Leila hones in on the pick, which fascinates her for some reason. (The innate fascination of humans with tools of all kinds, perhaps?) Once she has the pick, she may strum the strings with it a bit, but usually she’s more interested in dropping it in the soundhole and then saying something like, “Oh no! I don’t know where the pick go! Where did the pick go?” (She hasn’t figured out that “went” is the past tense of “go.” I imagine by next week or so she’ll have that one down.) Then I shake the guitar upside-down until the pick falls out, and Leila shouts, “there it is!” Then she immediately drops it back in the soundhole.

I get bored with this game. Her mother is concerned she might eat the pick and choke on it (seems very unlikely, but who knows, babies are reputed to do that sort of thing on occasion), so I don’t want to give her her own pick to play with. When I do, however (watching carefully to make sure she doesn’t actually decide to eat it), she just drops it in the soundhole and demands that I get it out so she can drop it in again. I could stand up so my hands and pick are out of her reach, but that seems like a mean thing for me to do, and when I try that she sometimes just reaches up towards my right hand, saying “Pick? Pick? Pick?” So I stopped using the pick at home, and have been getting much better at finger-picking, which is something I’ve been wanting to do for many years, but somehow never get around to (along with learning Spanish, and many other things).

In our meanderings around town, friends and acquaintances often comment that Leila seems to be exceptionally intelligent, dextrous, engaged with life, and good-natured. I think they’re mostly being authentic when they say these things, not just trying to impress the proud daddy. Perhaps there’s a genetic factor, and certainly there are physical factors – the finest organic breast milk is freely on tap every night (“boobie!” – which of course is just as nurturing emotionally as it is physically), most everything she eats is organic, etc. But more than anything, I’d say her being “exceptional” is more about many other children being “unexceptional.” That is, they are held back by their parents and other grownups in their lives, and especially by the schools. I’d suggest that most parents and the vast majority of schools – public, private, or “alternative” – are failing, often miserably, to allow children to be brilliant. I’m sure that many parents, teachers and school administrators care deeply about their children, but they’re just going about most everything all wrong and they have no idea, to be perfectly blunt.

They’re like mad biologists trying to raise parrots in the Arctic. The parrots are consistently freezing to death, but the biologists keep trying to teach them how to fly faster, do tricks, learn to say new phrases, etc., always hoping something they do is going to help the birds to flourish, but they just keep freezing to death no matter what they do. They start giving the birds drugs to increase their heart rate and keep them warmer, but that doesn’t work either. It never occurs to them that there are fundamental aspects of the environment they’ve brought the birds into which is consistently killing them.

I always knew our society (by which I mean the US, and to a large degree the “civilized” world in general) was messed up, but this awareness has never been greater for me than it’s been since I had a child. There has been plenty of good, widely-ignored and misunderstood research about how children and adults learn, how we maintain, improve or lose our physical, mental and emotional well-being. I’ve been reading about a lot of them lately, but I’m not going to get all academic here, I’ll just use my life in this world as a guide, I think that’s an easier way of describing things anyway. I’ve personally had extensive experience with self-directed learning, as well as many years in a reputedly excellent public school, and many years in a wonderful alternative school. I’ve also known (and know) many children and adults of all ages who have been raised in a wide variety of environments.

It starts at birth. From right at the beginning, although the practice has been widely discredited, including by the doctors who originally recommended it half a century ago, parents are confining their babies in a crib and letting them cry themselves to sleep. Whether consciously or not, this is the beginning of the process of teaching children that they don’t control their lives. The basic, primal notion for a baby, that their calls of distress should be answered by a nurturing older person of some kind, throws things out of whack and sets the stage for everything else. I used to think I was in a bit of a weird leftwing bubble, living on the fringes of society somehow, but I have been surprised to find, now that I have a kid and I’m around other kids a bit more often, that the practice of letting babies cry themselves to sleep is not uncommon within my own circle.

After “learning this lesson” that they don’t control their environment and their distress is not particularly important, within a few months they’re in the playground, where I often find myself with my daughter. Many of the kids are like Leila; self-confident, challenging themselves on the climbing thing but not doing anything that they can’t pull off. Occasionally Leila will fall a couple feet. In all the parks in Portland that I’ve been to, though, the ground is covered with soft wood chips, so it’s all good. But there are always parents who are trying to dictate their child’s every move in the playground. The playground – a place designed for kids have fun in -- somehow is turned into a source of exasperation for both parent and child. The parents create unnecessary boundaries, the children, of course, feel constricted by them, feel like they’re being prevented from growing and learning new things (and they’re right), and they push against them.

If Leila is doing something that a child a year older than her is not allowed to do, and then the other child’s parent decides to let their kid do whatever it is, say, climb a tall staircase (with a railing!), often the child, upon reaching the top, will say, “I’m scared.” Why are they scared? Because their parents have taught them at this early age that they cannot trust themselves. They have effectively stunted their physical and emotional development, already.

And then of course the next step in the process for the overwhelming majority of children: school. Now that many of them have already learned not to trust themselves, they are generally thrown into an environment where everybody else is within a year or so of their age except for the teacher. Regardless of the type of school, the implicit message here is these kids are in this box for a reason – they’re there to “learn,” and the teacher is there to “teach.”

Alternative schools can successfully alter this equation to the point where the overall experience is positive for the children, I’m sure. But the best of the alternative schools are trying (successfully or not) to create a “child-driven, experiential” environment. That’s good, because what that means is they’re trying to recreate the “real world” in a school setting. Because of our widespread societal preconceptions of what school traditionally is – a sort of rigid, “us” (students) and “them” (teachers and administrators) environment – it’s an inherent challenge to try to change the model and create an authentically alternative school. But even if an alternative school can create a situation where learning is actually experiential rather than all “taught” from on high, it’s still no replacement for the rich, infinitely more diverse environment that exists outside of the school building.

Of course, for most parents and others who care about children, keeping the kids out of school may not be a realistic option. Perhaps sending them to an alternative school isn’t realistic either, because of the expense usually involved. I’m not going to suggest that keeping your kids out of school is necessarily possible or even right for everybody. But for those people out there who think school is necessary or important for children, I would like to be one more voice in the chorus that vehemently rejects this notion. No, school is neither necessary nor important. In fact, the vast majority of time it will do far more harm than good. I’m talking about the schools that they usually call “good” schools (with the exception, perhaps, of some of the best of the alternative schools), not just the “bad” schools.

I know something about this subject. I have no degree, and I’m sure I don’t need one. I’ve known many parents and children, adults and young people, all over this world. I’m intimately familiar with the products of a wide range of private, public and alternative educational institutions, and I myself have spent many years as a student in a “good” public school system, an excellent alternative elementary school, as well as a more conventional private college.

Perhaps most importantly, I’ve known (and read books about) many young people who have been kept out schools for much or all of their lives. They are consistently brilliant. Not just in terms of their capability for critical thought, but also for creative thought, and in terms of emotional intelligence. They’re fully alive. Oftentimes their parents don’t necessarily impress me as exceptional people, in terms of their academic or life achievements. You wouldn’t be able to pick them out if you were waiting in line at the post office in the Boston exurbs. But to spend time with young people who have not been to school is a profoundly convincing experience in itself. The ease with which they tend to interact with other kids their age, or younger, or older, or adults. The self-confidence, self-assuredness, the bright intellectual spark that shines in their faces, their ease with “adult conversation.”

Many of them are taking courses at a local community college by the time their in their early teens, so they often end up having experiences with conventional educational institutions, but it’s a self-directed contact – usually they’re just taking courses in things that interest them, usually things that are either not taught in most secondary schools, or not taught at a sufficiently advanced level.

Since I had a kid and took a stronger interest in the subject, I’ve been asking the many university professors I know to tell me about their contact with students who have been kept out of the school system up to that point. Consistently, they tell me how impressive these kids are, how far above their peers they are socially, intellectually, emotionally.

From my own experience with school, and with seeing the effects of school on others, this makes perfect sense. What I remember about first grade was that I learned that my needs, feelings and desires didn’t matter. I learned that doing what the teacher wanted was all that mattered, and I learned that this was impossible to do. I felt helpless, confused, and afraid most of the time. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one in the class feeling that way. It was my first experience with a classroom setting with desks and all that, and it was a potentially spirit-killing experience.

Luckily for me, my parents recognized that school wasn’t working out for me, and they looked for and found a wonderful alternative school that happened to be right in our little suburb in Connecticut, called the Learning Community. After spending quite some time being reclusive and essentially recovering from public school-induced PTSD, I did well in that environment, and was basically allowed to remain more or less emotionally intact. I can only try to imagine how things might have gone if I had had to attend the public schools or some other conventional school during that fragile period of young childhood. What I know for sure is I wouldn’t be the person I am today.

By the time I went to public school again, from grades 7-12, I was feeling enthusiastic about the experience. I wanted to see what it would be like. I was interested in science and math, and I was under the impression I’d get to learn about these things. To this day, I like to hear a good story, or a good lecture. But being talked at all day long by people who were clearly disinterested in what they were talking about, while sitting in a class with people who were equally disinterested in the subject material, was overwhelming. Day after day, week after week, year after year, I was going out of my mind with boredom. It was like being in purgatory. I never dropped out, but I never accepted this reality either, and I somehow survived the experience more or less intact, though in large part missing six potentially very formative years of my life. For my sister and many of my friends, the public school experience was far worse.

I remember how at the beginning of each school year the students were given the opportunity to choose their class schedule. Each year, many or most of the courses were required, but at least you could choose between “Intro to Physics” or “Intro to Chemistry” (forget about astronomy, anthropology, or other subjects of potential interest to kids). You could choose between western European history or US history (all of course taught from the perspective of the rich white slave-owning Indian-killers, and you can forget about studying history of eastern Europe, Latin America, Africa or Asia). You could choose between French and Spanish, taught by non-native speakers. I’m sure there were not more than a tiny handful of students who were anywhere close to conversational at either language by the time they graduated, and I’m sure most of them were exchange students. But still, we were being offered a choice, and this was exciting. As I realized later, this was the only time during the year that we were effectively being offered a choice, and the choice we were being given was essentially between Tweedledum and Tweedledumber.

This was in the early 1980’s, in one of the most well-funded school systems in one of the wealthiest towns in one of the wealthiest counties in the US, a “good” school by most accounts. In fact, my parents moved to Wilton from New York City largely because of the school system there.

But even if the teachers had (at least at some point in their careers) been interested in what they were doing and talking about, I’m still convinced that it’s the basic, hierarchical, teacher-oriented structure of school that is the essential problem. School teaches you that you need teachers in order to learn. It is fundamentally disempowering and dispiriting. The false idea is rife that you need to study “Algebra I” before you can study “Algebra II” before you can study computer programming or astronomy – rather than learning algebra through the study of something potentially interesting and practical, such as computer programming or astronomy. We learn that in order to learn anything really interesting, you first have to bore yourself to death for years by studying other stuff. Gratification is always delayed.

In language classes, for example, the teachers don’t even start trying to get the kids to speak until they’ve given them a year’s worth of grammar and vocabulary tests. With this kind of regimentation it’s a wonder anybody learns anything at all.

People often hold up European public school systems as being far superior to US public schools. I’ve spent a lot of time all over Europe, known many young and old Europeans, and for various reasons, I agree that, for example, the German public school system is much better than ours. But having spent a lot of time in Germany’s second city, the great cosmopolitan city of Hamburg, I couldn’t help but notice that most Germans do not speak fluent English. Many do, usually because they’ve traveled a lot, lived in England, Ireland, the US, or had an Irish boyfriend or whatever. But for those who haven’t had those kinds of experiences, although the vast majority of them graduated from the German public schools and studied English for ten years, they still never became fluent.

In Japan it’s incomparably worse. Japan is widely acknowledged to have an extremely hard public school system, and many students are studying various subjects with tutors on a daily basis, even after their long hours in the schools themselves. As in Germany, Japanese students have all studied English for ten years or more. Yet, from my experience traveling in Japan last summer, it would be very generous to say that 10% of Japanese people can speak English with any degree of fluency.

What explains this failure of the school systems in two of the world’s richest countries? And why the huge difference between English fluency in Germany compared to, say, the Netherlands or Scandinavia, where (by my estimation) about 90% of the under-60 population are highly fluent in English? One difference is in Scandinavia and Holland, many of the movies and sitcoms on TV are from the US. Many of the documentaries are from the BBC. And the most common language spoken by international visitors is English. English is all around them on a daily basis. Experiential learning. In Germany, a much bigger TV and film market than Scandinavia, most foreign programming is overdubbed rather than subtitled, and because it’s a bigger market, much more of the programming is produced in German by Germans. (Same goes in Japan, France, Italy, etc.)

But then, perhaps the Germans and the Japanese just don’t want to learn English, so they don’t learn it, despite the fact that it’s being taught in the schools daily for most of their formative years. Or is it because of that fact? Which is the point. Scandinavians want to learn English because it’s around them in their nonschool environment, in the real world. In Germany, English is largely something forced down your throat in school, so naturally, many people basically reject it, do what they need to do to pass, and little more. They are offered no choice, subjected to a fundamentally disempowering situation, and they reject it because they are human. (Perhaps they also reject it to some degree because it is the language of the countries that carpet-bombed their cities and killed millions of their fellow citizens.)

By contrast, I spent a summer eight years ago traveling around the US with a German woman and her eight-year-old daughter. Her daughter spoke not much more than a few words of English at the beginning of the summer. By the end of the summer she spoke English better than her mother. Her mother may have known some big vocabulary words that she didn’t know, but her mastery of pronunciation and grammar far surpassed her mother’s. For example, by the end of the summer, upon meeting my father, this girl recognized the fact that my dad has a very mild Brooklyn accent, something which many native English speakers wouldn’t even pick up on.

So, you can spend one summer traveling around the Rockies and hanging out in the Navajo Reservation with your mom and become fluent in English, or you can go to school for your whole childhood and probably learn English less well by the end of it.

And this is not just about the much-vaunted (but still widely ignored by most schools) child’s receptivity for learning languages. I’m convinced that to a large extent, we don’t ever need to lose that penchant for learning that children have. In fact, we lose that penchant for learning because of school. Those who stay out of school, from my observations, tend to hold on to that magic spark that all children start out with. (And they probably hold onto it much longer if they can avoid having to get some mind-numbingly boring office job as adults.)

In the Learning Community as well as in the Wilton public school system, music education was negligible. There was no opportunity within the schools to play music, unless it was to learn how to play a brass instrument for the marching band (so you could perform during football games) or the “jazz” band in high school. The overwhelming diversity of music in this world was completely absent from school, aside from castrated versions of jazz standards. (In fairness, I believe both of the music teachers in the public schools I went to were good players who genuinely liked jazz music, but they were no match for the lifeless institutions in which they were trying to work.)

My parents, being both very accomplished, professional classical musicians, expected me and my sister to get a classical musical education, too. When each of us were around nine, I remember having conversations with my parents about whether I’d like to take music lessons, and if so, what instrument I’d like to play. I was being given a choice of instrument, but not a choice of musical style. As with the school system that says you have to study algebra before you can study astronomy, my parents felt that you had to have a classical musical education if you wanted to go anywhere good with music. My dear mother also used to say (though it’s been a long time) that if I wanted to really disappoint her when I grew up, I could either join the military or become a rock musician. (She doesn’t recall ever saying this, and in fairness, I may be making it up.) My folks always said that I wasn’t named after anybody in particular, but I always had the impression that I was named after a virtuoso cellist and friend of the family named David Wells. I also loved his playing, he was so passionate and so damn good. I don’t remember my exact thought processes at the time, but the cello was the instrument I chose. (My sister, who was named after a great flutist, chose to play the flute when it was her turn to choose an instrument.)

Although two out of three of my cello teachers were outrageously good players, really nice people, and very sympathetic teachers, I never really took to it, and I basically withered under the pressure. I don’t remember how fully I understood this at the time, but it was the basic lack of choice in the whole situation that I found oppressive. Practicing the cello became a source of conflict at home.

After five years of this I quit. I needed several years of playing no music before I felt moved to explore music on my own. I’m sure that growing up around music and musicians was a positive thing, in terms of having great live music around me all the time, and in terms of the example my parents and their friends set as accomplished players. In fact, one of my most postive musical recollections as a kid was when my dad and I would play the piano together, and he’d make up stories about dinosaurs, using the piano for background music and sound effects. And there were many, many other very positive aspects to my environment at home as a child in terms of providing a rich cultural experience, among other things, but having formal music lessons was not one of them.

I took a couple dozen formal lessons on bass guitar and guitar, but mostly I “taught myself.” By this time I was beginning to more clearly understand that “formal education” was not all it was cracked up to be. From master songwriters and musicians that I met personally, like Jim Page, and from listening to the words of other masters like Utah Phillips, I learned that the way so many of the songwriters and musicians that I had come to revere had learned their craft was by steeping themselves in the musical traditions they were interested in, and then by writing songs, while continuing to listen to other music and be part of the (evolving) tradition that they were in. My “music teacher,” essentially, was the music itself, which, I’d venture, is the best teacher of all, along with your own ears, mind, and hands.

“Teaching myself” in this way, I’ve become a fairly accomplished professional. If this were unusual, it wouldn’t be worth noting. But actually I’m pretty sure it’s the norm. I haven’t taken a poll, but I’d be surprised if more than a small percentage of people making a living in the music world are graduates of Berklee College of Music, Julliard, etc.

I learned to read and write by doing it with my parents, like most people. (As has been well-documented by authors like Jonathan Kozol, very few children of illiterate parents actually learn to read in school, demonstrating once again the failure of many schools to do anything that could be defined as “teaching” – because if no one’s learning, no one’s teaching!) Other skills I learned as a child that I use regularly today, such as typing, organizing mailing lists, and using computers, I learned at home from helping my dad with the workshops he and my mom were running. The rest of what I needed to know about how to do things like book gigs, I learned from watching other people do it. Just about everything I know about current events, history, and pretty much every other subject, I learned outside of school, by reading books of my own choosing, or books recommended by people who knew about stuff I wanted to know about. In all my years in school I barely learned anything of value, at least up until college, where I had a couple of good Marxist professors.

I’m currently in the process of writing a DIY Guide to Writing Songs, Playing Music and Booking Your Own Gigs, for PM Press. I could make it much longer by including lots of autobiographical tales of how a certain song was written or how I got a certain gig or first toured in a certain country, etc., but as it is, as a guide, with tricks of the trade and such, it’s not very long. I hope it will prove useful to people, but the basic message in the book for doing any of these things is to work with and follow the examples of other people who do it well, and then try it yourself, and keep learning from other people and learning from your own experiences.

My childhood memories can be somewhat vague, and I certainly had a generally positive experience with the Learning Community as a kid, but I find it interesting that one of the most vivid memories of my time at that school was when one of the parents got a flat tire. With the teacher’s encouragement, my whole class emptied out into the parking lot, where the car was with the flat tire. One of the older kids in my class had mechanical skills, and many other skills, which he had learned at home. He changed the tire while the rest of us helped out a little or watched. Even though I was only one of the ones watching, it was still a memorable event, I think because it was something that happened in the real world, outside school (even if it was only just outside school).

I’m quite certain that I’m one of many, many people who don’t learn well in forced, artificial environments, but flourish in real-world learning environments. One reason why this makes sense is that humans have been doing experiential learning very successfully for far longer than we’ve had schools. And still today, in the Kalahari Desert or the Amazon jungle you will find teenagers with enough botanical knowledge to fill several encyclopedias. In small towns in the Scottish highlands you will find teenagers who have a thousand tunes memorized which they can play beautifully on five different musical instruments, none of them learned in school.

I think about these things, think about the soul-crushing things most schools do to most students, see how brilliantly Leila has learned so many things and isn’t even yet two years old, and I don’t know what to say to the many people I’ve met who are aghast at the idea of raising a child with no “formal education.” If my kid really wanted to go to a school of some kind, I’d look around for a good one and let her try it. And if she didn’t? I’d no sooner send her to school than send her to prison.

As a professional musician who is happy enough living below the poverty line, I’m very privileged, and I know it’s not an easy thing to figure out for anyone, how to not do school. Schools work well in many, many ways with modern, (post-) industrial society, and of course it’s not just schools that suck, but most jobs people end up having to do. But for those of us who think society has some serious flaws that need serious attention, I’d say that figuring out what to do about the whole concept of school would be a good place to start. And in the meantime, those of us who can may opt to keep our children out of school and give them encouragement and opportunities to live and learn and pursue their interests in the real world.

It seems to me that children need teachers about as much as they need bullies. It seems to me that what they need is fun, respectful, knowledgeable and talented friends of all ages. And trees, grass, and libraries.

Click Here to Read More...

The RIAA vs. the World

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), representing massive multinational corporations with tentacles in every corner of the global economy including the music business, has just won a lawsuit against a mother of two who refused to be pushed around. Jamie Thomas’ pockets were not nearly deep enough to mount the kind of legal defense for the occasion, but she rightly thought that paying an out-of-court settlement of several thousand dollars for the “crime” of sharing music online was ridiculous. So she told the RIAA they’d have to take her to court. They did, and they won.

The fact that one of these cases actually went to trial, the amount of money involved, and the fact that the defendant could have been your neighbor, a middle-aged single mother of two who was not selling anything, but was just engaging in commonplace song-swapping via Kazaa’s peer-to-peer network, has made this case newsworthy. But what lies beneath it are the ever-growing tens of thousands of people who have been spied upon, harassed and threatened with lawsuits if they didn’t pay the RIAA thousands of dollars for sharing copywritten music in a way the RIAA, the US government, the World Trade Organization, etc., deem inappropriate.

In spite of the RIAA’s campaign to staunch the profit losses of it’s corporate members by waging a campaign of fear and intimidation against your average everyday music fan, the numbers of legal and “illegal” downloads continue to rise rapidly. However, the industry’s campaign is not just about robbing working class American music fans of hundreds of millions of their hard-earned dollars. The music industry is waging a war for the hearts and minds of the people of the US and the world, spending tremendous amounts of money on advertising campaigns to convince us of the rightness of their cause and the wrongness of our actions.

The RIAA is both powerful and desperate. They are a multibillion-dollar industry that has been “suffering” financially for years, and they are up against the very nature of the internet – that being peer-to-peer sharing of information in whatever form (stories, songs, videos, etc.). The internet has given rise to unprecedented levels of global cultural cross-pollination, and it has led to a democratization of where our news, information, music, etc., comes from that has not been seen since the days of the wandering troubadors who went from town to town spreading the news of the day.

The RIAA is trying to use a combination of the law, financial largesse, and encryption and other technologies to try to reassert their dominance over global culture. But perhaps most importantly, they are trying to reassert the moral virtue of their position, the rightness of their positions vis-a-vis the concept of intellectual property and the notion that the fear campaign they’re engaged in somehow benefits society overall and artists in particular.

The success of their campaign to convince us that the average person is essentially part of a massive band of thieves can be easily seen. Look at the comments section following an article about the recent lawsuit, for example, and you will find people generally saying they thought Ms. Thomas was wrong but that the amount of money involved with the lawsuit is outrageous. You will find people admitting that they also download music illegally, and they feel bad about it, but it’s just too easy and the music in the stores is too expensive.

Obviously the idea of anyone being financially bankrupted for the rest of their lives because they shared some songs online is preposterous, and very few people fail to see that. But the idea that Ms. Thomas did something wrong is prevalent, even among her fellow “thieves,” and I think it needs to be challenged on various fronts.

“We’re doing this for artists”

The RIAA represents artists about as effectively as the big pharmaceutical companies represent sick people. I’ll explain. The vast majority of innovation in medicine comes from university campuses. The usual pattern is Big Pharma then comes in and uses the research that’s already been done to then patent it and turn it into an obscenely profitable drug (especially if it’s good for treating a disease common among people in rich countries). Then they say anybody else who makes cheap or free versions of the drug is stealing, and by doing so we’re stifling innovation and acting immorally.

Similarly, the vast majority of musical innovation happens on the streets by people who are not being paid by anyone. The machine that is the music industry then snatches a bit of that popular culture, sanitizes it, and then sells it back to us at a premium. They create a superstar or two out of cultural traditions of their choosing and to hell with the rest of them. Sometimes the musicians they promote are really good, but that’s not the point. The point is that if the RIAA were truly interested in promoting good artists, they’d be doing lots of smaller record contracts with a wide variety of artists representing a broad cross-section of musical traditions. But as it is, if it were up to the RIAA we’d be listening to the music of a small handful of multimillionaire pop stars and the other 99.9% of musicians would starve.

The overwhelming majority of great music in the US (and most certainly in the rest of the world) is not supported by the RIAA. Rather, it is marginalized as much as possible. “Payola” is alive and well. The commercial radio stations are paid to play RIAA artists and paid not to play anyone else. A strategic, financial decision is made to promote a few styles of formulaic anti-music, each style represented by a few antiseptic pop stars, the lowest common denominator that can be created by the corporations behind the curtain. On the other hand, the overwhelming majority of great writers, recording artists and performers are ignored, denied record contracts, promotion, airplay, distribution, etc.

In short, the RIAA does their best to stifle art, at the expense of money. They represent some artists, no doubt – a few very well-off ones, the few (occasionally very talented) beneficiaries of their money-making schemes. In the US, even the system through which royalties are distributed ends up benefitting only the industry and a few pop stars. The comparatively little airplay independent artists receive is measured by organizations like ASCAP in such a way that it is largely ignored, and royalties we should be receiving end up in the pockets of the industry.

“Downloads hurt CD sales of our artists”

OK, so the RIAA’s claims to represent artists in general may be laughable, but surely they have a point when they complain about the annually decreasing CD sales of Coldplay and the Rolling Stones? Even if they are just a cartel representing the interests of the few and trying to prevent access or representation by the many, surely suing average music listeners is at least some kind of response to their artists losing sales to these free downloads?

The kind of logic that sees loss of CD sales for major label artists as a direct response to being able to download their music online for free is flawed. It assumes that people would be buying the CD’s of these artists were it not available for free. The reality, I’d suggest, is very different and also hard to measure with any degree of accuracy.

With the rise of the worldwide web has come an explosion of interest in an ever-broadening array of music. People are downloading for free and paying for new music from all over. When bigtime artists get loads of conventional publicity and everybody can’t avoid knowing that Janet Jackson has a new CD out because this news is covering the sides of every bus in the city, many people will go ahead and download tracks from her new CD if they can find them on the web for free. But would they bother buying the CD in the current, rich musical environment of the internet otherwise? Or would they just move on and download other stuff from the independent artists they’re constantly discovering out there on the web instead?

I’d suggest the latter, and I’d further suggest that there is no reliable way of knowing whether or not I’m correct. If the major artists are losing sales because of the availability of their songs for free on the web, I couldn’t care less. However, I think what is more the case is they are losing sales to the internet itself, as a result of the blossoming of grassroots musical culture that the internet is fostering.

“Giving away music hurts small artists”

This is an argument the RIAA is fond of putting forward. Sadly, many of my colleagues, many other independent recording artists, believe it. They seem to think that if the major artists are losing sales to the internet, it must be happening to us, too. Either deliberately or through inaction, they don’t put their music up on the web for free download. Fans of theirs, it often seems, respect this and don’t put up the music either (sometimes). I’m convinced this is all born out of confusion, and these artists are shooting themselves in the foot.

What’s good for GM is definitely not what’s good for the guy in Iowa City making electric cars out of his garage. I constantly run into people who assume that I must be losing CD sales and suffering financially as a result of the fact that I put up all of my music on the web for free download. Sometimes they are artists who think I’m something of a scab. Other times they’re fans who appreciate the free music but are concerned for my financial well-being.

Principles aside for the moment, on a purely practical level, the reality is that many independent artists, most definitely including myself, have benefitted from the phenomenon of the free MP3. Like others, the fact that I’m making a living at all at music -- unlike the overwhelming majority of musicians – is largely attributable to the internet, and specifically to free downloads.

It’s not simple, and it’s fairly easy to hypothesize one thing or another and back it up with selective information. But overall, my experience has been that I sold a few thousand CD’s a year before the internet, and have continued to sell a few thousand CD’s a year after the internet. Gig offers and fans in far-off places have multiplied, however, and in so many of these cases it’s clear that they first heard my music on the internet, usually because someone they knew guided them to my website.

Every year, over 100,000 songs are downloaded for free from my website, and many more from many other websites where they are hosted in one form or another. This represents many times what CD sales could possibly have been for me without a major record contract, previous to the internet. My conclusion is that the free download phenomenon behaves more like radio airplay that I never would have had otherwise. And it’s international airplay that has led me to tours in countries around the world and gigs in remote corners of the US that resulted directly from someone telling someone else about songs of mine they could find online for free.

The reality, pop stars aside, is that the overwhelming majority of musicians who are able to make a living from their music make it from performing. For DIY musicians who are not having their tours booked by Sony BMG’s booking agencies, the most valuable resource are fans, especially the ones who are well-organized and enthusiastic enough that they want to organize a gig for us somewhere. Through fans like this, we can cobble together another tour. This process has been helped immensely by the “viral marketing,” the buzz that can happen when music people like is freely available on the web.

I’m sure that there are many people who would have bought my latest CD if they weren’t able to download it for free. Of this there is no doubt. But to think that this is therefore how the free download phenomenon works in general is extremely simplistic. For every person who downloads the songs instead of buying the CD, I’d guess there are 100 who hear the music on the web for the first time, who would probably never have heard it otherwise. For every 100 people who hear the music for free, say one of them will buy a CD to support the artist. For every 1,000, maybe one will organize a paying gig. This may not cause a big rise in CD sales, but ultimately it doesn’t hurt them, either, and what it does for sure is dramatically increase the overall audience of independent artists around the world.

“But people are stealing private property on those P2P networks”

There are many ways to try to compensate artists for original work, scientists for ground-breaking research, inventors for great new inventions, etc. There is no single, sacred way to do this. There are many ways to support art and artists in society and reward them for their work. Paying royalties based on airplay, downloads and/or CD sales is one way among many.

If royalties are going to be a primary way artists are compensated, there are many ways to do this, too. With CD sales, according to the current system, the songwriter gets something like 7 cents per song per CD sold in the stores. With radio airplay, the onus on paying the royalties that may eventually get to some of the artists is on the radio stations, and the radio stations are usually supported by corporate advertisers.

If the RIAA really thought their artists could compete with the rest of the world’s artists on a relatively open playing field, they’d probably be busily trying to create some kind of web-based infrastructure where corporate advertising would pay some kind of royalties for their artists. If this infrastructure existed, people would drift towards it as the path of least resistance, compared to finding music on P2P networks.

The problem is, the RIAA doesn’t control the internet the way they control the commercial radio airwaves, and they know that the musical tastes of the people are broadening, and threatening their pop star system, threatening their profit margins. They can’t keep out the competition, so they’re trying hard to control the environment in a way that’s most beneficial to their corporate interests -- screw everybody else. Screw independent artists and screw the public at large.

I don’t know if anybody can predict these things with certainty, but it seems to me the basic nature of the internet will ultimately triumph over the narrow interests of the music industry. The music industry will not cease to exist by any means, but it will shrink somewhat, and will have to give way to the flourishing grassroots music scene which the internet has nurtured.

It seems to me that the most relevant question in terms of the efforts of the RIAA is, at what cost to society at large? How far will they go to maintain this broken system, to maintain the inequities of their star-making machinery?

And another crucial question: why should a system be allowed to continue that massively rewards a few artists for their “original” records full of “original” songs, while leaving destitute the masses of musicians and others who created the cultural seas in which these “original” artists swim?

Musicians, as a whole, represent some of the richest people in the society and many of the poorest. The music industry’s system, in conceptual terms and in practical terms, is broken. It represents the interests of the monopolies against the interests of the rest of the world’s people, cultures, musical traditions and musical innovations.

To my fellow musicians I say put all your music up for free download, help your careers and screw the music industry. To music fans I say keep on downloading, don’t feel bad about it -- and try not to get caught.

Click Here to Read More...

The Next Attack Is Coming: Six Years After 9/11

My friend Robert woke me up from my slumber at his cabin next to the Hoosier National Forest. “They’re saying we’re under attack.” I came inside and listened to NPR with him. At this point they weren’t sure whether it was military or commercial planes involved. My immediate thought was, there’s no country’s leadership in the world who’d do this, no leader wants to attack the US on US soil and risk having their own nation annihilated by US retaliation. Then the second plane hit, and they were confirming that these were, in fact, commercial planes that had been hijacked.

At that point, like so many others in the US and around the world who had not been living in a cave for the past century, my next thought was, why did it take them so long? For the past several decades the CIA had been overthrowing democracies in the Muslim world and installing and supporting vicious dictatorships. The US government had been supporting every Israeli aggression against it’s neighbors, and throughout the 1990’s had imposed – with the collaboration of the UN security council – genocidal sanctions on the people of Iraq which had been directly responsible for the deaths of half a million children, according to UNICEF. Under Clinton as well as Bush, the US Air Force had been bombing Iraq on a weekly basis since the invasion of 1990-91.

It seemed obvious that it was only a matter of time before someone decided that the indiscriminate slaughter of Arab civilians by the US should be avenged by another act of indiscriminate slaughter. And given that the targets appeared to be the symbolic centers of US political, military and economic might, this slaughter was actually far from indiscriminate! Every few months I find myself driving down I-95 in Connecticut, passing the sign on the highway marking the exit for a monument to the dead from 9/11 – in Fairfield, the town that was home to the largest number of the dead from the World Trade Center. Fairfield, one of the richest towns in the US, one of the richest towns in the world, in one of the richest counties in the US, Fairfield County, home also to the wealthy suburb of Wilton, where I grew up among the children of the business executives who took the train every morning to New York City to go to work in places like the World Trade Center.

I thought about these Republicans who I knew well, these businessmen with their messianic belief in neoliberal economics and the idea that the US is a force for good in the world, ignoring all the evidence to the contrary. I thought about their children, living in their blissfully ignorant suburban fantasy worlds, some of whom would suddenly discover that there was a world out there, and it had reached into New York and taken their fathers from them. I thought about the daycare center at the federal building in Oklahoma City, and wondered whether the World Trade Center had a daycare center in it, too. I thought about all the temp workers who could have been doing data entry for some nasty corporation in one of those buildings that day. It could easily have been me instead of them, had it been Boston in 1991 instead of New York City ten years later.

At the same moment I thought about my friends from the Muslim world, and their families in the US and abroad. I wondered whether crazed American mobs would burn down Dearborn, Michigan. I wondered how many mosques would be firebombed. I wondered whether Bush would decide to use nuclear weapons against the beautiful cities of West Asia, in some kind of unimaginable escalation of the slaughter. I was happy to note, over the days and months following, that some of the worst-case scenarios that played out in my imagination did not materialize. The lynch mobs did not take to the streets, and for the time being, the ICBM’s stayed in their silos.

I knew, of course, that my government would use these attacks to further their goals of world domination. I knew, as any leftwinger with their eyes open knew, that the US government would use this as an opportunity to jump-start Daddy Bush’s “New World Order” and the Monroe Doctrine from whence it sprang. I knew they would find a way to blame governments for the crimes of nongovernmental organizations. I was not surprised that our support for Saudi Arabia and Pakistan would not wane, while blame would be placed where it was most convenient for the neocons and neoliberals – against any regime that refuses to roll over on command from the State Department.

And my other thought in those first few minutes after the second plane hit the towers was, there goes the global justice movement.

I heard the confused, patriotic journalist on NPR trying to make sense of the situation. “Yesterday they were protesting the World Trade Organization, and today they’re attacking the World Trade Center.” That was it. This would be their line. Before Bush’s speechwriters could come up with the line, “you’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists,” someone on NPR had made the point in their own, slightly more subtle way. There is no clear distinction between those who want to undermine the US empire through killing thousands of people, and those who sought to change government policies through peaceful protest. Certainly there was now to be no distinction between those who would kill thousands of people, and those who would engage in protest actions involving property destruction or, God forbid, these terroristic college students who would dare throw the tear gas cannisters back at the police when they landed in their midst. While this behavior was never tolerated, it would now be considered as the moral equivalent of Osama bin Ladin.

I knew when I heard those words on NPR that this mostly young movement, these activists that the pundits had incorrectly dubbed “anti-globalization,” would be unprepared to deal with this new challenge. The movement was under constant, coordinated attack by the powers-that-be with surveillance, infiltration, and massive police brutality as a matter of course in dealing with peaceful civil disobedience. The movement was involved with a big internal dispute over tactics and how to relate to the Black Block. But the movement was growing, had plenty of vision and analysis, and was promoting ideas that were gaining increasing popularity.

Along with so many others around the world with their eyes open, I was living within an historical moment that could have gone in many different directions. A window had opened that was dramatically changing the composition of the air in the room, but now this window would begin to close, as quickly as it had been blown open only two short years before.

We on the left are always waiting, organizing, arguing, or some combination thereof, trying to determine what will be the next spark that will set off the next powder keg. We exist in the knowledge that the class divide, the race divide, the impending environmental holocaust, the growing disparity of wealth in the world are untenable, unsustainable. We exist in the knowledge that these things cause stresses in society that can go in many different directions, but that generally, oppression will breed resistance of one kind or another.

We are always hoping that this resistance will be a sensible sort of resistance that can lead to a better world – not white power but people’s power, not survivalism but cooperatives, not nationalism but internationalism, not religious war but class war, not authoritarianism and fascism but real democracy and socialism. But we know that these stresses in society are volatile, and can lead to many different kinds of developments. We’re all trying, in one way or another, to figure out how to bring things forward. Organizations come into existence, rise and fall based on whether they seem to know how to bring things forward or not.

The efforts of the many different groups around the US struggling for real democracy – economic democracy – bore fruit and managed to bring to birth a vital, youthful social movement in the streets of Seattle in November, 1999, that used mass nonviolent civil disobedience in a way it had not been used in the US in several decades. The WTO meetings were shut down. Around the US and around the world, people took notice, people were inspired, and the ripple effects rapidly spread across the globe.

Billions of people around the world who had been fighting the dictates of the US elite and the institutions doing it’s bidding – the WTO, the IMF, the World Bank, the free trade deals, NAFTA, GATT, these arrangements that were so destructive to the working people of both the Third World and the US itself, so destructive to real democracy, to the environment, to the idea that the people of a country, not a country’s billionaires, should be controlling their collective destiny – these billions of people had been wondering, where are the Americans in this equation? Do they not realize that they’re also being screwed? Do they not have a conscience, do they not care about the rest of the world at all? And then, after so long, they received an answer. There was a stirring in the belly of the beast.

Union leaders, their unions shrinking down to the point where they only represented 5% of the private sector, had finally begun to realize that nationalism was not the answer, that internationalism was. And people, young and old, who cared about the state of the environment, the welfare of the poor and homeless, the prosperity of the people of Mexico or Peru, the ability of the women of the world to have control over their own lives, people who cared about the very idea of to whom does this green earth rightfully belong, people who didn’t want to see their schools, hospitals and infrastructure privatized -- people came together, in large numbers, realizing that what we needed more than anything was economic democracy. People began to realize that the vital argument was between the idea of the commons and rights of living things and the idea of the sanctity of greed obscene profits.

There in the streets of Seattle, and later in the streets of many other cities in the US and around the world, was a crystalization of the battle for the hearts and minds of the people of the world.

On one side was the government and it’s servile corporate (and “public”) media, spreading disinformation, focusing on the few involved with trashing, ignoring or distorting the actions of the many involved with civil disobedience, giving the likes of Milton Friedman complete access to the newspapers and TV stations to make their case for these trade deals while almost completely censoring the voices of the global justice movement.

On one side was all the power of the state and the repressive arm of the executive branch – the police chiefs like Patrick Timoney and their lackeys, their brutality, arbitrary arrests, raids and detention, their increased border security, turning away activists in trying to cross borders in any direction, their infiltration of groups, their many provocateurs, their armored vehicles, their threats of deadly force, their fleets of helicopters, their unlimited supplies of tear gas, their unlimited budgets.

On the other side were grassroots organizations like Indymedia, the Direct Action Network, Food Not Bombs, nonprofit groups like Global Exchange and 50 Years Is Enough, unions like the Longshoremen, lots of college students and other concerned citizens from all over the place.

And the ranks were growing. Of course there were (and are) the luminaries like Subcommandante Marcos, Naomi Klein, Noam Chomsky, connecting the historical dots, making the links between US economic, military, foreign and domestic policies. But largely it was a young, inexperienced movement, well-informed about US economic policies but often relatively uninformed about the history of other social movements, past repression against them, or of the history of US military adventures around the world -- faced with a massive, well-coordinated campaign of disinformation and repression. But still it was growing, and the air was filled with optimism and possibility.

There were small and large protests happening everywhere, even a full-time protest-hopper like myself couldn’t get to half of them. Grassroots organizations were constantly being formed. Bands of hardworking activists were burning the candle at both ends everywhere, working hard, taking advantage of what was clearly a historical opportunity to win the confidence of the majority of the people. Through words and actions to spread the idea that real, economic democracy belonged to the people, that 90% of us had common interests, that the elite were screwing all of us, that we could change this situation.

I remember talking with a friend who was tirelessly working throughout the summer of 2001 to organize the next round of protests against the IMF and World Bank’s upcoming meetings in Washington, DC. After much debate and wrangling over the Black Block and other issues, the unions were coming down on the side of civil disobedience to a degree not seen in half a century. Tens of thousands of union workers and tens of thousands of other people from throughout society were preparing to shut down Washington, DC, to shut down the meetings of these elitist, anti-democratic institutions that had led to such misery around the world, that were so intent on causing so much more. My friend and other organizers were convinced that this protest was going to be much bigger than Seattle. There were rumors that the IMF and World Bank were thinking of cancelling this round of meetings, and coming up with an excuse that would attempt to hide the fact that they were cancelling them out of fear of the power of this growing movement.

In the end, they didn’t need to fabricate an excuse. The World Trade Center was destroyed, the IMF and World Bank cancelled their meetings, the unions cancelled their role in the upcoming protests, and we had a small conference instead of a large action. Even at that conference, the seeds of what would become the antiwar movement were being formed, while at the same time the feeling that this historic window that had been opened in the struggle for economic democracy was being slammed shut.

Over the next few months thousands of Afghan civilians would be killed by our Air Force, the country occupied, Osama nowhere to be found. Within two years, Iraq would be occupied, with the most sweeping agenda of economic privatization ever imposed on a country being put into place, causing unbelievable suffering to the people of the region, on top of the constant massacres being carried out by our military and by the civil war the occupation has provoked.

The movement for economic democracy that was, in part, emboldened by the protests in Seattle has continued to grow around the world. The forces of economic democracy have risen up and taken power in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and elsewhere, and have, predictably, been denounced thoroughly by the forces of plutocracy in Washington. The size and scope of the global justice movement in Europe, Korea and elsewhere has continued to grow. And just as they did before, US citizens are actively supporting these movements around the world, actively organizing protests, writing press releases, building latrines, singing songs and doing the work of movement-building alongside their global comrades.

But in the US, for now, the movement is “submerged,” that’s one word I’ve heard used. Of course there are always good people organizing all sorts of things as always. Large antiwar protests are being planned for this month and next month all over the country. Many people are getting more active around climate change and the lack of any positive initiative being taken by the powers that be. People in Colorado and Minnesota are organizing civil society’s response to the conventions of our two elite parties in this electoral cycle. Activists do the work they do as always, organizing, writing, teaching, running local Peace & Justice Centers, having weekly vigils, feeding the homeless, and so many other things.

But the IMF, World Bank and other such institutions have their meetings largely unopposed in the US these days.

A score for the forces of world domination, the forces of the rich and powerful, for whom 9/11 was a wet dream, a gift, a way out of the ideological battle they were losing, a way to avoid losing the consent of the governed in their neoliberal policies, a way to divert attention from the massive scandals at Enron, Worldcom, Xerox, a way to make someone like Bush look “presidential,” a sacrifice well worth making to allow them to further their sick agenda of “full spectrum dominance.”

But once again, their facade is crumbling. Support for Bush and the Democrat-controlled Congress are at all-time lows, CNN and Newsweek have to admit it, grudgingly, sporadically. The movement is submerged, but the bulk of the people of the US are more cynical than ever. It seems to me that something else is going to happen. Every self-respecting leftist would like to know exactly what form it will take, but nobody seems to know for sure. What’s sure is that as long as there is inequity there will be resistance. As long as people keep their humanity, they will want to show their solidarity with their brethren around the world.

The only thing that can temporarily muzzle this spirit is the maintenance of the idea that “the other” is not like us, he is bearded, angry, evil. The powers-that-be can maintain this idea through propaganda, and they can maintain this idea by killing enough innocents so that the next Mohammed Atta is a matter of inevitability.

And ultimately they can maintain this illusion best if the next attack comes soon.

Click Here to Read More...

Letter from Nagasaki

Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution: “Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes. In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.”

I met Eduardo and Lilly Zaragoza two years ago at an event I was singing at, the annual fundraising dinner of the Albuquerque Peace and Justice Center. Eduardo was 79 years old at the time. A short, gentle, quiet man, he had joined the US Navy at the age of 17 and was sent off to occupy the defeated nation of Japan. One month after the dropping of the atomic bomb on Nagasaki, his ship docked in the port, beside the many melted, ruined ships that sat lifelessly in the harbor. He and his shipmates took a walk around the annihilated city, the vast expanse of charred and melted rubble that used to be the city of Nagasaki. On that day, Eduardo joined the ranks of what the Japanese call the hibakusha, radiation survivors.


His life has never been the same since. No matter how much he has tried to forget, the nightmares of the visions he saw have never ceased. The masses of bloated bodies floating in the water. The horribly burned, disfigured, screaming survivors in the makeshift hospital wards he visited. Like the rest of the hibakusha, Eduardo was mentally scarred by what he saw. His body has also never been the same. The symptoms of what we now know as radiation sickness began on his first day off the ship. When I met him, he and his wife were both struggling with cancer.

Eduardo and Lilly described to me how they had had four children, not including the miscarriages. One was stillborn. Two others died of the same rare disease as young adults. Their last surviving child was suffering from cancer when I met them. Both of them came from families with a history of longevity and no history of cancer.

Eduardo was one of many thousands of US soldiers who were purposefully exposed to nuclear radiation. Many of the others, in experiments easily worthy of the Nazi Dr. Mengele, were ordered to walk through desert areas where nuclear bombs had just been exploded. The horrifying results on their fragile human bodies were quite predictable, just as predictable as the military’s denials of reality.

Corbin Harney died of cancer last month at the age of 87. Untold numbers of other hibakusha in what we now call the Southwestern United States did not live to such a ripe old age, but Corbin was special, he was a Western Shoshone medicine man, from a long line of medicine men. Corbin was a veteran of World War II. Upon returning home, his reward for his service was for his home, the Western Shoshone Nation, to become, technically, the most bombed nation on Earth. He was to spend most of his adult life campaigning against nuclear testing in his homeland, the area now generally known as Nevada.

Corbin believed in the healing power of natural hot springs, among other things. I met him at his home, the Poo Bah ranch, in Nevada near the California border. For decades, Corbin got up before dawn every morning to greet the sun in a ceremony to which anybody was invited to join. The ceremony always began with Corbin playing a drum in front of a small fire. When people gathered with him around the fire, on the morning I joined him, like thousands of other mornings, he alternated between singing in his Shoshone language and speaking in English about the importance of the different elements of life.

He spoke first about the dark, and how important that was, how everything needs to rest, how the light comes from the dark, and how important the dark was “in the times when we were hunted” by the white invaders, to hide. He spoke about the rocks, how they are all alive, how some of the rocks are radioactive, which is fine, as long as they are left in the ground where they belong. He spoke about the wind, and the wind gusted. He spoke about the light, and just then, the sun poked up above the horizon. He spoke about the rain, and in this arid desert, for a few brief seconds, right then, the rain fell.

A few days before Corbin died on July 10th, he joked with his friends and relatives present that he would die at 11:00. Not to anyone’s surprise, he kept his word. After he died, his relatives saw four dog soldiers appear from the fog outside his window to take him away. I believe them.

I remember reading in a book how there was a brief period when the Indians were more or less left alone, near the beginning of the 20th century. After decades of “shoot on sight” genocidal warfare against the Indian nations of the west, after the lifeblood of so many people, the buffalo, were systematically slaughtered nearly into extinction by the Army and the settlers, after the last of the free Indian people were driven at gunpoint onto barren reservations and then starved to death en masse by corrupt government officials, there was a brief time when they were allowed to try to survive on their barren reservations. A brief period where although the buffalo were gone, their land was stolen, their previous means of livelihood were robbed of them, at least they were not being slaughtered by the Army.

Then on the Lakota and Navajo reservations and elsewhere, oil, coal and uranium were discovered. For so many hundreds of thousands of people ever since then, life has once again been a nightmare of uranium and coal mines, back-breaking labor, poisoning of the water, land, and air, and premature death by cancer -- or by bullets, for daring to resist the uranium-mining corporations, such as the dozens of unsolved, uninvestigated murders of American Indian Movement activists in the 1970’s.

I remember reading somewhere that the cancer rate on the Navajo reservation – where there are hundreds of uranium mines, some closed, some still functioning, all toxic wastelands – is eight times the national average. It was sometime after that, in the early 1990’s, after the first US invasion of Iraq, that I read another statistic, that the cancer rate in Iraq had also risen by eight times what it had been before the invasion. And in southern Iraq, where most of the US artillery had been fired and bombs had fallen, so many of them full of “depleted” uranium, vaporizing on impact, the cancer rate was far higher.

I write this from Japan, where I’m doing a concert tour. I was unprepared for the extreme heat and humidity here, it’s like Houston or New Orleans, and with climate change kicking in it’s even hotter than usual. Seeking respite from the heat, I found myself in my air conditioned hotel room in Hiroshima, reading Robert Fisk’s most recent, magnificent book, The Great War for Civilization. That day I was on the chapter about the “Gulf War” and it’s aftermath. He didn’t use the word, but Fisk was writing about Iraq’s hibakusha, the innumerable children turning up at the overstretched hospital wards of Basra with “rare” cancers – children with leukemia (cancer of the blood), brain cancer, young teenage girls with breast cancer. Cancers the experienced Iraqi doctors had never seen in people so young, and certainly in nothing like the kind of numbers they were having to deal with at that time, and ever since then.

I arrived at Tokyo’s Narita Airport just about a month ago, and witnessed the almost completely rebuilt megalopolis that is Tokyo, and the seemingly unending expanse of cities surrounding it. During the war with the US, almost every major city in Japan was bombed into oblivion. Hundreds of thousands of children, women, senior citizens and others were indiscriminately slaughtered from the air. A few cities were being saved as potential A-Bomb targets, and the beautiful city of Kyoto was the only major city to survive the war structurally intact. After the USAF began running out of major cities to destroy, they started bombing small cities and larger towns. Indiscriminately bombing hospitals, schools, temples, churches, houses, entire neighborhoods – and yes, factories, too. All this with “conventional” weapons.

At my first hotel room there by the airport, NHK (Japan’s equivalent of the BBC) was delivering the news, talking at length (with English overdubs available at the push of a button for some of the programs) about the earthquake that had just hit northern Japan before I left Portland, and about the nuclear reactor – the world’s largest in terms of electrical output -- that had caught fire and leaked radioactive water as a result. Usually this time of year northern Japan is bustling with visitors, but tourism in the area over the next weeks was down by 90%, NHK said. Apparently most Japanese people didn’t believe the government’s assurances that the radioactive leak was “insignificant.” After all they’ve been through with radiation, it’s easy to understand why.

On NHK they were also broadcasting the Asian Cup, the Asian version of the World Cup, one of the most-watched sporting events on the planet. (Except for in the US, where the 45 minutes of uninterrupted play make soccer a commercially unviable sport for TV.) Iraq won, and in halting English, the Iraqi team’s captain spoke out in front of the world’s media against the US occupation of his country, and said that after the game he was going to Qatar because it wasn’t safe to live in Iraq. He spoke of some of his dead friends and family members.

And then it occurred to me, not for the first time, but there in Japan for the first time, the thought hit me that the United States has been bombing a nation somewhere in Asia for most of the past 66 years. So soon after the virtual annihilation of Japan from the air, the USAF went ahead and did the same thing in Korea, dropping even more bombs on Korea than all sides in WWII combined, killing millions of innocent people and half a million Chinese soldiers (did you even know, dear reader, that we fought a war with China?).

In the same year that that war ended, we were sending in Theodore Roosevelt’s grandson, Kermit, to overthrow the democratically-elected government of Iran, replacing him with one of history’s most tyrannical dictators, the Shah, who was to rule Iran with unspeakable brutality for the next quarter century. Then a few years later we were to invade Vietnam, completely destroying the country over the course of fifteen very long years, in the course of which we also invaded Laos and Cambodia, killing an estimated three million innocent civilians through indiscrimate carpet-bombing of three countries, leading directly to the insane Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia which then proceeded to kill so many more. (And I wretch every time I hear yet another person in the US say that “55,000 people died in Vietnam.” Just what defines “people” to those who would utter such a scandalous sentence?)

There are always pretenses for these invasions, and they are never called invasions. We support dictatorships in the name of democracy, overthrow democracies in the name of fighting “communism,” and when that bogeyman no longer inspired fear, then “terrorism” became the new watchword. And every day, more people worldwide die in car accidents than die in a year from non-state terrorism. Every day, more people die from falling down the stairs than those who die in a year from non-state terrorism. Every day, far more people die from breathing the toxic air – of cancer – than those who die in a year from non-state terrorism. But we invade countries and kill millions to stop the “terrorists,” while we relax environmental laws (in the name of “the economy”) which results directly in the deaths of millions more.

And when people in “America” doubt the wisdom of these invasions, when people raise questions about our government spending more every year on “defense” than the rest of the world combined while our cities are flooded, our bridges are collapsing, and millions of our children are going to bed hungry, sick and without health care, or the ability to read or write, we are told that we mustn’t be “isolationist.” We are told that there are “evil men” and “evil regimes” in this world that we must stop before they acquire nuclear weapons.

But they are mostly arming themselves to defend themselves from a possible – even likely – invasion by us. This is the historical reality, whatever the pundits say, whatever the textbooks say, whatever the politicians say. (And if you’d like to see the hard evidence, please pick up a copy of Joseph Gerson’s excellent book, Empire and the Bomb.)

Somehow we are never the ones who started it. Somehow we need to have these 10,000 nuclear weapons, each one 1,000 times deadlier than the bomb that annihilated Hiroshima. And if you don’t believe it, they say, if our arguments about evil regimes and WMD’s and democracy are not convincing, remember World War II. Remember Hitler, remember the Nazi holocaust, remember the “Good War.” (Now, if you believe that the US entered the war in Europe to save my Jewish relatives then maybe you also believe that we’re in Iraq to save the Kurds and the Shiites, and I’ve got a bridge to sell you in Minneapolis, but I’ll save that tract for another essay.)

Remember the Good War. Remember the Rape of Nanking, when Japanese occupation soldiers raped and murdered their way through China, killing an estimated 100,000 in Nanking alone. Remember Hitler, who systematically killed millions in an orchestrated orgy of death unlike anything the world had ever seen -- well, at least not since the Turks and their Kurdish underlings did the same thing to the Armenians, with nobody seriously doing anything to stop them, one short generation earlier, during the dying throes of the defeated Ottoman Empire.

Systematic killing of millions in an orchestrated, high-tech genocide, aimed at wiping out entire populations of human beings.

Walking around the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the reminders of the atomic bombings, and of the desire of the people of these cities for a peaceful world free of nuclear weapons, are everywhere. On plaques, in museums, in the parks. Everywhere I went, walking around beneath the blazing sun that shines mercilessly, constantly, after the rainy season ends every summer, I just kept getting the same cold, eerie feeling I remember well from visiting the concentration camps that have been preserved for posterity in Germany.

Visting Buchenwald I remember the feeling, how can such an unspeakable horror as the Nazi holocaust possibly be represented effectively within the walls of a building? How can pictures, videos, hair, shoes, teeth, the few remains of the many dead, how can these things project the scope of this nightmare? They can’t, really. But somehow, being there – and I know I’m not alone in this feeling – the ghosts are alive. Sit quietly for a few minutes in Buchenwald and you can hear the screams of the dying, feel the silence of the dead. The single candle burning in the middle of the empty room in the former gas chamber, with the Jewish prayer for forgiveness in the background, somehow communicates more than you might imagine if you haven’t been there.

It’s like that in Hiroshima. Seeing the few documentaries that ever make it onto TV in the US, hearing the testimonies of the hibakusha who occasionally visit the country that destroyed their cities and speak to the relatively few people who come to hear them, just isn’t the same. These cities were wiped out. They ceased to exist. Everything was gone. How can nothingness be memorialized? It can’t. But of the three steel-reinforced, concrete structures in Hiroshima that partially survived the apocalypse of August 6th, 1945, what is known as the Atomic Dome has been left as it was on that day. Mostly destroyed, but still recognizeable as a building. Most of the concrete turned to rubble, steel beams bent like straw, the inside completely gutted and burned long ago, when my parents were children.

This is what happened to an earthquake-proof, steel-reinforced structure. But this was a city of small wooden houses with clay tile roofs. All around this dome for miles, in this city surrounded by mountains, in this valley as far as the eye could see, were just flattened houses. In and around those houses, 70,000 people died in a matter of seconds, mostly women, children, and senior citizens.

Thousands more lived long enough – sometimes only a few minutes, sometimes a few hours – to walk, naked, their clothes having been burned off of them, their bodies charred black and red, their skin hanging off of them like seaweed, their arms outstretched, crying, walking on top of the collapsed houses of their neighbors, stepping over the dead and dying, walking towards one of the two rivers that flowed through the city. Many died before they got to the river, others died once they got to the river, and the rivers turned red from blood, and then black from radioactive ash that rained down from the sky. There were so many bodies in the river that they piled up and formed a huge dam.

Standing between those rivers, there in front of the dome at 3 am one evening, the words of the hibakusha I had had dinner with earlier came back to me. They were recounting the bits that they remembered, that trauma-induced amnesia had not obliterated. Every time was like reliving the experience, but they felt duty-bound to tell the stories to those who would listen.

Dr. Shoji Sawada was 13 when the bomb fell. He was sick that day, and unlike most people in Hiroshima, at 8:15 am he was not up and about, but was in bed, shielded by walls from the initial flash of light that burned tens of thousands of people to a crisp instantly. Shoji suddenly found himself covered in the rubble of his house, but managed to squirm out from under it.

Then he heard his mother calling. He looked around and couldn’t see her. Then he realized she was beneath him, pinned underneath a smoldering beam of wood. He tried with all his might to move the beam, but it was far beyond his physical abilities. He looked outside for help, but everyone around him was dead or dying. He went back in and tried to move the beam again, to no avail. The initial blast was as hot as the sun, which is what instantly killed anybody within a kilometer of it who was directly exposed, and most people within several kilometers of it. Immediately following this was a massive gust of wind many times stronger than the strongest typhoon, which is what flattened all the houses and snapped all the trees like toothpicks (leaving only parts of those few aforementioned steel structures, and a number of smokestacks, their cylindrical shape protecting them from the blast of wind).

Just after the wind, Shoji-san explained, everything combustible immediately caught fire. With the flames lapping at his legs, unable to move the beam of wood, he said, “forgive me, mother,” and ran towards the river. “Study hard and be a good student,” were her last words. And then she was burned to death, as her son survived the rest of the day in the river, surrounded by what can only be described as hell on Earth. Every day he remembers his mother, and her last words, and feels the pain and the guilt of the survivor once again.

Now multiply this scene by 70,000.

This was premeditated, high-tech mass murder targeted at civilians. Genocide. It was the Japanese holocaust. It was done to a country that was in complete ruins, whose government was in the process of attempting to surrender, but the “Allies” were pretending not to hear these messages because they wanted to drop the bomb first, to “send a message” to the Soviet Union, among other reasons. It was done to a country that had virtually no functioning industry. Yes, Mitsubishi had an armanents factory in Hiroshima, I learned from a visit to the museum there, but what the museum didn’t mention was that the workers were going there and waiting for parts which never arrived. Japanese industry was essentially totally crippled by the summer of 1945. There was no military value to the city of Hiroshima – even if having military value could possibly justify slaughtering 70,000 civilians.

Against the advice of most of the top military brass, Truman and Churchill connived to drop the atom bomb on Hiroshima, knowing full well that it would result in indiscriminate death and destruction to an entire city.

And then they did it again, three days later, in Nagasaki, after the Japanese emperor had personally become involved in attempting to surrender to the “Allies,” under the same conditions of Germany’s surrender at Potsdam. Incidentally, the bomb over Nagasaki was dropped directly above the biggest concentration of Catholics in East Asia, almost directly over the biggest cathedral in East Asia, over a city that contained a POW camp, and all this was known to Truman and Churchill and his advisors who supported dropping the first and second bombs.

Completely annihilating one city full of civilians, and then doing it to another – after raining down death from “conventional” bombs indiscriminately throughout almost every population center in the nation. This “conventional” holocaust of unprecedented proportions was carried out by “FDR,” that great hero of the working class in the United States. Nuclear hell on Earth was brought to Hiroshima and Nagasaki by that down-to-Earth hoosier who never went to college, Harry Truman, and by his good friend Winston Churchill, the man lionized in the history books for saving Britain from Nazi tyranny. The fact that he also ordered the gassing of Iraqis a few years earlier and supervised the firebombing of Dresden, Berlin, Hamburg and most other major cities in Germany, himself responsible for killing hundreds of thousands of German civilians, is usually conveniently overlooked.

There was no “Good War.” Every war the US has been involved with since the “American” Revolution has been a war for empire, based on lies just as blatant as Colin Powell’s 31 lies he presented to the UN a few short years ago, as the corporate media hung on every ridiculous word. The victors write most of the histories, but many other histories are out there, often out of print, growing mold on the book shelves in the libraries of “America,” rarely used. As a result, we are a nation made up largely of idiots (thank you, Green Day). A Gallup poll two years ago asked people in the US whether they thought the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan was “necessary” to end the war. 57% said it was. This is beyond shameful, not to mention completely ahistorical, proof of the effectiveness of the bald propaganda of the victors of this “Good War.”

What if you asked a modern-day German whether they thought the holocaust was “necessary” -- perhaps “necessary” to garner support for the German occupation from the largely anti-Semitic populations of the nations of eastern Europe? Even the very question would be appalling. Anyone answering “yes” would be considered something akin to a holocaust denier, some kind of monster, appropriately enough. What if you asked a modern-day Japanese person if the rape of Nanking was “necessary”? If he was a politician and answered in the affirmative to this question he would probably be driven out of office, just like Prime Minister Abe’s Defense Minister last month.

No, the Japanese Holocaust was not “necessary.” By any reasonable accounting of history, what was done to Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a holocaust as horrible in scope as what the Nazis did to Europe, except that it was carried out in a matter of seconds rather than years. By any reasonable accounting of history, Harry Truman and Winston Churchill were morally equivalent to Adolf Hitler. By any reasonable accounting of history, those in charge of the US Air Force were moral equivalents of the SS.

And why does it matter whether long-dead presidents were war criminals or not? Because the cliché is true: if you don’t understand history, you are doomed to repeat it. Because many of the hibakusha in Japan and around the world are still alive, and they deserve some ounce of dignity. Because if you believe the billionaires that run this country are capable of fighting a “Good War,” capable of defending the rights of the oppressed somewhere in the world, you might believe they could do that again. But they never have, they aren’t now, and they never will. Not in Vietnam, not in Afghanistan, not in Iraq, not in Iran, not in Syria, not in North Korea, nowhere.

They are running an empire -- a vicious, genocidal empire that’s been dominating much of the world for many decades. Kennedy was running it – he nearly ended life on Earth twice in his short tenure as president. Eisenhower, the butcher of Korea, was running it. Johnson, the butcher of Vietnam, was running it. Nixon, the butcher of Cambodia, was running it. Clinton was running it – he, like the rest, threatened to use nuclear weapons against both Iraq and Korea. He said “nuclear weapons are the cornerstone of our foreign policy.” His wife, Hillary, has also said “all options are on the table.” And we hopefully all know about Bush.

All of these people were (and in the case of the Clintons and the Bushes, are) terrorists of the worst kind. They are nuclear terrorists. What they seem to have learned from history is that it’s OK to kill and to threaten to kill millions of innocent civilians – and to risk the lives of billions more, including hundreds of millions of vulnerable people inside the United States – if they deem that it serves their interests.

What is clearly in our interests – and certainly in the interests of other human beings around the world – is to rise up against these “democratic” despots. If there is any possibility of redeeming the soul of this place we call “America,” this madness must be stopped. We may have exported our entire manufacturing base to China, but the weapons of mass destruction (and most of our “conventional” weapons) are still made in the USA.

The functioning of the government requires the consent of the governed. It can and must be withdrawn. One by one, or hopefully, in our millions. The most important lesson of history, the one that the rulers of “America” most want to keep from us, is that mass movements can achieve everything. That another world is possible. That democracy is in the streets. And that “evil” does not usually come in the form of a frothing-at-the-mouth dictator.

Evil, as has been pointed out before, is more often banal. Evil pays taxes. Evil pushes papers. Evil designs missiles, programs computers. Evil drops the bombs, but evil also sits by while others do that, and evil watches and fails to act. Evil is silent. Evil is patriotic. Evil waves a flag. Evil writes lying propaganda for textbooks and newspapers. Evil believes that genocide could possibly be excusable, let alone “necessary.”

Click Here to Read More...

G8 Warm-Up Tour: Whose World Is This?

The riots in Rostock, Germany began around 3 pm last Saturday. In European riots outside of G8 meetings and such, generally all sides refrain from using lethal weapons. (If anybody breaks with this tradition – such as Genoa in 2000 or Gothenberg in 2001 – it is always the police.) The riots on Saturday were part of a long series of such confrontations around Germany, around Europe, around the world.

On one side were many thousands of police brought in from all over Germany, dressed in space-age green or black riot gear. On the other were thousands of mostly young men and women, mostly German but including participants from all over Europe and a smattering of other places, many wearing balaclavas or bandanas over their faces, most dressed in black.


These events are strangely beautiful, partly like a brilliantly choreographed modern dance performance with the city as it’s stage, partly like a medieval battle. Many of those who don’t wish to be involved leave the scene in a hurry, many others find some high ground and watch the melee unfold, and quite a few more try to keep on with whatever they were doing before the riot started and hope it ends soon.

For months before the event tension had been building, as is standard before these big convergences. As if following a script, the German authorities raided leftwing social centers throughout the country looking for people they described ominously as “terrorists.” (What a useful word for anybody you don’t like.) These raids were reported throughout the European press, of course. The idea is to scare people off from coming to the protests. As usual, it worked, and the crowds were probably less than half what they would be if so many people had not been afraid to go.

Police were stopping people driving suspicious-looking vehicles, looking for gas masks, fireworks, or other things they didn’t want at the G8 protests. Of course, anybody coming in a day early driving a normal-looking rental car like me had no problems and could have brought anything into Rostock, but if you were trying to bring some banned item in with a home-made “pull-me-over” car, or a big bus full of anarchists, you had problems.

But all the efforts of the police were in vain, since one of the most effective weapons people use in these confrontations are readily available in unlimited quantities in every European city – cobblestones. The streets of Rostock were littered with broken cobblestones that young people had been smashing on the street and breaking into fist-sized pieces to throw at the cops.

The most impressive part are the modern equivalent of the archers, those firing flares, lighting up the sky, arcing far over the heads of the crowd and landing in the packed lines of riot police. Many times the police retreated, many times they charged, and many times they tripped over each other in the narrow streets, where their numbers simply couldn’t be accommodated. By the end of the day there were hundreds injured, dozens with broken bones, including quite a few police.

The day began with my friend Lisa dropping me off at the main train station, where one of the two opening rallies was to take place. She forgot her cell phone in the hotel room and it took her hours to drive back to it. For the whole day it seems the police had shut down most of the roads leading into the city. Sometimes roads leading out were also closed, but mostly it was easy to get out but hard to get in.

For days leading up to June 2nd, mostly youthful alternative-looking sorts of folks were streaming out of the main train station, coming from all over, then heading purposefully from the train station to the main Convergence Center or one of the three camps within twenty kilometers of Rostock, surrounding the small resort town of Helingendam, where the G8 meetings are taking place as I write. On Saturday morning the crowd kept doubling in size every ten minutes or so until by 11 am there were tens of thousands of people, and the same thing was taking place at another site in town for the other opening rally.

The crowd was a multigenerational collection of people with very diverse views, but united in the idea that this world could be a very different place. There were representatives of the massive German anti-nuclear movement, there were those calling for the G8 nations to end their wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, or to do something about global warming. There were quite a few Turkish communists, there were Danish union members, Dutch squatters, and many, many others with no particular political affiliation or ideology. Just people who know that things are not as they should be, this world is not quite the world we want, and these G8 leaders need to be held to account for the world they have, in so many ways, created for us.

They are essentially asking the question that is as old as what we dare call “civilization.” Whose world is this? Is it for the corporate elite and their pseudo-democratic governments to rule in the interest of profit, or is the world’s wealth for us all to share more equally? Is our world a place where we can allow any nation’s army to bomb cities in another nation? And when all this death and destruction is all about oil and control, what then? What is the appropriate response when our air is being poisoned by coal-burning power plants, our food and soil poisoned by pesticides, our water poisoned by nuclear waste, and we’re all dying of cancer? Is this how things should be? If not, how can we change the situation?

One of the speakers was from the MST, the landless peasants movement in Brazil. They have answered the question of whose world is this by seizing the land that the rich call their property and they are forming collective farms. They have chosen to eat and fight rather than to starve and die. The questions are immediate, the stakes high, and in Brazil, as with many other countries, much blood has been spilled over these questions.

In modern Europe there have been historic compromises between the haves and the have-nots, and most people live in relative comfort. The struggles rarely result in people getting killed these days. But as in the rest of the world, all over Europe the historic struggle goes on, continually trying to answer the question in one form or another, is the world here for the private gain of the few or for the public good of the many?

One of the things that’s always so striking about these mass convergences such as this week of action going on right now in and around Rostock is how few of the people I know in various activist networks around Europe are actually there. There were tens of thousands of people present at the big rally last Saturday, but they clearly represent a small fraction of the European left. Throughout my tour of Europe leading up to the G8 protests I asked people if they were planning to go. There were always one or two, sometimes a few, who were. But most said no, they couldn’t get off work, or they had to take care of their kids, or they were concerned about getting arrested, or they were on probation from the last arrest, or they were too broke to afford the train ticket.

Yet here we were on June 2nd, with the big public space in front of the train station thronged with tens of thousands of people. Behind the stage for everyone to see were two large banners, proclaiming in German and in English, “another world is possible.” I sang, a German hiphop artist performed, and then there were several speakers from around the world, including the woman from MST.

It was a long and peaceful march to the site of what was supposed to be the main rally, which turned into a smaller rally than the opening ones, as many people left, others stayed and fought, and a few tried to pay attention to what was happening on the stage, which kept on starting and then stopping again depending on what was happening around it.

June 2nd was the main rally against the G8, but the actual G8 meetings are happening now, with smaller groups (many thousands) based at their various camps engaging in road blockades and many other different types of actions to try and prevent the meetings from happening, or at least to disrupt them.

Already the G8 meeting organizers have cut their meetings down from three days to 1-1/2 days. They presumably have their reasons why they’re doing this, but everyone knows the real reason – fear of us, fear of humiliation, fear that the world will see them naked, humbled by a few thousand citizens determined to let them know that their elitist, corporate version of “democracy” is not ours.

My “G8 Warm-Up Tour” began with a flight to Copenhagen at the end of April. As soon as I dropped off my stuff in Norrebro I took a walk to the place that’s now being called “Ground 69.” 69 Jagtvej was the address of what was Copenhagen’s oldest leftwing social center. Built by the union movement in 1897 and called Folkets Hus – the People’s House – it eventually fell into disrepair and was squatted by leftwing youth in 1982 and called Ungdomshuset – the Youth House. Since then and until last March it was a thriving center that included a bar, an infoshop, several performance spaces including a ballroom with a stage and a great sound system, a kitchen where thousands of meals were cooked, practice rooms for local bands, and rooms for all kinds of other industrious and creative activities.

A whole generation of youth had grown up in and around Ungdomshuset. Many of them had kids who also grew up with the Youth House being a center of their daily lives, as their parents from the 1980’s generation mostly moved on to other things. In March the anti-terror police landed with helicopters on the roof of Ungdomshuset, filled the building with tear gas, arrested it’s defenders, and destroyed the building within a week. They had to use masked construction workers imported from Poland to destroy the building, since none of the Danish unions would work under police protection, out of principle.

In the taxi on the way from the airport, and walking down the main street in Norrebro to 69 Jagtvej, the evidence of the battle for Ungdomshuset -- for the right of the youth to have their house, and more broadly, the rights of people other than yuppies to exist in the quickly-gentrifying Norrebro neighborhood – was everywhere. There were thousands of posters carpeting the city advertising upcoming demonstrations. Ubiquitous graffiti saying things like, “I still feel like rioting.”

Official-looking signs saying “Jagtvej” had replaced many street signs that used to indicate that you were on another street. But now, evocative of the end of the film, Spartacus, we are all Jagtvej now. The two numbers that everyone in Denmark knows as synonymous with Ungomshuset, “69,” had replaced many addresses. My taxi driver was complaining about how much harder it is now to find the addresses of his customers since last March.

He was also complaining about the riots. Like many Danes, he was sympathetic with the struggle of the Youth House up until the several nights of rioting that followed the police occupation of the building.

But many others were either involved with, supportive of, or at least not particularly bothered by the riots, which were seen by many as a sensible or at least understandable reaction to the events that led up to them. This was also evident as soon as I got into the city. Many varieties of Ungdomshuset t-shirts and hoodies were everywhere, worn by many really young kids who had probably never seen Ungdomshuset when it existed. Many youth had made home-made patches saying just “69” or “Ungdomshuset Blir” – Ungdomshuset Stays – also the title of a song that became a national hit last fall. The scenes on TV of the riots – and they were well-publicized on national television – had caught the imagination of many young people, who identified viscerally with the young men and women battling with the police.

For several days, several neighborhoods in Copenhagen were characterized by burning barricades made largely of bicycle tires -- as with anywhere, you burn what’s available, and in Copenhagen you can’t walk down the sidewalk without tripping over hundreds of old bicycles on each block. Broken glass, broken cobblestones, tear gas and sirens were the order of the day. To a very large extent, the youth of Denmark were on the side of those throwing the stones, not the ones firing the tear gas, whether or not they were entirely clear on the origins of the conflict.

It was a shock to see how narrow the new dirt lot was, where Ungdomshuset had stood. The building was a lot taller than it was wide, I realized upon visiting Ground 69. But what really brought back the memories of that place where I have played shows to so many great audiences was when we were outside the prison where fifteen of Ungdomshuset’s defenders were being held, close to three months after the destruction of the building.

It was there that I came into contact once again with the microphone that had been used for all of my shows there, and for many other shows as well. The mike smelled like someone who had not brushed his teeth in years, it was the worst-smelling microphone I’ve ever encountered. I suddenly could see the clouds of smoke, behind which sat or stood a hundred black-clad youth, listening attentively, or singing or shouting along with me, facial piercings reflecting the lights.

Every Thursday since the beginning of March, different groups were taking turns organizing protests and marches with sound trucks through the city. Many people from the early days of Ungdomshuset have come out of the woodwork, along with many young kids who had never seen the place other than in a photograph.

I was in town for several rallies.

On my first real day of gigs, May Day, I sang in the morning in the nearby town of Roskilde for members of the red-green coalition, Enhedslisten, who have a number of people in the parliament and are the extraparliamentary left’s biggest ally in parliament. In the afternoon I sang at the communist-sponsored May Day stage in a big park near Norrebro. In the evening I was hanging out by a park with anarchist youth and others there to party for May Day, who had put lots of burning rubbish in the street, something which has recently once again become a Copenhagen tradition, particularly since March. Police stayed a hundred feet away. This time nobody threw anything at them, and they didn’t try to clear the street.

One rally and march was on the 69th day since the raid of Ungdomshuset. Many hundreds of us were marching behind a very loud sound truck, and for the first time I was able to appreciate techno. It reminded me at the time of hearing the call to prayer coming from the mosques inside Israel. A very different social milieu, to be sure, but in both cases there was a kind of loud statement of existence, this affirming cry of “we’re here.” People from Christiania had come and added to this, bringing with them dozens of little home-made instruments consisting of tin cans and latex formed in such a way that when you blew into them lightly they would screech with twice the volume of a good bugle.

The more conservative end of the establishment is often characterizing the growing Danish youth movement as a bunch of self-centered brats, and with that in mind, one scene on this particular march was noteable. There was a police “escort,” as always, on both ends of the march. At one point they were suddenly agitated. Not speaking Danish, I didn’t know what they were yelling about, but it was suddenly clear as an ambulance was making it’s way down Norrebrogade. But as soon as the march saw the ambulance coming, with no need for any prompting, the street suddenly cleared of people and the ambulance sped through unimpeded.

It was a few days later that I got my first taste of Danish tear gas.

The conservative government in power in Denmark has decided to “normalize” Christiania. For decades there was a sort of détente between the Danish government and this 900-person commune in the middle of the city, two blocks from the Christianshavn metro stop. But since Anders Fogh Rasmussen came to power this is all changing. He has sent Danish troops to assist the US occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan (though they are now leaving Iraq). He and his rightwing political allies in the racist “Danish People’s Party” have turned Denmark into one of the least friendly nations in Europe for immigrants and refugees. And, among his other crimes against the people, he has embarked on a project to “normalize” Christiania.

Christiania is a magical place, and is one of Denmark’s biggest tourist attractions. In 1970 it was an old military barracks, no longer being used as such, and the counter-culture decided to take it over and create a community on these several hundred acres of land. They cleaned up the land and the water beside it, fixed up the buildings that were there, and built many more funky, artistic dwellings. They decorated the land with artwork, built cafes, restaurants, music clubs, and a very successful bicycle-making workshop, among other things. They provided office space for activist groups and a large building was given over to be used exclusively by people from Greenland. (Still a colony of Denmark, much of Greenland’s population has suffered at the hands of their Danish colonizers and suffer from alcoholism and other problems.)

The continuing existence of Christiania has been an inspiration for people around Europe and much of the rest of the world. It is essentially a small town with no cars, no police, no landlords, no rent, generally bustling with tourists and residents. Until Fogh’s police went in several years ago and busted the open hashish and marijuana market, it was the only place in Europe outside of the Netherlands where hash and pot could be bought openly on the street, in a safe environment. With no police force, hard drugs were kept out of Christiania by mutual agreement between the residents and the people running their stalls on what is still known as Pusher Street.

The people of Christiania resoundingly answered the question of to whom the city belonged by taking land that was not being used and declaring that it belonged to the people. The buildings had long ago been built and paid for, why should anyone “own” them? Why pay rent or mortgages for them? Who needs police or other such services? They pay directly to the utility companies for their electricity and water. Rather than being a burden in any way to Danish society or taxpayers, they are a top tourist destination.

But the government apparently can no longer stand this kind of example being set. They say they want to create a park and “low-income housing.” What the residents of Christiania already have is a beautiful park for any visitors who care to come, and free housing – but so close to the center of the city, on property that could presumably be sold for hundreds of millions of dollars, and Copenhagen’s real estate developers are salivating in the back rooms behind the Prime Minister.

So on the morning of May 14th, after claiming that “normalization” negotiations with the commune had broken down (they hadn’t), police arrived unannounced with a bulldozer and proceeded to destroy one of 52 houses which the government wants to destroy, for one reason or another. They’re not up to code, they’re built in the wrong place, or whatever.

As the house was being destroyed, supporters of Christiania – including many also involved with the struggle for Ungdomshuset – started sending text messages to each other, and within a couple hours there were hundreds of people there. By afternoon there were hundreds more, and still more by evening. I got there by around 4 pm, about seven hours after the house had been destroyed.

I was walking from the metro station towards Christiania and I saw a couple of women from Ungdomshuset that I recognized. I had heard that the main road that runs alongside Christiania was completely blocked off by the police, and it had occurred to many of us that looking “normal” could be a good strategy for getting through the police lines. These women, however, had multicolored dreadlocks and facial piercings. I asked them about that. “We’re under cover!” They said. “We’re not wearing black!” And it was true. I hadn’t noticed.

The police were still blocking off the road, but there was one smaller road that went into a residential neighborhood, and they were letting people in there. From that road you could get into Christiania. As soon as I stepped foot into Christiania I found myself running with a crowd of people away from a cloud of tear gas. Groups of mostly young people had made barricades to keep the police out, and set them alight if the police were trying to come in that way. The crowds would then stand back and throw rocks and bottles at the police, who would fire tear gas back. It went on like that all night. On the roofs of the buildings many people were watching the show, and trying to be helpful, making noises when police were coming from around the corner.

This was not the preferred response of many in the Christiania community, who are coming from a more nonviolent, hippie orientation. The spokeswoman of Christiania duly distanced herself from the rock-throwing. In response many youth that I talked to complained that the hippies just weren’t responding. But if they had waited a few more hours they would have seen how people at Christiania were responding.

Overnight several dozen people built a new, very artistic house on the site where the house had just been demolished.

A few days later there was what you could call an anarchist-hippie unity march. I stood on the sound truck, which was a more improvised version of the ones used by the Ungdomshuset supporters, a more colorful Christiania version, pulled by a tractor, one of the few motorized vehicles driving on the narrow dirt roads of Christiania. It was raining, but not too hard. Behind the crowd of several hundred people was one of the main entrances to Christiania. On top of an arch that you pass through to get in or out it said, in English, “You are now entering the EU.”

Despite the fact that the house had been destroyed, Christiania felt more like Christiania than it had in years. Since the hash market was busted by the police, gangs of cops had been roaming around Christiania nightly, randomly searching the bags of anybody they wanted to. This kind of behavior is very unusual for police in Denmark anywhere outside of Christiania, but ironically, it had become one of the least safe places to smoke weed anywhere in Europe. That week was different. Thanks to the burning barricades it had once again become a liberated zone, and people were taking the occasion to roll and smoke lots of big spliffs. The sound man and I were feeling good by the time we got to the government building downtown.

There we were met by the other half of the march, the weekly Ungdomshuset march that the Christiania march was timed to coincide with. The rainbow flags and the black flags intermingled, punk rock, hiphop and acoustic music once again on the same stage, completely surrounded by hundreds of riot cops, who stood around looking mean but didn’t do anything.

The new movement for Ungdomshuset was well in evidence, with many very young kids there along with the more typical teenagers and folks in their 20’s. As with marches every Thursday, there were older folks with vests that said (in Danish), Parents Against Police Brutality. They were keeping an eye on the cops at these marches, but not trying to play the unpopular role of “peacekeepers,” just watching out for the cops, and everybody liked them.

One of the people who performed was a woman named Nia, a great singer, sister of a great singer named Billie, daughter of a pair of legendary Danish rock stars, Annisette and Thomas Koppel of the band Savage Rose, generally identified by the 1960’s, but still going strong today. Thomas died unexpectedly of a heart attack not long ago, at the age of 60, and he is sorely missed by many. Only days before he died he finished a CD of instrumental music, which rose to #1 in the Danish charts posthumously. He also wrote something called Message From The Grassroots, a sort of “where do we go from here” piece, around which many older and younger Danish activists formed a group of the same name, and their banners and sweatshirts were well-represented at the rally. (Annisette was also at the rally, but didn’t sing that day.)

The weekend before the house demolition in Christiania I was in Sweden. I had played at a three-week-long film and music festival in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle in Malmo, just over the bridge from Copenhagen, and my next stop in Sweden was further north, in Gothenberg. I was singing at a rally against NATO. It was the second anti-NATO rally I had sung at in Sweden, which seems particularly odd since Sweden is not a member of NATO.

But there in the harbor of the lovely, canal-filled city of Gothenberg were dozens of warships from the US, Britain, Spain and elsewhere. Sweden, like most places, is a land of contradictions. It is by far the most welcoming place in Europe for Iraqi refugees, while at the same time it sells large amounts of high-tech weaponry to the US to bomb Iraq with. In fact, I understand that per capita, Sweden is the biggest arms exporter in the world. Officially “neutral,” whatever that means, it is a member of the European Union and has hosted many NATO events.

The anti-NATO rally was the biggest in Gothenberg in a long time, with thousands of people there by the harbor across from the warships. After the European summit in 2001 during which a protester was shot in the stomach by the police with live ammunition, the police were trying to be friendly, but of course they were there to protect the warships from us, posted every few feet along the harbor.

Here we had another very privileged European country with a large chunk of the population concerned and asking basic questions. Why are we hosting a meeting of an organization that is busily making war with half the Muslim world? Why are we exporting so many arms to nations at war when we claim ourselves to be “neutral”?

Unlike some other countries in Europe, Swedes these days don’t do a whole lot of rioting. The same can be said of Norway, which was the next stop on my G8 Warm-Up Tour.

I had gigs in Oslo and in Trondheim. Trondheim is a city of 150,000 or so, seven hours on the train due north of Oslo, but not even halfway to the northern tip of Norway, which is well into the Arctic Circle.

Around both cities could be found posters and graffiti in solidarity with the struggle at Ungdomshuset. Along with them can often be seen “Blitz Blir” – Blitz Stays. Blitz is Oslo’s answer to Ungdomshuset, another leftwing punk rock social center that has been in downtown Oslo since the 80’s.

You’ll also find posters saying (in Norwegian), “Norway out of NATO, NATO out of the world.” Not long before I got to Oslo, NATO had a meeting there, and it was met by a small but festive protest which the authorities and the media were referring to as “violent.” It certainly was no riot by Rostock standards, but there was a bit of fence-shaking and a lot of tear gas.

Because of this, my friend Stein was once again in the news. Since the heyday of the Norwegian squatters movement in the 1980’s, if anything exciting happens in Oslo, Stein gets the blame for it. He doesn’t seek the publicity, but if there’s a protest and he’s saying something into the bullhorn along with many others, more often than not it’s his picture that’s in the paper and his words on the television news broadcasts. Walking with him from the train station to his house and back, about a 20-minute walk altogether, he was greeted by at least a dozen people, some of whom he knew, and harassed by one cop who he didn’t know.

It was about a year before the NATO meeting when Stein and many other people were playing support roles for 23 young men from Afghanistan who were doing a very public hunger strike while camping on the grounds of a large church in the center of Oslo. The Afghans were asking the people of Norway a simple question. Is Norway a country where people like them shall be deported back to war zones from which they had fled for their lives, or a country that shall give them safe haven?

For 26 days they ate nothing, wasting away in front of the eyes of the masses of passing shoppers, commuters and tourists. I was in Oslo for a week or so during that time, spending a good bit of it hanging around the churchyard. Every day at 5 pm there would be a cultural event for the Afghans, their supporters, and the passersby. While I was around there were performances by musicians from all over Asia, Norway and, at least in my case, the US. I first met the Afghans by playing for them, and realized in the process to my delight that most of them were quite fluent in English.

It was an eventful week while I was there. The most memorable occasion was when the police came at dawn one morning to destroy the tents and arrest the hunger-strikers. I was there with several dozen other supporters, including many from Blitz, surrounding the Afghans and trying to prevent them from being removed. As usual, the television crews spent much of their time following Stein with their cameras to see what he might do or say next. If they tried to talk to him he’d tell them that the Afghans have a spokesperson and he’d point to Zahir, a tall, thin, intelligent man of all of 23 who was working day and night in the position his comrades had chosen for him.

When the hunger-strikers ultimately were taken away by the police and then released, they all came back and stayed in the churchyard with no tents.

It was a heartwarming moment when soon thereafter the Norwegian Red Cross came and erected their own tents for the Afghans, and also hooked them up with running water. The Norwegian parliament then finally said they’d reconsider each case. After 26 days of not eating this was the best offer that had been made, and the Afghans decided to end their hunger strike. Since then, however, Norway has deported many more people to the war zone that is Afghanistan today, occupied by Norwegian troops along with many other NATO soldiers.

After riding in the train through the snow-capped mountains and small villages dotting the landscape here and there from Oslo to Trondheim, I was met at the train station by activists from the UFFA anarchist social center and taken to a protest downtown.

Not only was it roughly the anniversary of the hunger strike in downtown Oslo, but it was also the one-year anniversary of the killing of a young immigrant from Nigeria by a Trondheim cop. It was a classic story, repeated ad nauseum in the US. It was almost identical to a story I had heard just weeks before in Sonoma County, California. The young man from Nigeria had low blood pressure and had gone too long without eating. In front of the social welfare office he was feeling delusional and apparently acting out. If he were a white Norwegian, of course, the cop probably would have recognized the situation for what it was and sought medical help for him. Being black, however, he instead strangled him to death.

Over a thousand people there in downtown Trondheim, and over a thousand at the same time in Oslo, wanted to let the authorities know that this kind of racism is not OK in Norway.

There also at the rally were many of the Afghans I had met in Oslo a year earlier. They had chosen that day to embark on a long march from Trondheim to Oslo to highlight their plight and that of other asylum-seekers who are daily being deported back to war zones like Afghanistan. I sang for them as they began their walk. As I write this, they are about three-fourths of the way to Oslo. Many people were concerned about how they’d do in the very sparsely-populated, snow-covered mountainous regions that they had to walk through to get to Oslo, but they assured everyone that they had had lots of experience walking through snowy mountain ranges escaping their homeland and getting to Europe. They all made it through those mountains just fine.

That night after the rally in Trondheim I was to play at UFFA’s annual three-day music festival. Before the festival I was talking with one of the organizers, Bjorn-Hugo, about the differences between the activist scene in Norway as opposed to other European countries. “It’s hard to be very militant when they keep giving you what you ask for,” he explained. For example, when the old UFFA center burned down by accident, the anarchists demanded that the government give them another building. The government did. It’s a bit further from the center of town, but it has a bigger backyard than the last one, and everybody’s happy with it.

But the folks at UFFA still have a lot to be mad about. Although the society is prosperous and nobody’s going hungry, Norway is an oil-rich nation that encourages fossil fuel dependency and global warming. It’s a big arms exporter. It’s troops are occupying Afghanistan. And a member of the Trondheim police force strangled an African immigrant to death last year, to name a few concerns.

It’s summer, and in Scandinavia in general, and northern Norway in particular, the sun never really sets. It always feels eerily like it’s about 5 pm. Long shadows, a dusky light, but never dark. For maybe a half hour at about 2 am it almost got dark, but then it started getting lighter again. When the festival was over, at 4 am, several dozen fairly intoxicated anarchists – they had been drinking a northern Norwegian specialty called Kolshk, a mix of moonshine and coffee – marched towards the social welfare office where the Nigerian was killed. It was only a few blocks from UFFA.

Along with the march, in a shopping cart, they brought with them a toy wooden police wagon, about a meter tall and a meter wide, big enough for a child to sit in and pretend to drive. “It’s Trondheim. We don’t burn real police cars here,” someone explained. They wheeled the toy police wagon up to the social office, doused it with moonshine and set it on fire.

In the early dawn light, beneath the cloudy sky, the bright red fire and black smoke was beautiful, and far more dramatic than I had imagined burning a toy police car might be. A couple of real police cars circled us but didn’t do anything provocative like get out of their cars or anything… The fire department responded with impressive speed, looking like they had just gotten out of bed and thrown their gear on, and were not happy to be awoken so early for no good reason. They dutifully put out the fire, turning the black smoke white, leaving a smouldering toy police wagon still sitting in the shopping cart.

Without missing a beat, folks bid the social office adieu and wheeled the cart back to UFFA. Some of them climbed onto the roof and planted the partly-burned, still-smouldering toy police wagon on top of the chimney for all passersby to see. I suspect the partly-blackened police car atop UFFA will be staying there for quite some time.

“From dreaming comes knowledge.” Armand was quoting an ancient Arab writer. I was in the Netherlands, starting the Holland leg of my tour. Armand and I were backstage at the ACU club in downtown Utrecht, smoking big spliffs.

“What kind of weed do you recommend I get at the coffeeshop down the street?” I asked. He looked at me skeptically. “I don’t touch the stuff from the coffeeshops. I only smoke outdoor organic.”

The Netherlands is now the only country in Europe where you can buy pot and hash over the counter in coffeeshops (since the Danish police put an end to Pusher Street in Christiania). It hasn’t always been that way in Holland, though, and Armand remembers those days well. When he was a young man in the late 1950’s he first smoked cannabis with some folks from the Carribean he met at the harbor in Belgium, and he’s been a proponent ever since.

In the 60’s Armand became a household name in Holland and Belgium (the Dutch-speaking world, you could say). As in Denmark, the US, and much of the world, it was a time when leftwing hippies like Armand could become rock stars, and he did. He had many hits, and was known as the Dutch Bob Dylan. Stylistically there is certainly a resemblance, though his lyrics, from what I’m told (they’re almost all in Dutch), focus largely on cannabis, with peace and love and other nice ideas thrown in for good measure.

At age 61, with a full mane of long, bright red, dyed hair, and very multicolored clothing, he can enthrall an audience for hours. He used to pack stadiums. Now he packs smaller venues, though with significantly larger audiences than I’d normally get most places, so doing several gigs in Holland with him was a pleasure for various reasons.

Armand and I were first playing at a G8 informational event, encouraging folks to go to the protests, talking about what was going to be happening there, before the music started. The fear tactics of the German authorities seemed to be crossing borders, since just the week before a hundred bicyclists were mass-arrested for having an unpermitted Critical Mass bike ride there in Utrecht. The general consensus was that the Dutch authorities were looking for names of people who might be going to the G8 protests in nearby Germany, to pass their information on to the German authorities, since mass-arrests of bicyclists is not the norm in this otherwise very bicycle-friendly nation.

That night I slept in a large squatted building only a couple hundred meters from City Hall, in the center of downtown Utrecht. There had been a big fire in the building fifteen years ago and the building was abandoned. Taking advantage of Dutch laws which say that buildings left abandoned for a certain amount of time can legally be squatted, it was squatted and fixed up at least to the point where people could safely live in it.

As in cities throughout Europe, real estate prices have gone through the roof, and abandoned buildings these days are rare, so there are always palpable tensions between the scruffy squatters and their yuppie neighbors who otherwise populate the downtown areas. Is living in the city you grew up in a right or a privilege? You’ll find very different answers depending on who you ask.

The same tensions can be found between those favoring more industrial development and highways and those favoring more forests, farms, bicycles and villages.

Sometimes these tensions exist poetically within the same family. My friend Antwan has been campaigning for many years on behalf of the forests, farms and villages. Campaigns he’s been involved with have gotten quite a bit of media attention, and he has at times been a bit of a celebrity, in some sense Holland’s answer to England’s Swampy or Julia Butterfly in the US.

Antwan’s brother, on the other hand, is known for a different reason. He started a multi-million-dollar business, running a factory in China that makes plastic trees and sells them to corporations around the world who like that sort of thing. You just can’t make this shit up.

One of the gigs I did with Armand was on the outskirts of Amsterdam, in what is essentially a small village called Ruigoord.

Ruigoord used to be a small village to the west of Amsterdam, right on the harbor. Below sea level, like most of Holland, separated from the water by a dike. There were a hundred or so nice old houses and a big old church in the village, with farmland and forest surrounding it on three sides.

In the early 1970’s the Dutch government decided they wanted to expand the industrial harbor, make way for more industry, make more money, dump some more toxins into the air, clearcut the forest and pave over the farmland. With these lofty goals in mind, they forced the people of Ruigoord to sell their houses to them, with the intention of destroying this lovely village.

The hippies of Amsterdam, upon hearing about the fate of Ruigoord, thought rather that the village should stay. They moved in to the now-vacant buildings and started a thriving community there in 1973, and they – and now a whole new generation in addition to the original squatters -- have been there ever since.

Until very recently, Ruigoord was a village under constant threat. The harbor company kept on expanding, taking more and more farmland and forest. Facing the loss of the last bits of farmland only a few dozen meters from the edge of the village, in the late 1990’s members of the Ruigoord community and supporters from around Holland acted decisively.

They set up camps on the threatened land. They lived in treehouses and tunnels beneath the roads, to prevent bulldozers from taking down the trees or using the roads. Antwan lived in a tunnel day and night for a month, and was nearly buried alive there when the harbor company ignored the fact that he was living under the road and tried to drive on it anyway.

“For ten years, every year was the last year for Ruigoord,” Armand explained. But after the campaigns, all the media, and some sympathetic politicians, recently a Ruigoord was officially allowed to stay. The forests and the farmland around it are gone, but the village remains. Next door, the first company to move in to one of the industrial buildings by the new expanses of harbor was Starbucks. When the wind is blowing the right way, the acrid smell of roasting coffee beans hangs in the air. Capitalism stinks, literally.

The occasion for our concert was the annual Ruigoord poetry festival. The poetry was all really boring (it was all in Dutch). But there were some fantastic bands in the big church, and Armand and I on another stage outside. Hundreds of big, sturdy, but lightweight rectangular buoys were all over the field outside the church. Normally these multicolored box-shaped things are used to keep ships from scratching up against docks, but somehow lots of them migrated to the village… They make great seats, as well as fabulous toys for kids, like giant leggos you can climb.

Reminiscent of the Merry Pranksters, there were two buses on the field, beautiful buses with windmills on top. One was from the older generation, and on the back, in big lettering of the sort that was used to advertise Grateful Dead shows at the Fillmore, were the words Amsterdam Balloon Company. The other bus was the creation of the younger generation of Ruigoord, and on the front of it were the words, Dutch Acid Family.

Now that Ruigoord has finally been more or less legalized, many from the community are planning on boarding the ABC bus to go support Christiania later in the summer. Others were planning to head to Germany. That was my next stop.

My first stop in Germany was the Rostock Convergence Center, then an anti-war protest about 120 kilometers south of Rostock, then back to Rostock for the G8 protests.

The first G8 rally was still almost a week away, but the Rostock Convergence Center was already buzzing with activity. Every hour small groups of people were arriving from all over Germany, Russia, Spain, the US, all over. The Convergence Center was a big old disused school building, but what it had become was unmistakable. Political art and graffiti was everywhere. A large banner hung from the top floor proclaimed “kein mensch ist illegal” – no one is illegal.

Inside the building were posters, announcements and proclamations from all kinds of different groups, each playing their part in making these protests a historic event. Without any central leadership, the place had the familiar atmosphere of a beehive. There were those organizing the massive undertaking of feeding organic vegan food to thousands of people each day. There were those organizing anti-racist actions against eastern Germany’s sizeable Nazi skinhead population. There was the Clown Army planning their own unique disruptions to business as usual. There were the techies setting up computers with high-speed internet access. There was the legal team, the people organizing shuttles to drive everyone to various locations in the area, and of course many groups making plans for a multitude of direct actions.

I played an acoustic show there at midnight. The next day I went to visit the camp in the small town of Reddelich. Reddelich is a farming community of 150 people or so fairly close to the resort town where the G8 meetings were to take place. When I first visited the camp there were maybe a hundred people there setting up tents, digging latrines, rigging up electricity, preparing the kitchen for thousands of people who would be coming, and so on. I talked to the cultural working group who happily scheduled me in to do a show on June 1st at the bar, then I headed out to Hamburg.

Hamburg is a beautiful city where I have spent a lot of time over the years. I visited friends there, and caravaned with some of them to a small town 120 miles south of Rostock, where local people have been in a legal battle with the German government over the fate of a large chunk of land which used to be a military practice area for the Soviet military.

Since the wall fell this area of land which was once covered with dust and Soviet tanks has now turned back into a lovely forest, and the people in the area want to keep it that way. The German government, after some talk of turning the land into a park, have in more recent years been talking about once again using it as a practice bombing range.

Once again the familiar theme, the familiar question which can be found everywhere you look – whose world is this? As is so often the case, the people and the government are at odds.

The military typically uses pyramid-shaped targets for their bombing practice, and the people there had small and large pyramids they had made, with the slogan on them and on signs all over the place, “every target is a home.”

After spending the night at a pristine campground by a lake near the prospective bombing range, I spent the morning talking to folks who are veterans of the anti-nuclear movement. Hearing about villages in the Wendtland region where there is a nuclear fuel processing plant, villages where the farmers have become very politicized, not just about the dangers of nuclear power in their backyard, but about the bigger realities of who shall control our planet’s destiny.

I remember visiting the Wendtland region just before the G8 protests in Italy seven years ago. In small farming villages I passed signs wishing people luck at the protests in Genoa. I heard stories of the unusual creatures of the area, the giant moles that mysteriously dug huge holes beneath the railroad tracks to prevent the nuclear transport trains from moving, or at least to delay them massively. For many years it has gotten to the point that tens of thousands of police are necessary to allow the train to make their way across the country.

When tens of thousands of police arrive in the area, people know a transport is coming, and soon there are far larger numbers of farmers as well as activists from across Germany there to lay down on the tracks, dig holes beneath them, flood them with water, cut them with saws, block the roads with tractors to make police movements very difficult, and so on.

The nuclear transport is a ritual that goes on every year, but this year it’s not happening, apparently because the police throughout Germany are too busy keeping the G8 meetings from being shut down instead.

After a festive rally outside of what is known as the Bombodrom -- the land where the government wants to do their target practice – people headed in to camp on the land illegally and be arrested. The arrests never came, however, perhaps because the German police had other things to worry about further north.

After the rally ended and folks were headed into the forest to set up camp, others of us headed up to Rostock. Most of the rest were planning to head there the next morning. I sped down the highway with a car full of anarchists from England, Belgium and the US that I had picked up, and made for the Convergence Center.

As I had anticipated, it was jammed with people and full of activity and anticipation. Everything was in high gear. Information was flying around about who was being stopped on the highway, which borders were being closed, who was being turned away from Denmark or Holland, were the police in one of the camps or not, which roads were open in the city, how many people were still being held from a protest the day before in Hamburg, how many arrests had their been at an anti-Nazi protest nearby, and so on.

With another car full of people I headed out to Reddelich Camp. It was June 1st. The camp looked nothing like what I had seen only a few days before. What had been tents had turned into buildings made of pallettes and other pieces of found wood or downed trees dragged out of the forest. Near the bustling tent-turned-building where I did my concert, people had built a huge children’s play area, including a merry-go-round type thing which was fit for an amusement park. Eight people (kids or adults) could fit on the eight seats that surrounded a large pole with ropes connected to each seat. Once other people pushed it clockwise so the ropes were wound up around the pole, it could spin fantastically for five minutes or so on it’s own.

Nearby was a very impressive jungle jim kind of thing. The kitchen was in full swing, feeding thousands of people. There was a welcome center to help people orient and figure out how to plug in to what was happening. There was a building with computers with broadband internet access, and many, many more structures that I didn’t have a chance to investigate.

Hundreds of people were milling about at the bar by the time the sound system and the improvised mike stand was constructed, at 11 pm. One friend of mine there from the US was skeptical about whether this crowd of mostly anarchist youth was going to be interested in some guy with an acoustic guitar, when it might be assumed that many of them were more into punk rock.

As soon as I started strumming, though, the milling crowd turned instantly into an attentive audience, and suddenly I recognized people I knew from all over Europe and North America. There they were, people I had just recently seen in Utrecht, Gothenberg, Copenhagen, and other folks I hadn’t seen in months or years from England, Belgium, Berlin… And, as always at these mass convergences, mostly just lots of good people I had never met before.

I headed back to town in the wee hours of the morning to get some sleep before heading to the train station for the big rally. I thought about the jaded leftists I’ve known who say these mass convergences are pointless, and how completely wrong they are for saying this.

Whatever did or didn’t happen in Heilingendam this week, thousands of people from all over the world have worked together, marched together, sat in together, made new friends, and they’ll be bringing these connections and these experiences home with them. Whether the G8 meetings were seriously disrupted or just inconvenienced, the authorities and the world at large has once again had to take notice.

All is not well in paradise, and just who calls the shots, and in whose interests, is not at all set in stone. Whether refugees shall be welcomed or shunned, whether countries shall export arms or build windmills, whether forests shall be forests or bombing ranges, whether villages shall be villages or industrial harbors, whether recreational drug users shall be productive members of society or shall be thrown away in prison, these are all matters of life or death, and these matters are by no means decided.

Democracy is in the streets, in the big cities, the small towns, the forests – but not in the seaside resorts. Sometimes – often – governments are compelled, forced to listen to their people, especially when the people shout loud enough, long enough, sit down in the streets and refuse to move.

And sometimes when so-called democracies feel they must defend themselves with armies of riot police, the cobblestones get broken. They can be replaced.


Whose World Is This is also the title track of a great Jim Page CD. You can read more of my essays by going to www.davidrovics.com or www.songwritersnotebook.blogspot.com. Hope to see you on the road and in the streets.

Click Here to Read More...

Pivotal Moment in the Green Scare

Bill Rodgers died in a jail cell in Flagstaff, Arizona, fist raised above him, plastic bag over his head, of an apparent suicide, on the 2005 winter solstice. Two weeks before in Prescott, Bill’s baby, the Catalyst Infoshop had been raided by fifteen federal officers and he was taken away.

Bill was essentially accused of destroying corporate property. If he had been arrested for these crimes in, say, an EU country, I’m sure Bill would still be alive today. But the US is not the EU. The prisons of the US are full of nonviolent offenders, and there are special sentences for some of them. Bill knew that in America today, he could do like Jeffrey Luers and go to prison for a very long time. For Bill’s property destruction was politically – ecologically – motivated. Bill apparently chose to end his life rather than spend it in prison.


The last time I saw Bill was at the Catalyst, a few months before his death. We were sitting on (or more like enveloped by) some very old couches and someone was filming an interview for a local Cable Access program, I think. Bill was a couple years older than me, but with twice as much energy. He was small, intelligent, full of vitality, full of both good intentions and actions. He was an unassuming Prescott institution, along with the Catalyst Infoshop.

Bill was part of a sweep of arrests of activists around the US, and more broadly, part of the US government’s efforts to wipe out what it calls “ecoterrorism.” To impose decades-long sentences (Jeffrey Luers was sentenced to a breathtaking 22 years) on people who have harmed no one, people who have essentially committed expensive acts of vandalism -- against the corporations that are destroying our world.

The term “ecoterrorism” was coined by a corporation, by a PR firm from New York. The laws passed by the Congress giving “ecoterrorists” extra decades in prison for their alleged crimes were, of course, like most laws in this alleged democracy, passed at the behest of large corporations.

At the beginning of June Daniel McGowan, Joyanna Zacher, and Jonathan Paul will be sentenced for their alleged crimes of property destruction. Next week, at the federal courthouse in Eugene, Oregon, a judge will decide whether the “terrorism enhancement” law shall be applied to these cases. If applied, each defendant would receive a mandatory sentence of 20 years on top of whatever other draconian sentence they will otherwise be receiving. In the same way communists were once singled out for special punishment, so now are “ecoterrorists.” It’s the new Red Scare, the Green Scare.

This May 15th court decision comes at an interesting time. Our country is waging an illegal war for oil in Iraq in which over 600,000 people have lost their lives. The ice caps are melting, the oceans are rising, and the federal government is invading oil-rich nations and giving tax breaks to Americans for buying Hummers. Last week, a Cuban man named Luis Posada Carrilles was let back onto the streets of Miami. A free man, though he is known to have killed 73 people by planting a bomb on a civilian airplane in 1976, among many other deadly crimes. And the man responsible for blowing up Greenpeace’s ship in 1985 while it was docked in New Zealand, killing one, is now living in Virginia and selling arms to the US government.

But real terrorists like Posada are not our government’s concern. International law, illegal wars and mass deaths of innocent civilians are just fine. Global warming is just fine. “Ecoterrorists” are the problem, the FBI’s enemy #1, by their own admission. And in September, 2001 what was the FBI’s biggest, most expensive ongoing campaign? Right. Not Al-Qaeda, but the nonviolent acts of property destruction carried out by the Earth Liberation Front.

Of course, Muslims are also the new bogeymen. Just as anyone in the 1980’s who defended the sovereignty of nations in Latin America was called a “communist,” now anyone defending the soverignty of nations in the Middle East are called “terrorists” or “Islamists.” There have even been transparently ridiculous efforts on the part of the State Department to link supporters of Hugo Chavez with Al-Qaeda. In the modern era, you don’t even need to commit a crime or “conspire” (with FBI infiltrators/provacateurs) to commit a crime. You need only open your mouth.

Such is the case with devout Muslim university professor Dr. Sami Al-Arian, who has been in prison in Florida for years now. But this is also true of Sherman Austin, a young man from California who recently served a year in prison because someone posted a crude, easily-available smoke bomb recipe on his website.

And it is terrifyingly true in the case of Rod Coronado, who is being threatened with a 25-year prison sentence for a speech he gave in 2003 in which he answered a student’s question about an action for which he served years in prison in the early 1990’s.

There is a thread running through all of this – the war in Iraq, the criminalization of Muslims in the US and around the world, and the criminalization of environmentalists, particularly those involved with the activities of the ELF. That is, the interests of massive energy corporations. It was due to lobbying efforts by energy companies masquerading as the pseudo-eco “Wise Use Movement” that led Bill Clinton to pass the 1997 law criminalizing speech, under which Rod Coronado is facing his shockingly draconian sentence.

Much, however, has been written by people with far more legal knowledge than I about the nature and technicalities of the various new medieval laws under which many good people are facing outrageous prison terms. I would like to take a moment to talk about the nature of the alleged crimes of many of the accused here. I don’t know if they are “guilty” or “innocent” here and I wish them all the best either way. Our government has spent centuries framing activists for crimes they didn’t commit, so if they are innocent and facing these charges, I would not be the least bit surprised. If they are guilty, however, I say good for them for having done everything of which they are accused.

I want to be very clear here that I am speaking only for myself, and I don’t represent the accused, or any organization.

Having said that, who is the Earth Liberation Front? They are my friends, neighbors, colleagues, lovers. And (particularly given that you are reading this, and probably reading it because you’re part of the progressive community that reads stuff written by people like me) they’re probably yours, too. The names are irrelevant, the specifics irrelevant.

They grew up in North America, at a certain time in history, at the end of the twentieth century. Like most of our society, most of them came from the suburbs, they went to high school, they eventually went to college. Like many of the somewhat more privileged elements of our society, they traveled around the country as youths, they saw it, they drew certain conclusions, and they decided they had to act on these conclusions.

They grew up in places like Connecticut.

Growing up between the woodsy New York suburbs of Fairfield County and the smaller towns of Litchfield County, “Housatonic” was one of my first words. Since I was a child I was aware that I was not to touch this lovely river that winds through the town I grew up in because it was poisoned by PCB’s dumped into it by companies like General Electric and Eastman-Kodak. This massive watershed has been poisoned since I can remember. For decades it was known by fishermen and those drinking the water and getting sick from it that the water was being poisoned, but nothing was done about it.

When I was young, Wilton, Connecticut was a suburb and had long since lost all of its farms, but it was a woodsy suburb. Like so many other towns around the US in the 70’s and 80’s, the woods were replaced each year by more and more houses, and what I thought of as my backyard got smaller and smaller. Part of my backyard was a 700-acre watershed with a reservoir in it, a local water supply. When I was a child it was always full, but by the time I was a teenager it was often nearly empty, as more and more people moved into the area and used more and more water, and as droughts started happening with increasing frequency.

The main road going through town was a two-lane road, Route 7, with woods lining much of it on either side. Later it became an unrecognizeable mass of parking lots and strip malls. As I grew up, left home, and started feeding my desire to see the country, I was appalled to find that most of it had already been destroyed far more thoroughly than Wilton.

I saw New Jersey, where much of my extended family lived, and south Florida, where one set of my grandparents moved to when I was a teenager. I couldn’t believe people could live in these places, where what used to be the landscape was completely unrecognizeable, covered with asphalt, highways, parking lots, condominiums, and sports utility vehicles stuck in traffic as far as the eye can see.

And indeed, were the people really living? In such an alienating environment, more and more of them were turning towards pharmaceutical drugs in order to cope with this life they had inherited from the corporations. Time and again, the few who attempted to stop this “progress” -- this process of turning the world into a giant Wal-Mart -- were defeated, one community after another destroyed, physically, psychologically, the forests decimated, the common areas gone, even the sidewalks.

The downtowns closed, one after another, replaced by alien landscapes only accessible by car. What was left of the gutted former cities of places like New Jersey was populated by impoverished, unemployed people surrounded by abandoned and boarded-up buildings, the downtowns replaced by soulless suburbs indistinguishable from each other except that the chain stores appear in a different order depending on the town, if the word “town” can accurately be used to describe these places.

When it seemed like there couldn’t possibly be more highways, there were more. When it seemed the strip malls couldn’t possibly be uglier and more impersonal, they became bigger, uglier and without the modicum of public space the first ones often had. When it seemed public transportation couldn’t possibly get any worse, in so many places it ceased to exist altogether. When it seemed the general population couldn’t get any less healthy that it was, somehow pharmaceutical drug use increased even more, people got even more obese, and there was yet another spate of high school massacres to add to the last series.

And so many people just seemed to accept this new reality. New generations were born that never knew life could be any different. The concept of a neighbor, a front porch, or a bicycle became a thing of distant memories and old movies. The cancer rate grew and then it grew faster, but people would say this is how life is, cancer has always been with us, it just wasn’t diagnosed before. It’s easy to prove that this isn’t true, since there are societies outside the US to compare ourselves to, but nobody talked about that on TV, and most people never heard about these places, never traveled to them. Wal-Mart doesn’t pay people enough to take vacations outside of New Jersey, let alone to other countries. But they do pay just enough to keep the car running and to get the next prescription of Prozac.

Having spent much of my childhood hiking in the forests of northwestern Connecticut, on the Appalachian Trail, I spent a summer in the forests of western North Carolina. Although on the map you can see that 10% of the US land mass is identified as “National Forest,” I learned firsthand what that misnomer really meant. Much of it would more appropriately be called National Sacrifice Zones. I learned that the main job of the Forest Service is to subsidize logging operations and clean up the mess afterwards. I saw clearcut after clearcut. Eroded hillsides covered in stumps, mud sliding into stream after stream. Mountaintops covered with dead trees, killed by beetles emboldened by climate change.

I saw Louisiana. First the “National Forest” tree farms in the north of the state, then the coast. I drove and drove for hundreds of miles along the coast, smelling the stench of the oil industry that had laid waste to everything from Mississippi to Texas. I saw the flames shooting wildly out of the smokestacks, tried to imagine how anybody could live in such an environment. Fisheries devastated, communities ruined, economies struggling, the only jobs left being on the oil rigs and refineries that constantly mar the coastline, spewing carcinogens, the EPA never to be seen.

I saw the people there on the Gulf Coast living in the midst of a distopian nightmare, their trailers and little houses sandwiched between the highways and smokestacks, just to keep all the miserable occupants of the suburbs of New Jersey and Connecticut and Florida in their SUVs, driving to the next mall, driving to their jobs, ever further and further away, ever harder to find.

I saw Los Angeles. I had never been to a city where there was so much smog you couldn’t see the sky. Everything was grey. I read about how LA used to have a great trolley system, but it was bought by GM and Exxon and destroyed, along with the mass transit systems in other cities they bought in order to destroy. Somehow this was allowed to happen. Somehow civil society couldn’t stop it. I read about the cancer rate and the number of people with asthma there, one of the highest rates in the country, mostly because of all the cars spewing smog into the soup bowl that is LA.

LA, one more of so many examples of what happens when massive corporations are able to make all the important decisions. It’s good for Exxon and GM, so we will have suburbs. It’s good for Exxon and GM, so we will have endless expanses of highways, malls and cars. It’s good for Exxon and GM, so the natural world will be systematically destroyed and replaced by asphalt. Society will be systematically destroyed and replaced by people kept alive by inhalers, chemotherapy and psych drugs. It’s good for Exxon and GM, so we will send our young people off to die and kill off half the Muslim world.

And so many times I wondered, don’t the billionaires also breath the air? Are they happy with all their money? Will they be happy once they’re living in climate-controlled bubbles? Maybe if the bubbles are big enough…? Won’t it also affect them when the oceans rise? Maybe not when they only rise one foot, or two, but twenty…? Wouldn’t they also rather live in a sane society, or are their imaginations as damaged as those of so many of the people living in the suburbs they have created for us? Or do they just live on pure cynicism, figuring if they don’t profit from this madness, someone else will, and the economic system they’ve been fuelling all their lives is unstoppable, so just let it be…? That’s life, that’s death, it was a nice world once upon a time.

There in the west, there at the end of the continent, I went north. Like so many other people, when I first visited Muir Woods just north of San Francisco it changed me forever.

It was like going back in time, way back. The forest felt alive, sentient. The trees were so massive they blocked out the sky. Some were two hundred feet tall, ten feet wide, unlike anything I had ever seen or heard of.

Someone from an environmental group was handing out literature there. Almost the entire west coast had been full of forests like this, up and down the coast, from the ocean to the mountains. These were some of the very few that remained. Many of these trees had been there since before Columbus first began pillaging the Americas. Some of them were older than Jesus.

Many of the remaining few were in private hands, belonging to energy corporations that had inherited their vast expanses of land through theft, bribery and government handouts, corporate welfare. The rest was on “National Forest” land. Most of it was being logged at a rate faster than the logging of the Amazon.

And what was being done with these indescribably majestic trees? These magical beings that took my breath away, that had such an impact on everyone I ever brought to the coast to see them? These ancient creatures that converted me to paganism overnight, that filled me simultaneously with calm and excitement, hope and despair, that made me feel truly whole for the first time. Were they at least making beautiful musical instruments or homes with these forces of nature?

Toilet paper. They were making toilet paper.

There are lines that must be drawn. Everybody has their breaking point. There is a point at which you just have to say no. This just cannot happen. There is a point at which you cannot rationalize anymore, cannot tolerate anymore, cannot just keep living, pretending everything will somehow work out. There’s a point at which you have to take a stand, do something. There is a point at which you just can’t compromise anymore with yourself.

A point at which you decide that the utter desperate urgency of the situation must be reflected by urgent action. A point at which you decide that all the talking, the legal wrangling, the fundraising, the benefit concerts, the community radio, the education, even the civil disobedience is all good, all needed, but something more must be done, something direct, clear, unmistakeable.

There is a point where some people decide that fire must be met by fire. The point where you realize that tomorrow this bulldozer is going to destroy this ancient forest, and therefore this bulldozer must be destroyed, right now. A point where you decide that this suburb cannot continue to grow and destroy what little is left of the natural world around it. A point at which the offending luxury housing development must be burned to the ground, before anybody moves into it, while there is still a memory of what the landscape used to look like, what it could look like again. A point at which you decide that this SUV dealership simply cannot continue to sell these SUV’s that are giving us all cancer and warming the globe, it must be stopped, now.

Or at least the point must be made, eloquently, directly, brightly, in a way that lights up the night and sends a clear message, like a fiery beacon.

At the core, it’s really just conservationism. The desire to conserve what little remains of the natural world. Just the desire to keep things from getting even worse. To preserve this little bit that’s left, at least that.

The IPCC reports are clear and unequivocal. Climate change is going to kill us all if we don’t stop it. This climate change, so clearly driven by the energy companies that create government policies around the world, is soon going to end life as we know it, unless we change the way society functions. The scientists are clear that this can in fact be done. We can live where we work, turn the suburbs back into farms, ride bicycles, build solar power plants and windmills, recycle everything, it can all be done, if the energy companies and their servile governments will just get out of the way and let sanity reign.

These energy companies, these leaders of the “free world,” these people making the decisions that keep our society flying towards the proverbial brick wall, these people are murderers. They’re not just killing Iraqi children and US soldiers -- they are literally killing us all. Yet no one among the “environmental extremists” has ever acted on the desire for vengeance that makes so many of our hearts so heavy so much of the time. No one has responded violently to the unspeakably violent crimes that are wreaked upon us all on a daily basis. No resident of LA or Houston or Phoenix, while dying of cancer, has ever used her dying days to take revenge against the leaders of the corporations who are responsible for her death, who are killing her.

Instead, the violence in the environmental community has been a one-way street, with the killing of David Chain in the redwood forests near the end of the last century, with police systematically using brutal methods to suppress peaceful dissent, with the bombing of Judy Bari and Darryl Cherney’s car in Oakland, perhaps carried out by the very “intelligence agencies” that are persecuting activists today.

These alleged “ecoterrorists” have hurt no one. All they have allegedly done is destroy property, by various means, being careful not to harm a single human being or animal in the process. Destroyed property which, in a sane society, no corporation could possibly have the right to own. Because in a sane society, we all have an inalieable right to clean air, clean water and soil that is not poisoning our food. Therefore these corporations cannot, under the rule of any sane system of law, be allowed to clearcut the forests, dump chemicals in the rivers, or pave over mile after mile of land and sell SUVs on it. Property used this way cannot possibly be theirs. And if it is, it cannot possibly have any value, when the damage it causes is accounted for. This property, in fact, is more than worthless. Anyone destroying it should be paid for their time and effort in the form of carbon credits at least!

The last time I was in Dublin the show was organized by a woman who had only a few months earlier been preparing to spend years behind bars. But the jury there in Ireland found her and four other activists not guilty for the alleged crimes they had committed.

It happened almost exactly ten years after another not guilty verdict for similar alleged crimes committed in Britain. In both cases, the judges had allowed the cases to be put into context, something that rarely happens in so-called courts of law.

In both cases, the actions committed involved taking sledgehammers to military aircraft in order to prevent them from being used to kill people overseas. By decommissioning the planes as they did, the juries in both cases found that the activists were merely enforcing international and national law, which was in fact being broken by the governments of the UK and Ireland.

The juries found that it was illegal for the UK to be selling these planes to Indonesia, since it was clear beyond a reasonable doubt that Indonesia was going to use these planes, as was their common practice at the time, to bomb civilians in East Timor. In Ireland they found that US warplanes using Shannon Airport as a military base was in violation of Irish law, and these warplanes being used to maintain the occupation of Iraq was also in violation of international law.

I’m not a legal expert and I don’t know what laws might or might not be applicable in the case of these environmentalists who are facing the prospect of spending decades of their precious lives in the hell that is known as the US prison system. What I do know, beyond any doubt whatsoever, is that anyone who destroys the infernal machines that are laying waste to our beautiful world is a hero to me. Their actions should be celebrated, and certainly defended unequivocally. They should not spend a single hour in any prison. They should be found not guilty on all counts.

A few months ago I received an email with a press report in Ontario about an ELF action there that had just occurred. In their press release they quoted a verse from one of my songs. It was a proud day in the life of this songwriter. (But perhaps that's the real reason I was just banned from entering Canada for the next year...?)

May the elves of the forests breed and multiply, before it’s too late. For this beautiful world is not here for massive corporations to terrorize, pillage and destroy. It is here for people like you and I and Bill Rodgers to live long lives in, in harmony with the wild earth, to cherish, to steward, to enjoy – and to save for future generations.

To read more about the Green Scare and get involved, go to www.greenscare.org. To find out how industrial capitalists are killing off your community, go to www.scorecard.org.

Click Here to Read More...

The Battle for Ungdomshuset

I was awoken before dawn last Thursday by the ringing of my cell phone. On the line was a friend from Copenhagen. “I’m sorry to call so early. It’s happened.” Having very recently spent a lot of time in Denmark, I knew right away what this meant. Denmark’s flagship anarchist squat, one of Europe’s oldest squatted social centers, had been attacked by the police. “They landed helicopters on the roof,” my friend informed me.


Danish anti-terror police landed at dawn, unannounced and certainly uninvited, using helicopters, construction equipment and lots of tear gas to overcome resistance from the handful of youth who have for some time now been keeping a 24-hour watch over Ungdomshuset (“Youth House” in English). The medieval-looking barricades that had been perfected over the course of the past few months were impressive to see, but everybody at the house that I talked to during my recent visits to Copenhagen was fairly resigned to the possibility of an assault using helicopters being impossible to resist.

Every afternoon since the police occupation of Ungdomshuset, thousands of people from all walks of life have been peacefully demonstrating in support of the squat. Every night thousands more have been taking to the streets in decidedly less pacific ways. Various parts of the city have been characterized by burning barricades, broken glass, water cannon and tear gas. With 600 people arrested, by Saturday night the streets were a bit calmer.

Police have been recruited from all over Denmark to participate in the repression of the squatters movement and their supporters, and they have apparently even borrowed police cars from Sweden. Being part of the Schengen zone, driving into Denmark is normally as easy as driving across the border from Massachusetts to New York, but for the past several days there have once again been government agents at the borders. Among the 600 arrests in Copenhagen have been scores of Germans, Norwegians, Swedes and other international supporters, but many other would-be supporters have reportedly been turned away at the border.

My contacts tell me that people from within Denmark have been turned away from entering Copenhagen if they raised the suspicions of the police. Denmark is made up of three main land masses connected by two very long bridges. Pretty much anyone coming from one of the two western sections of Denmark would be coming to Copenhagen over a bridge, so keeping Danes from reaching their own capital city is not logistically as challenging as it might be in many other countries.

Several leftwing social centers, infoshops, and collective houses have been raided by the police, who have destroyed property including a number of doors which they unnecessarily smashed down, and people inside have been arrested. Members of the Anarchist Black Cross doing legal support for those already in prison were themselves arrested.

At Ungdomshuset and the surrounding neighborhood of Norrebro, activists there estimate 100-200 police are at all times guarding the building. The struggle for Ungdomshuset has received tremendous support from much of Danish civil society, including the unions, who in principle refuse to work under police protection. The rightwing Christian sect that bought the building, Faderhuset (“Father House”), however, has found people to work on clearing and destroying the building. They are wearing masks because they don’t want to be recognized. A Danish flag is now flying on top of 69 Jagtvej.

There have been dozens of protests at Danish embassies around Europe in solidarity with the struggle for Ungdomshuset, and in Paris the Danish embassy was occupied by protesters.

Supporters of Ungdomshuset formed a foundation with the hope of legalizing the squat by officially purchasing the building, but Faderhuset refused to sell. The foundation has been told by the city of Copenhagen that perhaps a different building could be purchased. Ungdomshuset issued a statement rejecting this idea, out of the principle that the government should provide the solution to a problem that the government itself created, without making other people pay for it.

The squatters of Copenhagen dare to ask the question, who’s world is this anyway? Who are these people who claim to own everything, these lords of the land? Perhaps privatization and gentrification of society is neither just nor inevitable. Perhaps the air, water, land, and even the buildings on the land should be held in common. Perhaps in such a prosperous society every city should have free social centers like Ungdomshuset, and they should not need to be fought for.

Since 1982 Ungdomshuset has been a major center in Europe for the autonomous movement. People who have stood against corporate greed, stood for an egalitarian society. Against nationalism, for a world without borders. Against racism, for a world without discrimination and xenophobia. To these and other ends, Ungdomshuset has been host to thousands of concerts, workshops, meetings, conferences, and protests.

The building that, at least up until last Thursday, housed Ungdomshuset, had a long history before 1982. It was built by the Danish labor movement in 1897 and was called Folkets Hus – the People’s House. VI Lenin spoke there before he launched the Russian Revolution. The Second International took place there. From that house the first International Women’s Day was declared. It fell into disrepair and disuse in the late 70’s, and was squatted in 1982 by autonomous youth.

The police takeover of Ungdomshuset and draconian security measures adopted over the weekend come at a time when the Danish government has shifted markedly to the right. The Rasmussen government has sent Danish soldiers to participate in the illegal occupation of Iraq. Denmark has recently passed some of Europe’s most restrictive asylum laws.

The sensible toleration that once characterized the Danish state’s attitude towards marijuana has been shattered by the ongoing police occupation of Christiania. The 900-person squatted community in the old military barracks not very far from the center of the city has for many years been one of Denmark’s most popular tourist attractions, featuring a successful bicycle factory, restaurants, cafes, a daycare, and, until recently, an open market for marijuana and hash. No hard drugs were allowed, and the atmosphere was very easygoing. Now the drug trade has once again been pushed underground, violence has gone from rare to commonplace, including one beating death, and police are searching people at will for drugs, maintaining an intimidating atmosphere for residents and tourists alike.

And now, along with selling Ungdomshuset, the Danish government is making plans to seize property in Christiania, kicking out residents in order to create what they’re euphamistically calling “low-income housing.” Those seeking to profit from gentrifying cities seem to be using the same capitalist’s handbook, from New York to San Francisco to Copenhagen.

The battle for Ungdomshuset is not over, though the building is now occupied by the police and being destroyed by masked construction workers. The elements of the autonomous movement that made Ungdomshuset the center of it’s community will not disappear, with or without the house. The same fight for common space against corporate greed, the struggle between the forces of capital and the forces of liberation, will continue in different forms, in Copenhagen and around the world.

And for sure, whatever Faderhuset ends up building on 69 Jagtvej after they’ve destroyed the historic building that stands there now, they’re definitely going to need some molotov-proof windows.

Click Here to Read More...

Journey of a ("Self-Hating") Jew

Among other events in recent history, the formation of the group Independent Jewish Voices in the UK has once again pushed the debate on Israel and Palestine into the spotlight. Along with this, the usual, tired and outrageously misplaced allegations of “self-hatred” are made by the more shrill voices among the “Israel can do no wrong” lobby. Here are some of my ruminations on this discussion.

Journey of a (“Self-Hating”) Jew
David Rovics

There are few issues more divisive in US society, including on the left, than the issue of Israel and Palestine. Even the word “Palestine” is divisive! The state of Israel claims to represent Jews worldwide. This is a preposterous and plainly incorrect claim, but one often made and often assumed, to the detriment of much of humanity. People who vocally oppose Israeli policies are labelled anti-Semites. Jews who oppose Israeli policies – or who dare to question the right of this apartheid state to exist as such – are labelled “self-hating Jews.” Supporters of Israel are using historic anti-Semitism and the memory of the Nazi holocaust as a means to stifle dissent. Reason and compassion is not on their side, so they resort to name-calling. I have some personal experiences with this state of affairs, and I thought I’d recount some of them and share some thoughts on the subject.


I used to be lovers with a woman from Germany. She and I were visiting my grandmother at her retirement community in Florida. It seems about half the Jewish population of Brooklyn ends up in Florida by the time they’re 65, and grandma Diane was among them. One of the women grandma played Bridge with was a German Jewish holocaust survivor. When she met my partner, there was something she clearly felt compelled to tell her. “We were Germans,” she said. “We were Germans.” That was all, three words.

Any non-fascist historian can confirm this fact. By the early twentieth century most German Jews were what they call “assimilated.” They were about as German as any other German. For many, their Jewish identity was about as important to them as which Christian denomination their neighbors belonged to. They were integrated members of a European society, Europeans, Germans. They were communists, social democrats, conservatives. They were laborers and they were bosses. They were renters and landlords, rich, poor, and in between. Obviously, the rise of Hitler changed all that, and suddenly Jews recognized themselves as Jews again. The Nazis wanted to kill all of them, so Jewish identity suddenly became a matter of life and death. When people are thus threatened, oppressed, and ultimately slaughtered in their millions, this sort of thing tends to bring people together to attempt to defend themselves. Thus from this disparate group of people once again is born a “community.”

Enter 21st-century USA. There is no such thing as a “Jewish community.” There is no such thing as a “Christian community” either, or an “Irish community,” “Italian community,” etc. There is no oppression to speak of in the US or Europe directed at people based on their Jewish or Christian identity, any more than there is still oppression against people of Irish or Italian descent. Certainly there used to be all of these things, but it’s been a while. In the forty years I’ve been living in the US I have hardly ever heard a serious anti-Semitic remark. I’ve never been victimized in any way as a result of being Jewish, and I don’t think I have ever met anyone of my generation who has had a problem with anti-Semitism of any significance, either.

Jewishness of course is an unusual phenomenon that is often defined as a religious, ethnic, and/or quasi-national identity, depending on who’s doing the defining. Regardless of the definition, there is plenty of common history for Jews anywhere, but like Catholics, Poles or whoever else in the modern US, Jews do not have a common identity in terms of their politics, professions, geography, etc. Jews are not ghettoized anymore, whether by law or by a generalized discrimination. They are rich, poor and in between, and they live anywhere in the country where you might find other people. Sometimes in large numbers, sometimes in very small numbers. Sometimes they have contact with each other as Jews for one reason or another, usually they don’t.

Once I had a gig at a law school in Vermont. Three people came to hand out literature about my alleged anti-Semititic views to people coming to the show. These three people were in a group that called itself The Jewish Community, as I recall. But in the civilized discussion that followed my concert, it turned out that there were more than three people of Jewish lineage in the crowd who were not members of The Jewish Community and didn’t share their views on Israel. It didn’t seem to me that these Jews were any less Jewish than The Jewish Community -- they just weren’t in a group that called itself The Jewish Community.

This also, it seems to me, is the distinction between groups like AIPAC and the rest of the Jewish population. The rest of us don’t tend to organize as a “Jewish community,” but as whoever we are – environmentalists, anarchists, union members, real estate developers, whatever.

Of course, there is plenty of oppression in the US. Racism, for example, permeates society. Race, of course, is a social construct with no biological basis, but it is a social construct that is the basis for both historical and ongoing discrimination of massive proportions. But if a Jew, a Catholic, or even a Muslim is white, then he or she is white, and treated as such. This is how modern US society functions. There is a sort of caste system, and it changes in various ways over time. It used to be a liability to be most anything other than a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. This is no longer the case. Over the course of the post-war period the “white” category has expanded to include light-skinned Jews and other historically-oppressed ethnic and religious groups such as Irish and Italian Catholics.

This is not to say that white people don’t suffer from discrimination. You can still be discriminated against according to your regional accent, how you dress, whether you can read or write, etc. As a youthful, long-haired hippie driving an old beat-up car, I was pulled over by the cops many times more than most other white people, probably for all of those offenses – being young, having long hair, and driving an old car. But I’m quite certain it was not for being Jewish.

History is another matter entirely. While the label of “self-hating” is generally misapplied and used to try to silence Jews critical of Israel, self-hatred certainly exists, and other conditions like it. I think of my nanny when I was very young, living in upper Manhattan. She was a deeply loving woman full of enthusiasm for life, and children, her own two sons and the many young children she took care of. I visited her now and then for decades after my family moved from New York City when I was a small child. She was full of stories. She talked about all the gangsters in the area and how they never pick on her because she’s known them all since they were babies. New York was her city. She had a strange accent, impossible to place. She said she was English. She met an Italian-American jazz musician there in England and moved back to New York with him after the war. She talked about being a teenager in London during the blitz, and how she used to use the air raids to her advantage, to spend more time with boys. “Sorry mom, I can’t come home now, there’s an air raid happening.”

She raised her kids to be Irish-American Catholics in New York City. Several years ago I was visiting New York and I gave her a call. Her eldest son answered the phone. His mother had died a few months before, he told me. He also told me that he had found out during the last year or so of her life that she was not from England -- she was a German Jew. She was one of the last Jewish children sent to England during the Kindertransports. For whatever reason, she had hidden her identity from everyone, her friends, her family. She told her son on her deathbed about how her society, Germany, had rejected her. Perhaps the rejection was too much to bear, and she had to try to forget about her past, her German and Jewish identity. Perhaps the term “self-hating” could in some measure apply to this wonderful, vibrant, but apparently troubled woman, although the term seems far too simplistic to fit such a complex person so full of love for humanity.

Perhaps it was experiences she had after arriving in the US that strengthened her resolve to keep her ethnic and national identity hidden. My grandmother’s mother was from Russia, and spoke Yiddish, never becoming very fluent in English. When my dad was young it was Yiddish that the matriarchs of the house spoke, their secret language which they never taught him. Grandma Diane’s parents were refugees, leaving Russia because they didn’t want to be killed in the pogroms and didn’t wanted to be drafted into the Tsar’s army, a death sentence in itself. Before the Nazi holocaust, Diane Rovics and her mother were in touch with dozens of relatives in Europe, Diane once told me. Her mother died soon after the war, and I don’t know how much Diane tried to get back in touch with her relatives across the ocean, but she said she never heard from any of them, and presumed them all to be dead.

Grandma Diane’s Jewish identity was always terribly complex for her. For a long time she was looking for housing outside of Brooklyn. This search went on for years before she eventually moved to New Jersey and then Florida. In every community she visited there were either too many Jews or not enough Jews. She wanted the safety of having lots of Jews around, but didn’t want anybody else to notice. When I was a child she often told me that I was lucky to have blond hair and blue eyes and not to “look Jewish.” She’d say the same about our last name, from Grandpa Alvin’s part of the family, Rovics, which she informed me was not a typical Jewish last name.

Once when she left the safety of New York City to visit Connecticut about a half century ago, land of the “gentiles” back then, there was a sign on the beach saying “no Jews or dogs allowed.” I’m sure she had many other similar experiences. Being Jewish was for her a source of strength and a source of anguish, but mostly anguish. She always just wanted to fit in, to be an American, and ultimately, she did, and she was. She was traumatized by her family history and by the Nazi holocaust, but she wanted to put it behind her. She would often tell her idealistic leftwing grandson, “you can’t change the world.” She’d tell me to just look out for myself, get a good job, go to business school, become a dentist, be a respectable part of society and hopefully you will be respected in turn, or at least left alone.

For other assimilated, white, light-haired, blue-eyed US citizens such as Diane’s daughter, my aunt Judy, who knows where life could have gone. But as with so many others, the Jewish genocide that was going on when she was born in 1941 made a lasting impact. The Zionist movement for a Jewish homeland, not very popular among Jews worldwide before the Nazi holocaust, became much more popular after it. Lots of Jews – though far from all – joined that bandwagon, and my aunt was one of them. We haven’t spoken in years, but from what I understand, for her and her synogogue in New Jersey, criticism of Israel is completely unacceptable, there is no room for debate.

For people like Judy, “never again” means “never again to us.” Fuck everybody else, especially Arabs. The fascists in Europe killed us, nobody stopped them, and now if we need to steal somebody else’s land in order to have a home, so be it. People like Judy invent all kinds of outrageous theories to justify the fundamentally racist movement that has led to the state of Israel. There are no Palestinians, they’re all Arabs, and the 800 million Arabs in the world all hate Jews and want to “drive the Jews into the sea.” The Palestinians are really Jordanians and should be just as happy there as in the land of their ancestors. The hundreds of Palestinian villages destroyed by the Zionists never really existed. The Palestinians were all nomads if they weren’t Jordanian. The refugee problem is one created by the Arab states -- not the Jews who drove the refugees off their land.

People like Judy live in a sea of lies, and are miserable. At least they’re miserable. Hating other people so vehemently – Arabs, your fellow Jewish critics, and whoever else – causes one to be miserable. I’m sure there must be some happy ones out there, but the “ardent Zionists” I meet tend to be about as miserable as other members of hate groups I’ve met. I remember seeing the Orange marchers in Glasgow one time. What a miserable bunch. They all looked so pathetic, those men and boys dressed in their antiquated outfits, singing songs about being “knee-deep in Fenian blood.” These people have decided that the solution to their perceived problems lies in the oppression of another people. Not only does this kind of mentality breed misery, but it also doesn’t work.

Disenfranchised people always struggle for their liberty. Sometimes their struggles will be crushed, as in the case of the German left in the 1930’s. Sometimes their struggles will meet with relative success, such as the European labor movements that have been largely responsible for creating many of the most prosperous societies on Earth. Other times the oppression of a people leads to an ongoing struggle for justice that goes on for decades, such as the Palestinian struggle for self-determination. There can never possibly be peace and security for Israel as long as there are millions of impoverished, angry refugees surrounding it, no matter how high the walls they build, no matter how many children they massacre, no matter how many youths they torture in their prisons. History has demonstrated this fact, over and over again. Where there is oppression there will be resistance. The resistance may or may not be successful, but it will always harm the oppressor to one degree or another. This is not mere rhetoric. It is history and current events, all over the world.

There are those for whom “never again” takes on a very different meaning than for people like my aunt. For them, these lessons of history are learned. Of course, such people have existed since long before the Nazi holocaust, but the holocaust also was responsible for creating lots more of them. People who believe oppression should be opposed in all it’s forms, and those struggling for their lives and liberty should be supported. For these people, the term “us” means something much bigger than Jews, Catholics, Americans, or some other such limited category. Bob Steck is one such example.

Bob Steck died last December at the age of 95. He was a friend of mine, who I used to see much more of back when he lived near my mother in Connecticut, before he and his wife moved to Arizona. Bob grew up near Davenport, Iowa. When he was a boy in the 1920’s, Davenport was a town full of socialist intellectuals. The countryside around the town was full of radical farmers. When the fascist generals rebelled against the democratically-elected government in Spain in 1936, Bob was one of many thousands of Americans who volunteered – against the wishes of the US government – to fight fascism in Europe. Bob had never been to Spain, and I’m not sure if he had ever even met a Spaniard before, out there in the middle of the farm belt. He was not fighting for people he knew, or for “his people” in some kind of limited sense – he was fighting for humanity, for the future, for justice, for dignity.

Along with Bob, thousands of young men and women joined the International Brigades from England, Ireland and elsewhere. The biggest contingents of people ready to die in the fight against fascism came from Germany and Italy. After more than a year fighting the war in Spain he was captured, and spent 16 months in a concentration camp where he was regularly beaten, where the conditions were atrocious. Some German Nazis visited the camp once and measured everybody’s faces, thinking they could tell the Jews apart from the others by the size of their noses. He was Jewish, though that never occurred to me until one morning at his house when he made a particularly tasteless Matzo Ball omelette for me. Most of the Americans to go to Spain were killed there, but Bob was one of the those who ultimately returned home.

More than anything, Bob was a communist, and a historical optimist. He would tell me that ever since society has been divided into classes, several thousand years ago for much of the planet, there has been a class struggle, and this struggle will continue until we eventually abolish poverty, racism, and these sorts of divisions in society. Just as he fought against fascism in Europe, he fought against racism in the US. He was the Director of Activities of Camp Unity, a daring inter-racial working-class resort in upstate New York. He saw himself as a part of a movement, not as an exceptional individual, though he was most certainly both. He taught history for 30 years in the public schools of New York City, playing his part in the evolution of society, with books and lectures, just as he had in Spain with rifles and supply trucks. Yes, he was Jewish, and like so many Jews and so many other people of his generation, he was a communist first and foremost.

Bob was a very stoic man, by his own admission. He was stoic before the Spanish Civil War, but being held in the concentration camp taught him stoicism to a much larger degree. Never let the guards know how badly you are suffering, or it will demoralize the other prisoners. This was his view. I don’t know how much he may have had to question his beliefs from time to time, but when I asked him what his thoughts were on Israel, his response was quick and unequivocal. There must be justice for the Palestinians.

Long before I ever went to Israel I had strong opinions on the behavior of the Israeli government, and whether there should even be an Israeli government as such (that is, a government wherein non-Jews are systematically discriminated against, disenfranchised or killed). I had never been there, but my impression was that it was a colonial state, a society of settlers, like South Africa, Australia, the US, Canada and others. One of many societies where European invaders had colonized the place at gunpoint and either killed or driven out the indigenous population. The scars of living in societies like these can be seen on anybody living in them, whether they are members of one of the oppressed groups or one of the privileged groups. Whether they are being killed, doing the killing, or giving the orders to fire.

I was uncertain what to do when in 1999 I received an invitation from the Israeli Folk Music Society to do a tour of Israel that they would set up. But I quickly decided I should do it. I lived in one society that was brutally colonized by European invaders, so it seemed silly not to go, just because Israel was much more recently-conquered territory than the US. Besides, I wanted to see first-hand what was up there, and the offer to organize a tour was a perfect way to meet real Israelis.

And that’s what I did. Not Peace Now, not Gush-Shalom, not Women In Black, not Anarchists Against the Wall. They’re not members of the Israeli Folk Music Society. I met regular Israeli Jewish anglophone folk music fans. Like so many Israelis, the vast majority of the men and women I met were not born in Israel. Many were from New York, and others originally came from Britain, Australia and elsewhere. I was trying to be sort of undercover, wanting to see what Israeli Jews thought about their situation, not wanting to impose my viewpoint first. Besides, I hadn’t yet written any songs about the Palestinian struggle (at least nothing I liked enough to sing in public), so that made it easier for me.

What I found in my ten-day tour of Israel was the most racist society I had ever encountered. The secular yuppies of Tel Aviv were the worst, while the most compassionate people opposed to the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza tended to be very religious, which was an unexpected revelation for me. The most sensible person I met on that trip was a religious man who was in the Israeli military for the wars of both 1967 and 1973. It was after 1973 that he had an awakening, and came to recognize the brutal reality of the Israeli occupation.

I met some other fairly decent folks there, but most people I encountered seemed to be right out of a Klan rally in 1950’s Alabama. Very odd, since many of the Americans among them had been involved with the Civil Rights movement back in the day. But they seemed to have no problem talking about “the Arab mind,” refusing to use the term “Palestinian” in conversation, even when avoiding it meant jumping through all kinds of verbal hoops. They talked fondly of one friend living on a West Bank settlement, whose politics were often described as “somewhere to the right of Ghengis Khan.” One of them talked often of her “Christian Arab” friend who lived in a “Christian Arab” town in Israel, who we should visit at some point. (We never did.)

Once I was doing a house concert there. As long as I sang about oppression elsewhere in the world people loved it. They were reminiscing of their days in the movement against the Vietnam war and their time in SDS. I was trying to end my show after quite a while, but they wanted more, more. It was at least the fifth encore, and I thought, OK, now I’m gonna hit ‘em with a song against the US bombing raids and UN sanctions that were currently causing mass suffering in Iraq. It was the first time I sang a song at a gig and nobody clapped.

After a very pregnant silence, a self-described socialist originally from Scotland began clapping, but no one joined him. There was basically unanimity in the room. The song was wrong, the bombing of Iraq was right. And how outrageous to sing that song in Israel, I was told, since “we had to put gas masks on our children and hide in bomb shelters.” A handful of Israelis were killed by the Scud missiles, a few years after Israel had itself bombed Iraq, and the Israelis had to sleep in bomb shelters, all emerging safely the next morning, unlike the Iraqis who were being killed in their hundreds of thousands, including those incinerated by the US Air Force while hiding in their bomb shelters.

But for these people, the suffering of the Iraqis simply was irrelevant. The Iraqis didn’t matter, they all wanted to kill the Jews, even the Iraqi children, I was told there to my unbelieving face.

My German girlfriend was with me on that tour. In the long discussion that followed me singing the song about the war on Iraq, she and I were told that the bombing of Dresden was a good thing. This man was telling us that the killing of a hundred thousand women and children, for no reason other than to kill them, was a good thing. He was telling us that one of the great war crimes of world history -- right up there with other mechanized mass killings, such as the blitz, the Nazi holocaust or the carpet-bombing of Korea and Vietnam – was a good thing. He couldn’t justify it in any way, but it was good, and he wanted us to know that.

This was around the time that I realized that the whole of Israeli society is full of trauma survivors of one sort or another. Palestinians inside and outside Israel traumatized by ongoing oppression of so many sorts, and Jews traumatized by living in the war zone they created when they declared their “independence” (from whom?) in 1948. Traumatized by their parents and other relatives being killed in Europe. Traumatized in such a way that most of them had decided, it seemed, that “never again” clearly meant “never again to us Jews.” To hell with everybody else.

About a year later, to my surprise, the Israeli Folk Music Society offered to organize another tour for me. I again decided in favor of constructive engagement. But then, a couple months before the tour was to happen, Ariel Sharon took a thousand troops to the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the spark – along with the settlement-building, the road closures, the increasing numbers of checkpoints, the bulldozing of houses and olive groves -- that lit the powder keg that set off the second Intifada. And then I wrote a song about the Israeli soldiers gunning down children with live ammunition soon after Sharon’s visit to the mosque, and it was all over.

The organizer of the tour didn’t cancel it right away. One by one, the organizers of nine of the ten shows I was scheduled to do wrote me outraged emails. How could you write a song like this, how could you say these things, we thought you were one of us, you sound like them. From most of the presenters there, and then from other supporters of Israel from the US and elsewhere, I started receiving emails regularly calling me a self-hating Jew, a neofascist, a fascist, a Nazi, etc. One of the ten presenters wrote me and said he liked the lyrics and looked forward to hearing them. He was the veteran of 1967 and 1973 I mentioned earlier.

Then a few days later I started receiving emails from Palestinians throughout the diaspora who had gotten the lyrics to my song somehow, too. These emails far outnumbered the ones from the Israel supporters. Many were short, just thanking me for making this statement. Others were much longer and full of stories of the nakba, “the catastrophe,” as they call the events of 1948. Others wrote about the brutality and humiliation of life under occupation, or life in the refugee camps. I started meeting Palestinians of all walks of life, in the US, Canada, England, and eventually in Palestine itself.

The news lately is full of factional fighting between Fatah and Hamas. But this is not the sort of thing that characterizes Palestinian society. Palestinians do have a community. One reason for this is the fact that they are all under siege, and all struggling to live under the occupation, all wanting it to end. The Muslims and Christians get along fine. They are all Palestinian. When you’re there, these things are obvious, especially if you’ve visited other communities engaged in resistance. You see those common signs, that universal sense of determination, purpose, existing in the moment, not knowing what horrors tomorrow may bring, whether their house will be bulldozed, whether their daughter will be shot by a sniper while sitting in school, whether the olive grove will be burned by settlers. On the ground in Palestine, it’s very clear what’s happening. This is a place under occupation by a massive, fundamentally racist military power.

Most people in the world with a knowledge of world events recognize the situation for what it is. This is certainly true in Europe. According to polls I’ve seen lately, most Jews in Europe and in North America do not identify with Israel as a country that represents them. Most people in Europe do not have any problems with Jews. There are always a few boneheads here and there desecrating cemetaries. It doesn’t take many people to do that. But generally, serious acts of anti-Semitism are virtually unheard of in Europe or North America. Most Europeans, however, are very critical of Israel and concerned about the plight of the Palestinians. And most Europeans recognize that there is no contradiction here, since they understand that “Israel” and “Jews” are, thankfully, two different things.

Germany, however, is a unique case, where as far as Israel and Palestine are concerned, it’s a different story.

In my family there’s long been a bit of a suspicion of Germany and Germans. Most of us have been to Europe, but only a couple have actually visited Germany. Bordering countries, yes – Holland, France, Denmark, but not Germany. Of course, the neighboring countries are all much more attractive, since most of their cities survived WWII intact, while almost all of Germany’s were destroyed by British and American carpet-bombing. But the comparative lack of pre-war architecture wasn’t why my family avoided visiting Germany.

I was a bit hesitant about it the first time I visited. I didn’t know a lot about recent German history. I mostly knew German accents from WWII movies. After spending quite a bit of time there, though, I developed a real affection for German society. Spending lots of time with lots of Germans, I found so much beauty, and so much anguish. As much as German society suffered from the Allied bombardments, from a generation of young men being sent off to kill and be killed in battle, from so many non-Jewish Germans also being killed in the camps, Germans as a whole are even more paralyzed with an unbearable guilt about the genocide of their Jewish brethren. Most Germans today have no recollection of what society was like with millions of German Jews in it, but their absence is like a ghost standing on every street corner.

Most Germans would be horrified to be accused of anti-Semitism. Whereas the left throughout almost the entire world is critical of Israel and supports Palestinian sovereignty, the German left is largely quiet about it, or actively and uncritically supporting Israel.

I remember one guy in the neighborhood in Hamburg where I spent quite a bit of time, who had a radio show at the local free radio station (equivalent of what we’d call community radio in the US). For one of his shows he interviewed a Palestinian doctor about life under the Israeli occupation.
Specifically about the challenges of providing medical care under the circumstances, with the checkpoints delaying ambulances for hours or turning them back, with tanks firing at ambulances, etc. By consensus, the collective board that ran the radio station canned his show permanently for this offense. What did he do? He failed to have an Israeli on his show at the same time. To dare to have a Palestinian doctor with no Israeli to somehow balance out his views was unacceptable.

Many Germans on the left who have dared to try to be consistent internationalists in solidarity with oppressed people around the world, and have included Palestinians within that worldview, have suffered similar fates. When you know that this is the environment on the German left and in German society in general, the Autonomen become even more impressive. These were Germans in the tradition of Bob Steck, true internationalists who supported liberation everywhere, including for Palestinians.

In the 1980’s the German autonomous movement followed in the footsteps of the Italian autonomous movement a decade before. They ccupied buildings, reclaiming the commons, building a different society. They rejected the Soviet model as well as the capitalist one. They opposed US as well as German military and economic intervention in the Third World. They were antifascists to the core, spending much of their time physically battling Nazi boneheads on the streets of Germany, and often battling the German police as well. (When they have to choose, the police almost always side with the right in these situations.) They supported struggles for self-determination around the world. And, consistent with the rest of their principles around anti-racism and Third World liberation, at the top of their flagship squat in Hamburg, Haffenstrasse, were two words that shocked German society probably more than anything else coming from the Autonomen: “free Palestine.”

But with the decline of the Autonomen has come, among other things, the rise of a uniquely German organization known as the Anti-Deutsche.

I’ll be returning to Germany for the G8 protests this summer, but the last time I was there was several years ago, and the last concert I did there was in the town of Marburg. I had seen a flyer that the Anti-Deutsche had made, criticizing me and my music the night before. This time, when I got to the arts center in Marburg where my concert was to happen, there were eight or so blond men and women in their early twenties, forming a gauntlet in front of the entrance to the building, handing out the flyers. Some people didn’t go to the show as a result, I don’t know how many.

The flyers claimed I was an anti-Semite. I was clearly an anti-Semite because I support the Palestinian struggle, and the Palestinians all hate women and hate their own children, since they fail to prevent them from being shot by Israeli tanks. They furthermore argued that since I was critical of capitalism, I was therefore anti-Semitic because making statements against institutions like the World Bank is a veiled anti-Semitic thing to do. This kind of thinking seems to be supporting all kinds of strange anti-Semitic myths about the ranks of Jews being filled with rich bankers, but there you go. Also, since I opposed the war in Iraq, I was an anti-Semite, since the war in Iraq was being waged to benefit Israel, and therefore it was good, and therefore the US should be supported most of the time, and Israel all of the time. I approached them politely to try to have a civil discourse about the flyer, but was told by one of them that “we don’t talk to fascists,” so there would be no discussion.

If this was an isolated cult of wingnuts it would be one thing, but the Anti-Deutsche are a fairly common phenomenon all over Germany, with their base in Leipzig. They actually originally come out of the more communist end of the German left. Many Germans will privately acknowledge them as nutters, but they’re often loathe to confront them, fearing the label of anti-Semitism.

To their credit, the Anti-Deutsche apparently spend much of their time opposing actual fascists. But they seem to spend at least as much time harassing people like me. I haven’t seen any overviews on this sort of thing, but my friend Attila the Stockbroker, a punk rock songwriter and poet from England who tours in Germany regularly, has recently been banned from a number of music venues on account of his fairly mild opposition to Israeli policies. He hasn’t written any songs specifically on the subject, but just mentioning his opposition to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza was enough to get the Anti-Deutsche to actively denounce him. And that was enough to get several venues to ban him, and for some of his traditional leftwing punk audience to stop coming to his shows.

As irrational as the Anti-Deutsche patently are, they have a chilling effect on the German left, and they are a real product of German history, and of the German collective guilt complex. So in order to avoid being anti-Semitic, that is, in order to avoid being racist, they must support a racist regime. It’s convoluted logic that most people outside of Germany can see through, but in Germany this logic plays pretty well. Two wrongs make a right. We are traumatized because our people killed millions of Jews, therefore we must support the traumatized victims of the Nazi holocaust as they act out their displaced feelings of aggression towards us and focus them against the Palestinians, slaughtering thousands of them annually and making sure the rest live in a state of squalor.

Jews like my aunt or like so many Israelis say “never again to us,” while the Anti-Deutsche and other Germans say “never again to them.” The Autonomen and the Bob Stecks of the world say never again to anyone.

Who holds the moral high ground is obvious. The thing that allows people like me to sleep well at night, though, is having the knowledge that not only is this the moral view, the view that is easier to live with as a human being with a conscience, but it is also the sensible understanding of history and reality. Blinded by rage, trauma, or guilt, what the pro-Israel people apparently don’t see is that no matter what you do, a subjugated people will fight back. As anybody who’s visited a VA clinic in the US can tell you, the cost of oppression is also very high for those doing the oppressing.

So I say save the Jews and free Palestine!

Click Here to Read More...

The First Amendment: Good When You Can Get It

The organizers with United for Peace and Justice and all of those participating have once again pulled off a giant protest march and rally. As has happened once or twice a year since the invasion of Afghanistan, hundreds of thousands of people have converged for a national protest, this time in Washington, DC.

The major media outlets decided this time that the protest was worth covering. This time it was aired on CSPAN, reviewed by the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune and the Houston Chronicle, and even recognized as the socially diverse crowd that it was – young and old, veteran activists and first-time protesters, soccer moms and socialists.

As usual, crowd estimates given by the major media varied wildly from “thousands” to “tens of thousands” to “just under 100,000.” Some, including the New York Times, dared mention one estimate of 400,000. This is particularly notable since the NY Times was one of the many outlets guilty of barely reporting on past protests, and frequently using vague terms like “thousands” when reporting on crowds that had virtually filled Central Park.


I missed this rally, being on tour on the other side of the Atlantic this time around. But looking at it from afar, it seems to have been a model event. UFPJ was given a permit to have a march and a rally. The masses descended, and the major media took note, at least to some degree reflecting the reality that could be seen by anyone present – that there are a lot of people in the US against the war.

For people attending or reading about this weekend’s anti-war protest, there are certain assumptions that could be made, that the media also seems to be confirming:

It may or may not make much difference, since democracy is mostly about voting, but we have a First Amendment which guarantees freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. When there’s a really big national protest like this, you will hear about it in the mass media.

Reading the corporate media over the years and listening to the government spokespeople as well, certain other assumptions are clearly to be understood:

If it wasn’t reported, it must not have been very big or significant. If there is any violence at a protest, it was probably started by protesters. Protests are dangerous places with lots of angry people at them who generally don’t really understand what they’re angry about. For some reason because of the “war on terror,” we have to have more police security at protests since 9/11, since terrorists might target or take advantage of otherwise non-terroristic protests. There is some kind of relationship between protest and terror. As we know from our history books, since the Civil Rights movement the authorities have learned from their violent excesses in the past, and now when civilians commit acts of nonviolent civil disobedience, they are gingerly carried off by the police. Police do not attack nonviolent protesters without provocation.

Of course, all of these assumptions are false. For those of us who regularly find ourselves on or near the front lines of dissent in the US, this is obvious. But for every one of us like that, there are hundreds more sympathizers. People like most of my extended family and I’ll bet many of yours, who are against the war, against much of what Bush stands for, but they haven’t quite made it to a protest or done much else to make their views clear, at least not in several decades. Or if they have done something, they’ve been one of the millions over the past several years who have been to one protest, and not managed to get to another. So very likely they don’t have a very firm picture of what goes on out there in the land of free expression.

CNN’s polls have supported the notion for years that most of the country is against the war and not supportive of the president. Yet most of the protests are barely reported by CNN, if at all. And if they are reported, they are rarely given the time necessary to show how the protest movement truly represents civil society. If you weren’t there, you probably wouldn’t know it happened.

And if you weren’t involved somehow with the organizing of the event, you’d be unlikely to know that the organizers were given a permit to march but not to rally, or to rally but not to march, or were given no permit at all for any central location. Or that the police were penning people into cages who wished to protest. Or that many people were not even being allowed into the cages in the first place.

Or that people committing acts of nonviolent civil disobedience, or in some cases just walking down the sidewalk, were being tear-gassed, beaten with clubs, shot with rubber bullets and electric tazer guns, crushed with horses, held in unsanitary prison cells. That protest organizers’ houses were being raided by police, beaten bloody, computers and cameras stolen. That spaces rented by protesters had been attacked by the police, with everything inside the building being seized. That people were being attacked frequently for the crime of riding bicycles in groups.

And that all of this had been going on under the false pretense of security since long before 9/11.

I thought I’d recount some of my personal experiences with protest, speech and the First Amendment over the past decade or so, as illustrations of how things tend to go, in the hopes that some readers might find these stories illuminating.

For those of us who come with what might be called the “radical narrative” of history, it all starts with an understanding that democracy largely happens in the streets, and that the rights we have only exist if we continue to fight for them, otherwise they are taken away. It starts with the understanding that the 20th century began with the authorities brutalizing and arresting thousands of people every week for giving pro-labor speeches on the sidewalk. With the criminalizing millions of members of the IWW (the Industrial Workers of the World) by calling them “German agents” because they called World War I a “bosses’ war.” Many opponents of the war were jailed for years, including socialist leader Eugene Victor Debs, who won a million votes for president of the US while in prison for his anti-war views.

It starts with the historical understanding that we live in a class society which operates under the golden rule – those who have the gold make the rules, and everybody else has to stand up for their rights by other means. Those who have the gold declare the wars, consistently lie about the real purpose of the war, and profit from the war. Those without the gold fight and die in the wars.

It starts with the understanding, also, that the smooth operation of any society requires that most people do not see history and reality this way. That efforts will be made on the part of the powers-that-be to prevent this from happening. And that if it seems this kind of awareness is spreading, and manifesting itself on the streets, one frequent way to deal with this is through disinformation or omission of information, and both subtle and overt forms of repression.

February 15th, 2003 was an interesting case. Many of us already knew about the imperial intentions of the US in Iraq, and didn’t need to see the disaster unfold before we knew invading Iraq was a terrible idea. The protests worldwide involved many millions of people, including all over the US. Half a million people, maybe more, were flooding into New York City. It was a bitterly cold, windy winter day.

The NYPD had denied UFPJ a right to march. Citing security as a concern, the police created pens for each block, to make sure it was impossible to march. A block away from the pens, the police were sending thousands of people walking dozens of blocks in order to then be turned away from entering the rally area there. It seemed from my observation that perhaps half the people trying to go to the rally weren’t able to get in.

As with most of the major anti-war rallies in the past several years, most of the people coming to the February 15th rally hadn’t been to a protest since the 60’s, or ever. For those of us who had, the police behavior was outrageous, but not surprising. For many of the well-dressed, middle-aged folks from the suburbs or further afield coming in, the way the rally was being controlled by the police was shocking, and many of them gave the cops a good piece of their minds.

A year later the NYPD this time prevented organizers from holding a rally, only allowing a very controlled march during the Republican National Convention. This time the hundreds of thousands of people attempting to represent civil society and engage in their right to assemble were told we would damage the grass on Central Park if we held a rally there on New York’s commons, where so many other events had been held through the years.

On another occasion more recently, a permit to march was only granted when organizers threatened to march without a permit anyway. And what of the 100,000 or so people who protested the war in Afghanistan in Washington in April, 2002? Or the 300,000 or so who protested the wars in September, 2005? These were massive events, huge undertakings for many organizers and many communities from around the country. Each person at each of these rallies represents a hundred more who didn’t make it. But they got a fraction of the media coverage that this most recent one has received.

February 15th, 2003 and January 27th, 2007 will at least for some time be a part of the memories of many people, including the media consumers who far outnumber the many people who were actually in attendance. But for these other equally massive outpourings of national discontent with the regime that were hardly covered? If you weren’t there, they may as well not have happened. They do not enter into the national discourse any more than current events in Micronesia.

And if this is how our right to assemble is dealt with, what of those following the Gandhi-MLK tradition of nonviolent civil disobedience?

When people think of the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999, the popular imagination is filled with images of young people dressed in black trashing Starbucks and McDonalds in downtown Seattle. A couple hundred people participated in this activity, and it has not been repeated to any significant extent at any protests in the US since then. Most of the other 60,000 people protesting in Seattle miles away from downtown were being drenched with tear gas for sitting in on the streets, nonviolently surrounding the WTO meetings taking place in the Seattle Center. But as usual, as soon as anyone started throwing rocks somewhere in town, this was to be the media’s primary focus.

Many people in the US feel in some way that everything changed after 9/11. But in terms of a nation-wide campaign of disinformation and repression against an activist community, the WTO protests were the bellwether event of recent years. What had been local campaigns of various sorts against rapacious corporations had grown into a nationwide (and already international) movement against corporate globalization in general. The corporate media responded with fear-mongering and disinformation, and the authorities responded with repression.

For years after Seattle, the disproportionality of the reaction of the local and federal authorities was at times comical. Anybody who was on the right email lists leading up to Seattle knew it was gonna be big. Anybody on the right email lists knew the protests at the IMF/World Bank meetings in Washington, DC the following April (A16) was also going to be significant. Anybody on those lists would also have known that the May 1st protests calling for the shutting down of the Stock Exchange on Wall Street was going to be small, but Mayor Giuliani was taking no chances.

The day began with what was being billed as a march for undocumented workers. Several thousand Latino men, women and children marched, flanked by what appeared to be almost an equal number of cops. As I recall, the cops stood on either side of the march, two rows deep on each side. Most of the cops were also about a foot taller than most of the marchers. These marchers had a broad and thorough understanding of their role in this society. The most popular sign on the march, in English, read simply “workers of the world, unite.”

This march was clearly never intended to be anything but a peaceful march with no plans for civil disobedience. What was at some point intended to follow the march was perhaps some kind of action, which I don’t think had ever gotten much beyond the planning stages, probably because most of the organizers were too busy with A16, which had just taken place two weeks before in DC.

In any case, to deal with the 200 or so anarchist youth who ostensibly wished to shut down Wall Street, several thousand police were literally tripping over themselves in the streets, which were awash with motorcycles, paddy wagons, and bored cops feeling pretty stupid with nothing to do. In preparation for the shutting down of Wall Street the cops had actually shut down the entire business district around Wall Street, looking at the ID of workers and residents wanting to cross police lines. Groups of police were deployed to guard every nearby Starbucks or other corporate chain store, as well as the World Trade Center and other places they thought might be potential hotspots.

It was two weeks before then that police in Washington, DC had mass-arrested 600 or so people for daring to hold an unpermitted march. This happened in the days leading up to the IMF/World Bank meetings, so the cops held everybody over the weekend to keep them away from the protests.

On the first day of the meetings themselves, 20,000 or so people surrounded the large area of town the police had walled off. The organizers of the meetings had to bus delegates in during the wee hours of the morning, and other delegates were stuck driving around the city for hours looking for a way in.

Police behavior there didn’t descend to the kind of wanton brutality of Seattle, but I personally was walking past a group from Arizona who had taken over one street, and witnessed an unmarked police van just drive into and through the group. One man was on the ground. At first it was unclear whether he was injured, but he had apparently gotten pushed to the side, rather than underneath the van. The group quickly reassembled their line afterwards.

That week in DC the police raided the main convergence center for the protesters and confiscated all of the puppets and other artistic representations people had been working on. They did the same thing in Philadelphia a few months later leading up to the Republican National Convention there in 2000. By the time of the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, and given the well-deserved reputation for corruption and brutality of the LAPD, the US Justice Department was actually involved with overseeing the police for the occasion, and specifically ordered them not to steal the puppets this time.

No event was too small or too large to warrant the hysteria of the corporate media when it came to “anti-globalization” protesters. “The anarchists from Seattle are going to come destroy the city.” This was the mantra of the corporate media in the weeks leading up to any protest for some time. “Seattle anarchists” were the outside agitators of the day. Nowadays it’s “foreign fighters.”

I think it was an anarchist book fair I was singing at in Bloomington, Indiana around then. It was the sort of event in a small university town that would a few years before have been considered quaint and very Bloomington-esque. But now it was a cause for alarm, and for fear-mongering about anarchists from Seattle, and maybe an excuse for the police department to apply for federal grants to buy some new equipment.

When the anarchist youth took to the streets on bicycles in a fairly small Critical Mass ride, the police took the occasion to strike, throwing young people off of their bikes, handcuffing them and arresting them. I’m not sure for what. Some kind of obscure traffic violation? Disorderly bicycling?

My concert was happening a half block from where the arrests took place, and as usual, I was setting up to play, and not on a bicycle getting brutalized and arrested. One young man came up to me and gave me a CD. “This is from my friend,” he said. “He was trying to come to your show, but he got arrested. This was actually the third time he had been trying to go to one of your shows but got arrested first.” It was then that I was sure I was playing in the right sorts of places.

The protests in Miami were a defining moment. By now it was 2003, two years after 9/11. The “war on terror” and the war on “Seattle anarchists” had merged. Miami’s police chief, Timoney, had been responsible for the brutality of the Philadelphia police during the RNC there, and now he was police chief of Miami, in time for the FTAA (Free Trade Area of the Americas) meetings and accompanying protests.

For weeks leading up to the protests, the Miami media was whipping up a frenzy with talk about downtown being destroyed by anti-globalization rioters from all over the Americas. Police Chief Timoney was showing videos to the Miami police that were implying that police were killed during what were increasingly being referred to as the “riots” in Seattle. By the time we arrived, the cops were out for blood.

Downtown Miami was completely shut down, almost no businesses were open, many were boarded up. The few businesses that were open were on our side. The downtown exits on the highway were shut. Nobody was there but us, the cops, and the media, who had mostly imbedded themselves fearfully behind police lines.

Some of the cops and media were quite clearly afraid of us, which was another one of those things that would have been really funny if it weren’t terrifying. Thousands of cops in riot gear, driving around in armored personnel carriers, flying around in multiple helicopters circling overhead at any given time, and they’re afraid of 20,000 or so entirely unarmed people, most of whom are fairly scrawny white college students…?

The scheduled events included a rally in an amphitheater, a march, and then another rally back at the amphitheater. However, the cops decided not to let more than 200 or so people into the 10,000-seat amphitheater for whatever reason, either before or after the march. I managed to get in, and was, as programmed, singing for the small crowd that was in there when the police began their unscheduled, unprovoked assault on the demonstration outside.

I was doing a tour up the east coast immediately following the FTAA protests, and it was like a gallery of wounds. Every town, every gig was full of people who had been injured by the police in Miami. Here was one friend with a big red splotch from being shot in the breast by a tazer. Here’s another with a hard lump the size of a baseball on his thigh from being shot point-blank by a rubber bullet. Then the word that someone from New Jersey died mysteriously days after inhaling too much tear gas. Those “non-lethal” weapons again. By the time I got up to New York City I was singing at a benefit for Indymedia there, who had gotten most of their cameras taken by the police.

I was reminded of one visit to the Lower East Side in the 90’s, during the final siege of Tompkins Square Park by the police, to try to seize it along with the rest of the neighborhood, to make it safe for gentrification. There were garbage cans burning, crowds yelling and banging on things, overall it was a very festive occasion. I remember seeing an older guy I knew as Uncle Don there, and he had a broken arm. I asked him what he thought the prospects were. “Too many people are getting their bones broken,” he said. “It can’t keep going like this.”

The blatant tactic is essentially to use overwhelming military force in order to keep a social movement from getting too far off the ground. And while these brutal and bizarre events receive gobs of local media attention, they are virtually ignored by the national press.

Many thousands of people from all walks of life representing hundreds of different organizations were pouring into the streets outside of these various meetings of the corporate elites, and this was generally not national news. If any national media might have considered covering the protests in Miami, they scrapped those stories in favor of breaking news having to do with Michael Jackson’s nose, if I recall.

The local Miami TV stations were actual comedy, however. We were being given a bird’s eye view of scenes of the protests. We could see beneath us the police attacking demonstrators, but the newscaster was saying things like, “I think there’s some kind of scuffle. The police are defending themselves.”

Of course, we have the internet (at least as long as Congress maintains net neutrality laws). We’ve got Pacifica Radio and many other means of reaching people with useful information. But this kind of drumbeat propaganda on the commercial and so-called public airwaves has a profound impact. It is still a huge part of how most people find common reference points, common understandings of broader reality, most of the time.

And what about just setting up a soapbox and speaking on the sidewalk? Well, you’re partially blocking a public walkway. Incredibly, I can tell you from personal experience that in most places where people congregate in this country, including on most subway platforms, you cannot sing a song with your guitar case in front of you without being told to leave by the police. The few places where it is legal to do this, such as Boston, it only became legal after court battles over the First Amendment were won by the Street Artists Guild in the 1970’s.

I remember listening to BBC World Service a couple years ago. They were doing a piece about street music being banned in Singapore. They obviously thought it was a bit of an extreme measure on the part of the authorities there. They joked that they liked the musicians playing in the London Underground. Little did they know, evidently, that their own government had banned music from the subway platforms a few years before, in 1995, as part of the Criminal Justice Act. I remember it vividly, as it happened just before the summer I was planning to make a living busking in the tube…

It seems to me there’s something to be said for knowing your situation. And whatever happens, some things can be known. We’ve got freedom of speech, sometimes. Every once in a while the media might even pay attention, though most of the time they’ll get it entirely wrong. And freedom of assembly? We’ve got that sometimes, as long as you apply for a permit and actually get one. Just make sure to move when they tell you to, if they give you time to move after they tell you to. Otherwise you may be beaten and tortured with “non-lethal” weapons. But usually they won’t fire live ammunition. Viva democracy!

David Rovics is a singer-songwriter who tours regularly throughout North America, Europe, and occasionally elsewhere. His website is www.davidrovics.com.

Click Here to Read More...

Death By Numbers

The great butcher has himself been butchered. The timing is auspicious. These symbolic little “victories” in the otherwise bleak occupation of Iraq often seem to be timed for US consumption. If this one was, then it couldn’t have been a coincidence that it comes on the same long holiday weekend as the death of the 3,000th American soldier there.

And three thousand is not just a round number -- it’s just a bit bigger than the official death toll from the terrorist attacks on 9/11.


The 3,000 number itself was already auspicious in the days after September 11th, 2001. It was on another September 11th twenty-eight years before that a US-sponsored neofascist coup in Chile quickly resulted in a similar number of deaths. Thousands of supporters of democracy and egalitarianism who had elected Salvador Allende to power three years earlier were systematically murdered. Like so many other US government interventions in the affairs of other nations, this one led to decades of dictatorship. One more US-sponsored regime kept in power by torture, executions and systematic election theft.

Like Pinochet, Saddam was, for decades, our guy in the Middle East, along with the Shah of Iran and others. Saddam was one of the world’s most enthusiastic torturers and executioners of Islamists. Even GW admits he had nothing to do with 9/11. But now Iraq has lots of radical Islamists and all kinds of other folks attracted to the idea of defending an Arab country from bloodthirsty American invaders. So now the “war on terror” can go on in Iraq, too.

The US had the receipts for the chemical weapons they sold to Saddam in the 1980’s, and they ignored the reliable information they had from both Iraqi defectors and UN inspectors that all the WMD’s were long gone by the early 1990’s. Instead, they knowingly used this phony search for wepaons of mass destruction as an excuse to impose a more compliant regime on yet another country.

In the 1980’s a scientist from Texas was running a “pharmaceutical” plant in western Iraq for Saddam. Meanwhile, thousands of Iranians and Kurds at a time were being killed in the course of dozens of massive-scale human slaughters carried out with chemical weapons. And, as usual when dictators we like were carrying out atrocities of staggering proportions, the military aid and political support from Washington continued unabated. As long as the main victims of Saddam’s regime were his own people and the citizens of the new Islamic government in neighboring Iran, it was all good.

Following a long-standing tradition in US foreign policy, Saddam attacked Iran in a gigantic, unprovoked assault. Over the course of the eight-year war, over a million Iranians were killed, many of them by poison gas. “Saddam’s martyrs,” the hapless young Iraqi draftees and others who died in the course of this senseless slaughter, are thought to number about 700,000.

It’s another interesting number to attempt to comprehend in some way. Since the most recent 2003 invasion, according to Britain’s Lancet Medical Journal, the toll by violent death in Iraq could be as high as 700,000 by now.

The job of torturing the Iraqi people has for years now been done by the US, in the same Abu Ghraib prison that Saddam used as his chief torture facility. And now the job of slaughtering hundreds of thousands of Iraqis has also been passed on from Saddam to his American executioners.

Among other things the Iraq Study Group has recommended, widely ignored by the so-called “mainstream” media, is the total privatization of the Iraqi economy, starting with it’s oil. So the job of profitting from Iraq’s vast oil wealth has also been passed on violently from Saddam and his cronies to the US and it’s corporations -- although unlike the current government, at least Saddam used part of that wealth to provide most Iraqis with universal health care and education.

And those people in Iraq trying to put an end to this nightmare by once again forcing an English-speaking army out of their land? Terrorists, of course.

Just like the Vietnamese. In some hotel room a year or two ago I was watching a documentary on Fox television. It was about the Battle of Hue in 1968. The Vietnamese partisans had taken the city from the US occupation forces. The US military eventually re-took the city from them. The Fox documentary was full of outrageous claims about the bravery of the US Marines and the spinelessness of the enemy, how every time a Vietnamese came face to face with a US soldier they ran.

There were stories of courageous “house-to-house” fighting, and no efforts were made to try to familiarize the viewer with any information about how guerrilla fighting is generally conducted. Normally, when you are facing a vastly more powerful military force, no sensible guerrilla force engages in combat that might be described as “stand and fight” for very long. At the end of the documentary, the only honest piece of information in the whole thing was mentioned in passing: By the end of the Battle of Hue, 80% of the city lay in ruins.

Facing such a fearful, spineless resistance it was once again necessary to destroy the city in order to win it back?

And as in Vietnam, the ever-growing resistance in Iraq is a shadowy affair, and is supposedly full of people from other countries and “Baathist remnants.” In Vietnam it was the Russians. In Iraq it’s the international terrorists. Reality be damned, that’s our story and by golly we’re sticking to it. And never mind the fact that the terrorists who came from all over the Muslim world to take Afghanistan back from the Russians did so with billions of American dollars, funded through the regimes that are still in power in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan – during the very same decade (the 1980’s) that the US was supporting Saddam’s war against other Islamists who we didn’t like!

A woman I know was telling me about her lover. I’ll call him Ghassan. Ghassan was a young man full of vitality, with great hopes for the future. He was educated as an engineer in an ivy league university in the west and spoke fluent English. He despised Saddam as well as Islamic fundamentalism. Like so many others throughout the Middle East, he was a secular, leftwing pan-Arabist.

And like most Arabs – unlike most people in the west – Ghassan knew of the double-standards of the invaders. He knew that despite the rhetoric, the US had always supported dictatorships of all kinds, and opposed movements for self-determination. He knew that the US had overthrown democratically-elected governments that had their people’s welfare in mind, and replaced them with torture-happy dictatorships that looked out for US corporate interests as they slaughtered their people.

Ghassan was a person of conscience. He met a little girl in Basra who had been orphaned by the Americans, and he adopted her as his own. And when his people were being massacred, he came to their defense.

My friend got an anonymous phone call one day. The man on the line said Ghassan had joined the resistance in Falluja. The building he had been in was completely demolished. Fighters were on the second floor. On the first floor was his adopted daughter from Basra, and other women and children. Everyone in the building was killed. The man on the phone said that Ghassan died looking the crusaders in the eye.

If the Ghassans of the world are the terrorists we are trying to wipe out, then, as the bumper sticker goes, we are surely creating enemies far faster than we can kill them.

In the once-beautiful City of Mosques, the resistance had only small arms against the airborne might of the world’s largest military. The US employed helicopters that fired chemical weapons, and helicopters that fired hundreds of rounds of armor-piercing bullets per second. Yet in order to re-take Falluja from the resistance in 2004, the fighting was so fierce that by the time the guerrillas were killed or driven out, about 80% of the city was turned to rubble.

Hundreds of thousands of refugees from Falluja and elsewhere in Iraq continue to flood into Jordan and other countries, wherever they can go. Construction in Amman was certainly booming when I visited there last year. And these are the lucky ones who have managed to survive thus far, and have the means to move somewhere else. If you talk with the survivors you can start to get some idea of how the respected Lancet Medical Journal arrived at the estimates of the numbers of those who have died violent deaths in the past several years of this most recent nightmare for the people of Iraq.

Perhaps I’m being too moralistic. Perhaps we really need the oil that lies beneath their sand.

Perhaps all of this is in “our national interest.” Perhaps. As long as it is also in our national interest to support despots, to jail and kill democrats. As long as it is also in our national interest to maintain a state of desperate poverty among the masses of people around the world. As long as it is also in our national interest to be hated or at least mistrusted by 98% of the world’s population. As long as it is in our interest to be in a perpetual state of war, and to be directly responsible for the ceaseless slaughter of millions upon millions of good people on every continent aside from Antarctica.

I wake up in the morning, read the paper and once again I feel like I’m living in a bubble, watching heavily-armed men arm themselves some more, form alliances, make enemies, torture and kill them, then make some more enemies, arming themselves some more in the process, all to determine who gets to drive the car that is spewing it’s exhaust into our little bubble. This is how the world looks when ExxonMobil and Halliburton are determining your foreign and domestic policies. In a word, insane.

But Saddam is dead. One mass murderer is down. How many more to go?

Click Here to Read More...

Ubiquitous Sprawls of America

Once when I was touring Denmark my friend Jenka was visiting Europe at the same time. I picked her up at the airport and we headed into Copenhagen. As we were approaching the city, she got excited. “Wow,” she said, “it’s like a constant Critical Mass bike ride!”

As we wait at traffic lights at major intersections we pass through, the traffic passing by ahead of us generally includes a few cars and a lot of bicycles and pedestrians. Bike paths are as common as streets, and most people of all walks of life get around town by bicycle. Trains and buses full of passengers traverse the city, and you rarely have to wait long for the next one. Each neighborhood has a commercial center with shops, cafes, public spaces and streets off-limits to cars altogether. Most people live bicycling distance from where they work. Like so many European cities, it is a place that seems to have been designed for people. People like it that way and, to a huge extent, they keep it that way.

Some cities in the US share much in common with Copenhagen. Though they almost entirely lack bike paths, cities like New York and San Francisco at least have a lot of pedestrians, decent mass transit, centrally-located parks and neighborhoods where people both live and work. These are also the cities people tend to visit, whether they’re tourists from Europe, Asia or domestic travelers. Go to the movies or turn on the TV and you’ll see that so many of the stories take place in New York or San Francisco. It would be easy for many people to develop the impression that cities like these are representative of life in the US. But they’re not.


My friend Ash came to visit the US from Denmark once while I was in Washington, DC to sing at a protest. It was January a couple years ago. Her plan was to join me for a week in DC, but first to spend a week soaking up the sun in Florida. She flew into Tampa. She managed to make it to the hotel she had found online, checked in, and then thought she’d go try to find the beach. Like most hotels in the US, hers was located some miles down a highway outside of the city, in an area that used to be woods, swamp or farmland. An entirely recent development, a sort of sprawling cluster of hotels, fast food restaurants, and big box stores, surrounded by vast parking lots, connected by four-lane roads and six-lane highways. A sidewalk has never graced the area, and certainly not a bike path. Ash discovered a bus stop eventually, on the side of the highway, but no bus ever crossed it’s path. Welcome to the real USA.

Ash had never seen or imagined such a place. An entirely alienating environment where everybody gets around by car, and there is not a pedestrian to be seen unless it’s someone walking from their car to the mall. Where walking is actually somewhat dangerous and certainly not pleasant, there on the shoulder of the four-lane road with the trucks and SUV’s whizzing past. I had warned Ash that there would be no way to get around the area without renting a car, and that this was really the only way to get around most of the country, but this idea had seemed just too preposterous to be believed, and she didn’t rent one.

The European exchange students usually find the real USA. I used to cringe when I’d meet one and ask them where they ended up in their year abroad. The answer never seems to be one of those few really endearing places. It’s always some suburb of Dallas or Phoenix or something. And of course, I eventually realized, and decided to stop cringing. That’s where most people live. Those are the areas where somebody can find work, where a family that’s not rich can buy a house that might be spacious enough to put up an exchange student. Few people can afford to live in those interesting cities like New York and San Francisco. Few people are likely to find decent jobs in nice university towns like Madison or Berkeley, unless they’re students, living there for a few years while they spend their parents’ life savings and accrue massive debt.

New York state is losing hundreds of thousands of people every year, while cities like Houston are gaining population at a similar rate. The loss of population is coming from the abandoned cities like Buffalo and Troy. New York City’s population, on the other hand, gains some and loses others. Specifically, it gains yuppies and loses lower-income people. It’s strange, because if you go to New York City and ask people of any walk of life why they live there, many will tell you they moved there, or they stay there, because they like the place. Ask people in Houston why they moved there and the answer you get will usually be two words: “for work.” Which is probably not entirely the explanation, since there is work to be found in New York City as well – it’s just that the cost of living is so much higher there, it’s impossible on most salaries to pay the rent.

So people end up in Houston, and try to make the best of it. They buy a car because there’s no other way to get around. Usually they buy an SUV or a pickup truck, because that’s what everybody else drives, and besides, gas is still comparatively cheap, and it was really cheap a couple years ago, when they bought their SUVs. The most reasonably-priced property is always a few miles or a few dozen miles outside of what was once the heart of town. And the town lost any semblance of a heart a long time ago – if it ever really had one, and as a city of any size it has never had one. It is a monstrous creation of car culture gone horribly wrong. Most of it is pavement. Between the highways and the endless miles of strip malls lining them from east to west, north to south, are the parking lots. Far above your head, always, are the huge, flood-lit billboards advertising every product imaginable. Aside from a few blocks near Rice University, or a park or two on the outskirts of town, or inside the malls, there is nowhere in the city that people walk. The few people riding bicycles or attempting to navigate the barely-functioning bus system are Mexican immigrants too poor to buy a car yet. Naturally, the population is among the most obese on Earth.

You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone living there who thinks that places like Houston are models of urban planning that anyone should ever emulate. But the powerful forces of economics, of survival, dictate that the sprawl will sprawl even more. And what else should people do? In a society where corporations make all the important decisions, where private property rules and the profit motive is a kind of religion, there will be no mass transit, bike paths, local shops. But these are the places where it is where it is possible to live, to have a house and a job that will eventually pay for it.

And if you’re not a tourist visiting the chic bits on the coasts, or an exchange student ending up in some nondescript middle-class suburb somewhere in between the Starbucks and the Wal-Mart, there is yet more of America that you are unlikely to see. If you were driving all over the country and had a penchant for exploring “historic districts,” as the signs call what used to be known as “downtown,” you will see these places. You could select random GPS coordinates within relatively populated areas and visit them, that could be another way to see the forgotten majority of American towns and cities, these cities that have become towns again, you could say. You’re unlikely to go to these places for school, or work, or because there’s any sort of tourist attraction there, because there is really nothing to attract visitors in places like Trenton or Camden, New Jersey, or Corning or Elmira, New York, or Flint or Albion, Michigan.

The “historic district” in these places consists of a few blocks of dilapidated, abandoned buildings, some of which used to be shops, some used to be apartments, others used to be factories. In some cities, like Detroit, the old buildings in some parts of the city are being razed and turned back into fields. But in most places, the buildings sit there, abandoned, a silent testament to what used to be. If you drive west from Boston, the next really thriving metropolis you’ll get to is Chicago, about a third of the way across the country. Most of the cities in between, if you stop and look, after you go past the cluster of hotels, fast food places and Wal-Marts right by the highway, are ghost towns. Victims of the great one-two punch of deindustrialization combined with a few big box stores replacing what used to be downtown as the commercial “center” – the places where people shop, at least, for it cannot really be called a center, it’s central to nothing, in the middle of nowhere.

The few young people remaining in such towns as Dayton or Youngstown, Ohio don’t really seem to know that it used to be any different. People have a remarkable ability to accept reality as it is. I remember visiting my teenage cousins in a city just outside of Trenton called Morrisville, Pennsylvania. It was one of my earlier visits to their place. I asked them where’s downtown? Their response: what do you mean by that? It was an unfamiliar concept. Town begins when you pass the sign on the highway that says “entering Morrisville.” It ends when you pass the sign that says it’s ending. In between those two signs is the town. This is how it is understood.

When I was a child, every year my family would go to the Danbury Fair, outside the town of Danbury, Connecticut, where there was an annual season on the fair grounds with animals, rides, clowns, games, etc. I remember going to the last fair, before the fair grounds were converted into a massive parking lot, surrounding a massive shopping mall. For a few months it was the world’s biggest, I think until they built a bigger one outside of Minneapolis. They called it the Danbury Fair Mall. All that remained of the fair were a few pictures in the hallway to the toilets. Who can be expected to remember what was once beneath the asphalt, or the bustling downtown that used to exist before the Stetson factory closed and the mall opened. But at least there is a new condominium development miles from what used to be downtown, called Stetson Place.

With economics as they are in these many cities, even many of the malls end up being abandoned, along with the town centers they once helped destroy. I remember being on a march from the White House to the United Nations that the group Kensington Welfare Rights Union organized. Abandoned strip malls and ghost towns is most of what you’ll see in between DC and New York, and endless miles of not-yet-abandoned strip malls, and wealthier suburbs, with row upon row of house after house.

In St. Louis there is a neighborhood that used to have 30,000 residents, and now has 3,000. The bricks from the old buildings in what was once a working-class neighborhood are being sold to real estate developers in California, to make more homes for the rich, or at least the gainfully-employed. St. Louis is an interesting case – a city where one of their great claims to fame is the fact that Lewis & Clark passed through, on their way to explore Indian Territory with no visas. They left St. Louis. There’s a statue of them looking to the west.

Maybe Thatcher was right, society doesn’t exist, it’s just a collection of individuals. That’s certainly what it looks like in most of the population centers here in the USA. And these centers spread with no oversight like cancer cells, and the people drive more and more, and naturally, the cancer rate rises to go along with the cancerous, pavement-ridden suburbs of often nonexistant cities. We even bring skyrocketing cancer rates to the countries we invade, where we steal their resources to defend our insane way of life. We poison them just as we poison ourselves, in order to profit from burning their oil, so we can poison ourselves some more, along with the rest of the planet.

And what’s the point of all this, this thing that some have dared to call a civilization? Is it some kind of macabre, grand-scale economics lesson? Like here’s what happens when nobody is in charge of development policies aside from stockholders in very large corporations. All of society begins to resemble a mass of cancer cells. Some cities grow wildly in every direction, eating up all land and community around them, spewing toxins from coal-fired power plants and the exhaust pipes of SUVs. Other cities die, leaving behind their toxic shells. The people move further and further away, driving ever more, working ever more, losing their time, their physical and mental health. For the mental health, at least there are psych drugs. For the physical, well, cancer has always been with us, hasn’t it? America is #1, so there is no need to look beyond our borders to see whether people in Brazil are dying of cancer. By and large, they’re not. It’s an industrial disease, but that’s just how progress goes, the inevitable, unstoppable dictates of capital.

What of the legal opposition? My friend Jason West is the mayor of New Paltz, New York. Like the majority of the town council, he’s a Green. He was telling me about some big box store that opened on the outskirts of the town. Because of jurisdiction issues, there was nothing the town of New Paltz could do to prevent the store from opening. The best they could do was to require the store to buy more land that they had to keep in it’s natural state.

And the extra-legal opposition? Those youth who have taken the law into their own hands, in the tradition of anti-nuclear and anti-war activists around the world, usually under the call letters ELF (Earth Liberation Front) and destroyed the offending property -- the property of the corporate bulldozers destroying the last of the ancient forests, the property of the corporations building massive new developments in the already over-developed suburbs, the property of the corporate SUV dealerships selling the cars that are poisoning our air, our lungs, our children – these people are serving or facing prison sentences of up to 23 years in prison for their alleged crimes.

Perhaps the powers that be will learn from their mistakes by themselves, before they’ve completely destroyed any vestige of society, and the planet along with it. Perhaps they’ll realize that turning the entire country into one big National Sacrifice Area for profit was a mistake. When NASA gave tens of millions of the Earth’s inhabitants cancer by having one of their plutonium-filled satellites blow up in the stratosphere in the early 1960’s, they abandoned the use of nuclear fuel, at least until recently. Perhaps the developers can also learn. Perhaps after the last city has been turned into a strip mall, after the last Wal-Mart has been built, after the last bit of nature has been paved over, after the last Appalachian mountain has been blown up to find the coal to power the ever-expanding suburbs, they will decide it is time to pave a little more, perhaps a bike path there beside the highway, next to the parking lots, beneath the billboards.

Click Here to Read More...

500-Year Siege

I was in San Francisco, California a couple months ago, and I saw Klee Benally there. It had been a long time since I’d seen him. I tend to go where the gigs take me, which often means going in and out of certain orbits in unpredictable ways. There at the American Indian Center of San Francisco, Klee was the master of ceremonies for an event that was attended by 200 or so people, mostly indigenous.

The event was one of many of it’s kind to draw attention to plans by the Arizona Snowbowl Corporation to build a 14-mile pipeline from the city of Flagstaff to the nearby San Francisco Peaks. They want to expand a ski resort there, and make snow out of the wastewater.

These mountains are sacred to 13 different local tribes, but as usual, this is not a problem for the corporation. The message here is not lost on anyone. Once again, it is a case of the USA saying to Native America: we shit on you. Your land, your religion, your people. The 500-year siege continues.


Klee is a member of a 3-piece band called Blackfire, along with his sister and his brother. Their music is hard, dark, loud, punk-metal kind of stuff, with lots of growling and power chords. Together with their father, a Navajo medicine man named Jones, the four of them also perform traditional song, dance and drumming together. Sometimes the Benally Family opens for Blackfire, which is always a fascinating exercise in contrasts. But usually Jones is in Flagstaff, employed as a medicine man at a local hospital.

I was on one of Blackfire’s European tours, opening for them at a bunch of shows in Germany and Prague. We were a day late getting into Prague. We were traveling in an old but functional VW van. We had a gig in a squat in Prague during the week of the World Bank/IMF meetings there.

The Czech border police didn’t know what to make of us. They were on the lookout for black-clad anarchist youth from Spain and Italy. We definitely didn’t fit that description, but they knew there was something about us. I’m sure they had never seen a Navajo family before, and they must have realized that Jones was far too old to be throwing rocks at anybody.

After a while they decided we had to stay in Germany because there was a small but fairly jagged dent near the back of the van. The said they thought this could be dangerous, someone could cut themselves on it. We spent the night at a friend’s place in Nuremberg and succeeded in getting into Prague the next day by train.

Around that time, in 1999-2000 and thereabouts, I was spending a lot of time in Germany, in a relationship with a woman from Hamburg, hanging out with the radical farmers in the Wendlandt region, singing at anti-nuclear protests and such.

Germany has a very active leftwing, especially when it comes to US imperialism and nuclear power. For many German leftists, though, as with their counterparts in the rest of Europe and the US, Native America is a non-issue. When approached about getting involved with Native struggles for self-determination in the US, some will tell you that the issue is “esoteric.” In other words, basically, Native Americans are a thing of history, irrelevant except for certain hippies who like to make sweat lodges, live in tipis, and imagine what it might have been like way back when.

Others in Germany know better, and there are probably more functional groups working in solidarity with indigenous struggles there than anywhere else in the industrialized world. They know that Native America exists and it is under a constant state of siege. And they know that resistance is widespread, and needs to be supported.

I spent Y2K in a trailer on a farm in the Wendlandt, figuring it might be good to be near a source of food for when industrial society collapsed. After the world failed to end I went back to Hamburg, and along with a dozen other people from around Germany, I made my way to Arizona. February 1st, 2000, was to be an important marker in the struggle for Big Mountain, and this date would see the largest number of outsiders coming to show solidarity with the people there for quite some years.

Since long before Europeans began their savage conquest of the Americas, Navajo and Hopi people have lived side by side in what we now call the Southwest. Traditionally, Hopis are farmers and Navajos herders, so there have at times been tensions between the two peoples, as is the case anywhere in the world where these two ways of living intersect. By most accounts, though, the Navajo-Hopi “land dispute” is basically a creation of the US government, the state of Arizona, and Peabody Western, a giant multinational energy corporation.

The Navajo and Hopi people, like most indigenous peoples in North America, suffer from the very same affliction that keeps most people in countries like Nigeria or Angola in grinding poverty – that is, great wealth, in the form of tremendous deposits of coal and uranium.

There was a brief “renaissance” for many indigenous peoples in the west. This was in the early part of the twentieth century – in the brief span of time in between. In between the time when native people were slaughtered en masse, forced onto reservations, and starved, and the time when coal, uranium and oil were discovered on their lands. Since then, things have continued to go from bad to worse.

Those of us coming from Germany to Arizona to support the struggle on Big Mountain arrived by mid-January. Driving onto the Navajo reservation, it became quickly apparent why some rental car companies in the Southwest make you sign a contract saying you will not take their cars to Mexico or to any Indian reservations. The area of Black Mesa/Big Mountain is just the sort of place Hertz is afraid of.

The roads, if such a term can be used to describe what we were driving on, were beyond anything I’d seen anywhere in the world. It was beyond the general neglect of the federal government and the corrupt tribal councils.

The area around Black Mesa was subject to a US government-imposed freeze on all construction, including road maintenance, which had been going on for several decades. The roads, such as they were, consisted of two humps, like little mountain ridges, with valleys in between them that were often several feet deep. If you fell off the humps at the wrong spot, whether you were in a pickup truck or an SUV, you could seriously damage your vehicle. We managed to stay on the humps in my old pickup truck.

We had long since passed the nearest town. After many more miles of driving down a dirt road that had been maintained, we passed a little school and a water tower. Soon after that, the road turned to humps and we drove many more miles, slowly, constantly vigilant to avoid falling into the ditches on either side of us.

We passed many ancient driveways that led to hogans that were no longer there. Finally, we came upon one of the very few driveways left that led to a hogan that was inhabited, by Louise Benally and her family.

We had brought a couple of big Army tents with us that we bought in Flagstaff, and there on Louise’s land we set them up. Her homestead there would come to be known as Camp Anna Mae, named after Anna Mae Aquash, the Micmac woman who came from Canada to Pine Ridge, South Dakota to support the struggle of the Lakota people there against the mining of uranium on their land. Her death was one of several dozen unsolved murders in South Dakota in the mid-70’s. The FBI is widely suspected.

I quickly realized one of the many things that made Louise Benally special. Along with the tenacity of her spirit, her willingness to stay on the land so long after the vast majority had been driven off, was something else – she spoke English. There we were, sitting around a fire outside Louise’s hogan, with several elderly women in colorful skirts, slowly cooking a hunk of a lamb they had recently slaughtered, which was wrapped in foil and lay beneath hot coals. Louise was several decades younger than the rest of the women, and the only one who spoke a language in addition to Navajo.

These elderly women were the backbone of the struggle. Collectively they were known by all as the grandmothers. Their bravery, their dark, weathered faces, their short stature and their colorful skirts all reminded me of the Mothers of the Disappeared I had seen standing between us and the riot police in Buenos Aires. But they were several thousand miles north of those Madres, and speaking Navajo instead of Spanish.

At it’s peak, during a pipe ceremony on February 1st, there were 250 people who had come from outside to show their support. There were people from all over Indian Country, including from as far away as the Dakotas. There were the Germans. There was a French chef. There was a sizeable delegation Japanese, many of them Buddhist monks. And most of the rest were young white people from across the US and Canada.

But for some while before and after that date, at any given time there were several dozen people, mostly young people from across the US, living with the grandmothers, working with them, herding their sheep, cutting firewood, and otherwise just being a presence, organized then as now with the name Black Mesa Indigenous Support.

In contrast to the clean, colorful elders they were living with, these youth were often dressed in anarchist chic – dirty rags they had gotten from dumpsters and stitched together themselves, covered in patches, facial piercings, and dreadlocks. The grandmothers called them “goat heads” because of their dreads.

Peabody Western runs North America’s biggest coal mine there in Navajo country. For decades they had been using millions of gallons of water from the aquifer below to slurry their coal 270 miles from there to Las Vegas, where Las Vegas and other cities got most of their power. The Mohave Generating Station is temporarily shut down and the coal slurry is not running. Water is returning to the once-empty wells, and some of the streams are slowly coming back to life.

But poke around briefly on the web and you can see that this is a very temporary situation. Other energy corporations are making plans to open new mines and new power plants, tacitly promising to maintain a local cancer rate that is many times the national average.

In fact, as I write this, Alice Gilmore and a number of other elderly Navajo women are blockading a road near their homes on the New Mexico side of the reservation, where the Desert Rock Energy Company is attempting to expand their mining operations.

Peabody has also been trying for decades to expand their massive mine. The problem is, there are people living on top of the coal, and they refuse to leave.

The government is just barely too tactful to forcibly remove thousands of Indians from their land in the modern era, so they have employed various other methods. Very much along the lines of the sanctions imposed on Iraq during the 1990’s. Starve them into submission. Make their lives unliveable. Take away their water. Make sure they have to drive dozens of miles down unmaintained roads in order to get water for their sheep. Impound their sheep and make them pay to get them back. Fine them for making repairs on the roofs of their hogans. Fine them for collecting firewood.

Until 1974, the Black Mesa area was the home of one of the last remaining intact communities of 20,000 or so people living traditionally, speaking mainly Navajo, living as sheep herders, in community, as they had for centuries. But then Peabody decided they wanted to expand their mine and people like Senator John McCain wanted to do their best to make sure this could happen. This meant moving 20,000 people off their land, some at a time, by making their lives impossible if they tried to stay.

Most ultimately moved. Many were sent to live on land that was made radioactive by the Church Rock uranium spill. Their sheep died from drinking the water, and many of the people died soon thereafter.

After losing their community, living increasingly isolated lives made miserable by constant harassment by the authorities, some 17 families still refuse to leave their dusty land.

Rena Babbit Lane is one of them. Last month her supporter left the land, and then the Hopi Rangers, working for those who seek to expand coal mining operations, took the occasion to visit Rena, who is approximately 80 years old, and push her around, yell at her, threaten her, and cause her to have a heart attack. And now she’s back from the hospital, back in her hogan, once again refusing to leave the land.

As in Palestine or Colombia, the mostly white supporters are able to be useful largely just because they’re white. The corrupt tribal authorities know who butters their bread, just as Israel or the government of Colombia do.

Just being there and being white doesn’t stop the general trends, but it can effectively prevent the authorities from harassing the grandmothers for another day. Also, the fundamental racism of the reservation system is such that the tribal authorities are not allowed to arrest non-native people – the most they can do is escort them off of the reservation.

When I first got to Black Mesa I didn’t know if I’d know anybody who was there. That was a silly thought. I remember when I was a young man living in Berkeley I kept running into people I knew at various leftwing events. I said to my friend David Said, “it’s a small world.” “No,” he said to me, chuckling haplessly, “it’s a small left.”

Sure enough, there were all my friends from the IMF/World Bank protests. There were folks from the struggles to save the old-growth forests on the west coast. Julia Butterfly was one of them, visiting Big Mountain scant weeks after she came down from the old redwood she had been living in for two years.

My friend Wes from Philadelphia was telling me how illuminating it was for the grandmothers when the Seattle WTO protests happened. The grandmothers had noticed that there was a week or two when most of their supporters had left the reservation.

Only 18% of the Navajo reservation has electricity, and virtually no one in the Black Mesa area have it. But those who had televisions quickly spread the word – young people with dreadlocks looking suspiciously like our supporters had shut down the city of Seattle. The protests were over, then the supporters returned.

Many of the supporters had come from Minnesota, I think about thirty of them at the high point. They were veterans of a struggle there known as the Minnehaha Free State.

In Minnesota a lot of place names begin with “minne” because that means “water” in the Mendota language. “Haha” means, you guessed it, “laughing.” Minnehaha park was nearby part of the Free State’s encampment, and also part of it. By the end, all of the Free State would be in the park.

One of the things that always disturbed me about the heroic struggle of the people of Big Mountain was how ignored it was by most of the non-Native community in the region, including most of the activist community.

The sinister brilliance of the reservation system is how the people are out of sight and out of mind to other people in the region. There were and are people doing important work trying to raise awareness of and struggle for all kinds of good things in places like Flagstaff, Phoenix, Tucson and Prescott. But for most people there, the Navajo reservation is about as nearby as Iraq, and Iraq is much more in the news. This was not the case with Minnehaha, which was right there in the Twin Cities metropolitan area.

I first read about the Minnehaha Free State in the Earth First! Journal, and visited it many times during the course of it’s tumultuous 16 months in the late 90’s. It was a case of mutual interests coming together in often beautiful ways.

The Minnesota Department of Transportation had plans to build a highway through a residential neighborhood in Minneapolis and through the park next to the Mississippi River, in order to better facilitate a speedy drive from downtown Minneapolis to the massive Mall of America outside of town. The completing of the highway would shave a good three minutes off of the trip.

Local residents wanted to keep their neighborhood intact. Local environmentalists wanted to prevent the building of yet another highway. The Mendota people wanted to save land that was sacred to them. Residents of the neighborhood and environmental activists all lived together in the Twin Cities, as did many Mendota people, who had never been given a reservation by the federal government.

It was a powerful collaboration that captured the imagination of many people in the region and beyond. Though the encampment was ultimately destroyed by MDOT and other government agencies, it spawned a new generation of activists, friends, community. In the beginning, the Free Staters were occupying several houses that were slated for demolition, with the blessings of the former residents forced out by the state of Minnesota.

When 800 police were sent to evict everybody and burn down the houses, the Free State moved downhill, into what was then still part of the park. Someone made a brilliant, conical-shaped structure that could sleep 18, in cubby holes on two floors made of pallettes and other found materials, with a firepit in the middle, to keep everybody warm through the long, cold Minnesota winter.

I used to tour mostly by van. Once or twice a year I’d make a big loop around the US, dipping into Canada here and there if they let me across the border. Either before or after visiting Minnesota, I’d pass through one of the Dakotas.

Several years ago I was driving from Missoula, in western Montana, to Rapid City, South Dakota. I had left myself two days to do the drive, preferring to amble along at a more leisurely pace when possible. I was making better time than I thought, though, and was coming into Rapid City the night before my gig there.

Charles Ray was organizing my show there. He’s a local activist and punk rock musician, files stories for both Free Speech Radio News and South Dakota Public Radio. I called him to ask if I could stay at his place an extra night, and he said great, glad you’ll be here, you can come in the morning with me to Pine Ridge for a church-burning. Like in Mississippi…? No, an entirely different king of thing. A healing ceremony.

Fifty miles from Rapid City is the Pine Ridge reservation, where there are intensely beautiful, huge, colorful, crumbling rock formations, and lots of uranium mines and Lakota people. There’s only one FM radio station that comes in around there, and much of the time it’s in the Lakota language. It was here that Anna Mae Aquash and so many others were killed by the FBI’s death squads in the 1970’s.

We pulled in to a tiny little town just outside of Pine Ridge. It had 17 residents, nine white and eight Lakota. A few decades earlier, though, it had been somewhat bigger, a white town with a racist history. The bar was covered in buffalo skulls and had a big sign that said “no Indians allowed.” The “no” had been crossed out, so now the sign read ominously, “Indians allowed.” One might draw the conclusion from this sight that they were not necessarily welcome, but were at least allowed.

A hundred feet from the bar stood a dilapidated Catholic church that was no longer used, but had once been the center of the white community there, along with the bar. It was also a place with connections to the boarding schools where the white settlers, their churches and their government, tried to “Christianize” the natives with the sorts of barbaric practices typical of European civilization.

I remember a couple different folks talking about their experiences with these brutal schools. Of the school Jones Benally was forcibly sent to when he was already in his twenties, many years ago, he would only say, “I learned to say ‘yes’ and ‘no.’”

My friend Chris Interpreter talked to me a bit more about the Baptist school he was sent to. Chris got his last name because his grandfather’s grandfather was interned in the starvation camp that the Army drove the Navajos to, and he was one of the few who was able to speak English, and so was used as an interpreter between his people and the occupying army.

When Chris was a young teenager on the Navajo reservation in the 1980’s, a Baptist revival came through and set up camp. His grandmother was a woman who actively practiced her traditional religion and lived with her sheep on what was left of her land with what was left of her people. Perhaps feeling that the old ways weren’t working out and she should try something new, she converted to Christianity. When given the opportunity, she and Chris’s parents sent him to a school for Indians that the Baptists ran. The government-run Indian boarding schools had finally been stopped a decade earlier, but there were still private ones.

Chris didn’t want to go. Though he felt betrayed when she converted to Christianity, Chris loved his grandmother and wanted to stay. At the school he was beaten and humiliated for doing the daily rituals his grandmother had taught him, and for the crime of speaking his language.

After a few months he ran away from the school, and made his way a hundred miles or so back to his grandmother’s hogan. When she and his parents heard about how he had been treated they told him he didn’t have to go back. When the representatives of the school came to bring him back, his mother told them to go away.

It’s impossible to over-emphasize the destructive impact these schools had on communities, and on the minds and spirits of the people sent to them. I remember once being in a little Hopi town nearby Black Mesa. There was one general store in the town. An elderly Navajo man was looking at the shelf full of aspirin, cough syrup and such.

He was elegantly dressed in classic Western garb, like he had just gotten off his horse. He spoke no English, but wanted to know from me, the only white person in the store, what pills he could take that would help is ailing heart. I don’t know much about pharmaceutical drugs, and also had no idea whether he was suffering from heartburn, irregular heartbeats or something else, so I apologized and said I didn’t know.

Anyway, there by Pine Ridge, South Dakota in front of the old church stood Big Jim. An aptly-named, tall, buff Lakota man in his 30’s or 40’s, Big Jim had bought the property the church was on and planned to build something new there. He had decided that rather than bulldozing the old building, he would publically, ritually burn it in a healing ceremony, for all his people, all the commuities ruined by the Christian invaders with their murderous armies, and their armies of miners, thieves, schools and churches.

A small group of Lakota men and women had gathered for the occasion. The event had been announced on public radio in Rapid City, thanks to Charles, and also gathered was one elderly white Catholic couple who had been married in the church.

One local, older white man in a pickup truck pulled up momentarily and said, good-naturedly, “the Indians are burning the church down!” Big Jim smiled.

For the old Catholic couple it was a solemn occasion. For the Lakotas present it was a bit of a celebration, and out of respect for the elderly couple, they quietly walked around the corner of the church, to watch from a different vantage point and give the old couple some space. When the fire was lit the dry old wood caught quickly, and soon it was a massive conflagration.

After interviewing Big Jim about the occasion, Charles had set up a video camera fifty feet from the church. That was the closest I could stand to be, the fire was so hot, the hottest fire I had ever experienced.

Around the corner from the old Catholic couple, Lakota men could be heard uttering phrases such as, “man, that altar’s really cooking!”

The cross on top stayed standing long after most of the walls surrounding it had collapsed. Eventually, though, the flames that had engulfed it brought it crashing to the ground, too, and all that was left was a smouldering pile of rubble. It was a brief moment of hope in the midst of the death and destruction that characterizes the ongoing conquest of Native America. A brief respite in the 500-year siege.

Click Here to Read More...

Youth House vs. Father House

There are certain things that jump out at you as soon as you arrive in Denmark. One thing you’ll notice, especially if you come from a place within that large mass of the world that is at least a bit closer to the equator, is that there is rarely anything you’d call direct sunlight. It’s twilight most of the time. In the summer it’s only really dark for an hour or so, but it’s never completely light, either. In the winter it’s dark most of the time, and the darkness is often accompanied by a cold, light rain.

You’ll also quickly notice that there are far more people with blond hair and blue eyes per capita than just about anywhere else you’re likely to have been, and at any given time, a vast number of them are riding bicycles. All the cities feature elegant networks of bike paths and lots of pedestrian-only streets. The country is largely designed for use by bicycle, train and foot, and most people think this is as it should be. There is universal health care and higher education, and every Dane I’ve ever met thinks that this is self-evidently a good thing.

While Denmark may be an easy place to be a social democrat, it’s different if you’re an anarchist squatter. If you reject the notion of private property you are outside of the social contract. If you think that when a building is abandoned and empty, people have the right to move into it and make use of it regardless of what individual or corporate entity officially owns it, you are a pariah to be vilified, violently opposed, or bought off, whatever works.

It’s early December, 2006, and along with the scant sunlight and the blonds on bicycles, another thing becomes quickly apparent. Some people have been hard at work with large posters and cans of wheatpaste, and the city of Copenhagen has been blanketed with a picture of somebody’s fist and the words “Ungdomshuset – the Final Battle.” Below that are more specific bits of information – the Final Battle is taking place between December 13th-17th, and so on. Tattooed on the fist are the numbers “69” for 69 Jagtvej, the address of Ungdomshuset. Ungdomshuset means Youth House – using really literal names like this is very common in Scandinavia.


The Final Battle may not make the news in most of the world, but in Denmark it will be material for headlines. Ungomshuset is the last anarchist-run, squatted social center in Denmark outside of Christiania, and an institute of iconic significance throughout Scandinavia. I’m on a tour of Sweden, Norway and Denmark, and in every city I visit it’s easy to find posters alerting people to the Final Battle, encouraging everybody to get on the buses that will be headed to Ungdomshuset from Oslo, Trondheim and even as far away as Moscow, rumor has it.

The 1980’s was the heyday of the autonomous movement in Denmark, Germany and elsewhere in Europe. Thousands of mostly young people squatted hundreds of abandoned buildings in dozens of urban centers, creating alternative societies that embraced community, art, music, and a culture of resistance that rejected consumerism and empire. A community was formed that rejected the domination of the world by multinational corporations and the governments that supported them, whether they be outright militarist states like the US or more watered-down NATO members like Denmark. They defended their squats in pitched battles with police, and at the same time debated sexism within their movement and organized protests in support of refugees and against nuclear power. The movement existed in a near-constant state of siege. Many squats were ultimately taken by force by the police, and others were legalized.

Not far from Ungdomshuset is Bumzen, one of the now-legal former squats, which still has the dynamic atmosphere of a squat, with residents constantly making artistic and structural improvements to the 5-story building in which they live. Most of the residents are actively involved with day-to-day life in Ungdomshuset. They run Ungomshuset’s infoshop, sell beer behind the bar, organize concerts in one of several performance spaces, use one of the many rooms on the upper floors as rehearsal spaces for bands or rooms for holding workshops, meetings, film screenings. They cook vegan meals for the community using the massive pots and pans in the kitchen.

I remember one of the first times I played a concert at Ungdomshuset. There I was in the bar surrounded by black flags with skulls and crossbones, and people of all ages, but mostly in their 20’s, mostly dressed in black, except for the glittering silver of nose rings, lip rings, eyebrow rings and other various facial piercings. There were probably a hundred people in the room, most of whom listened to a lot more punk rock than acoustic folk. It was a standing room-only situation, but when I started playing there was silence in the room, and everybody was listening to every word.

Everybody in Denmark learns English in school from an early age, but there are still various levels of English fluency. Nearly all the anarchists of Copenhagen speak English extremely well, and often a couple other languages to boot. They are a highly educated, well-traveled bunch, as accustomed to discussing World Bank policy or the history of Spain as they are to defending themselves against marauding police. The peak moment of the autonomous movement in Denmark may be in the past, but to hang around Ungdomshuset you get the distinct feeling that you are in the center of a movement that is far from waning. You get the feeling you are in the midst of a force of nature, a militant but thoughtful phenomenon with a collective sense of itself.

I played that show years ago, and some of the folks from behind the bar took me to Bumzen a few blocks away, where they put me up for several days. They showed me to my penthouse suite, a sort of attic space with a little porch overlooking much of the Norrebro neighborhood. Before I climbed the ladder that led to my little room I was handed a clean duvet for my bed, a lamp, an alarm clock and a bag of pot. (They had ascertained I was a hippie and correctly surmised I would appreciate such a thing.) Looking around my attic apartment, on the little porch overlooking the street far below, lit up by the moon there was a large box full of empty bottles. Bumzen may at that point have become legal, but there was still the problem of the occasional gang of Nazis, who don’t like immigrants or anarchists, and it’s important to be prepared.

Now in the last month of 2006 and back at Ungdomshuset, I’m about to play another concert. The place is bustling even more than usual. Adam, a member of the collective, asks me if I want a tour of the place. I’m tired from hours of driving and not thinking clearly, and I ask him if anything’s new since the last time I was there. “The barricade-builders have been hard at work,” he replies.

Ah yes, it’s the beginning of the month, and for some weeks now the community has been in high gear. The battles in and out of court have apparently been lost, and this squat that has been a flourishing social center for 25 years is facing it’s biggest challenge. In a bizarre twist, a rightwing Christian sect called Faderhuset (Father House) has bought the historic building with the intention of destroying it. The leadership of this sect seems as intent on levelling this well-known anarchist center as it is intent on making money in the real estate market.

The 5-story building that is now Ungdomshuset was built in 1897 by the Danish labor movement, and was for many decades known as Folkets Huset (People’s House). VI Lenin spoke there before he launched the Russian Revolution. The Second International took place there. From that house the first International Women’s Day was declared. It fell into disrepair in the late 70’s. A supermarket chain bought it, wanted to level it and turn it into another supermarket, but the city wouldn’t allow the destruction of the historic building. When it was squatted by the anarchist youth and declared Ungdomshuset in 1982, the city eventually decided to let them keep it, but there has always been contention over this, and over who was the official owner of the building.

For the first time since the building was squatted, a majority of the Copenhagen city council is in favor of the house staying, but they say there’s nothing that they can do, it’s owned now by Faderhuset and property law is property law. Half the well-known bands in Denmark, it seems, are playing shows in the house during the first half of December, and lots of prominent artists and other public figures are speaking out in support of the Youth House. “Ungdomshuset blir” – Ungdomshuset stays – has become the rallying cry for all self-respecting leftwingers in Denmark. Anarchist youth have organized many protests in recent months that have been met with wanton police brutality. Some of the brutality has made national news, but the protests and the brutality continue unabated.

Politicians have tried to negotiate with Faderhuset to sell the building to a leftwing foundation that would then give it to the youth, but there is no negotiating with this Christian sect. At the same time as the negotiations are happening, the government is preparing it’s armed assault on Ungdomshuset. Rumors are flying, and one of them is that the police force that will attack the house will be comprised entirely of volunteers – cops who really like the idea of beating up punk kids.

Inside Ungdomshuset, preparations for the defense of the building are making it look more like a medieval castle with each passing day. Two of the most talented barricade-builders were arrested at the last protest at the headquarters of Faderhuset, and are both facing deportation to North America. Massive beams of wood reinforced by steel are blocking doorways and windows, and if one defense is breached there is another beyond it. I’m reminded of other heavily-armored buildings I’ve been to, like when I had to go to the US embassy in London to get a new passport, or when I visited Sinn Fein’s headquarters in Dublin.

In past assaults, the police have gone onto the roof or, using cranes, through the second-floor windows, rather than attempting to ram through the formidable barricades on the ground floor. There are too many windows to turn the entire building into the kind of fortress the ground floor has become, but no effort is being spared to do just that. The upper-story windows from which you could once look out at the neighborhood are now completely barricaded, and the only light that shines within Ungdomshuset now is artificial.

The most famous rock band in Danish history, a leftwing band that has been putting out great music since the 60’s, Savage Rose, will play at Ungdomshuset on December 13th. By then, thousands of supporters of the Youth House from all over Scandinavia, Germany and elsewhere in Europe will have arrived in Copenhagen. On the 14th there will be a protest outside City Hall. The 15th is the date the city set for the youth to vacate the premises. But with posters all over Scandinavia alerting all to the Final Battle, the city has changed it’s mind, and is now saying that they will set the date when the house must be vacated later.

Later, after the Youth House’s supporters have gone back to their countries of origin. Later, probably later at night, probably at 4 o’clock on a Monday morning, after the previous evening’s activities are long over, when the only people up are the few dedicated collective members on guard duty. Perhaps the barricades will hold off the police long enough for a call to go out to supporters across the city, in time for them to watch the building get stormed by 300 heavily-armed riot police backed by battering rams, cranes and helicopters.

But history has not been written yet, last-minute compromises have been made in the past, and support for the Youth House within Danish society is steadily growing as the days go on. The unions have said that they will not work under conditions that call for police protection. Without them Faderhuset would have to try to find sufficient scab labor to demolish the house and build something new in it’s place. No small feat in a country where the vast majority of workers are unionized.

The Final Battle will probably come in one form or another, and how the dance between the autonomous youth, the authorities, and civil society will play out is yet to be seen. Whatever happens, though, the Danish media will be covering it, and the international media will ignore it. For the rest of the world, there is no Danish autonomous youth movement. For the rest of the world, Denmark will continue to be the mild-mannered social democracy with blonds on bicycles who all have cradle-to-grave health insurance, where it is always twilight. Not a country where state-sponsored vigilantes smash through the windows of community centers to go and systematically pulverize children with clubs.

Click Here to Read More...

They Kept On Walking

Our taxi dropped us off at the checkpoint outside Nablus, so we could then walk through the checkpoint and take another taxi into the city. With the travel restrictions and hundreds of checkpoints everywhere, this is the way you have to travel, if you’re lucky enough to be allowed to travel at all.

There, on the outskirts of this ancient Palestinian city, as with every other city in the West Bank, was a heavily-armed gang of young Israeli men and women in green IDF uniforms. One of the men inspected my passport, and spent a few minutes trying to discourage me from entering Nablus. “It’s crazy in there. There are Arab terrorists. There are bombs every night. It’s not safe.” I thanked him for his warning, and thought to myself that he might have an entirely different experience in Nablus if he visited the city in a role other than that of occupation soldier.


We got into another taxi and drove towards the city center, passing one destroyed factory after another, bombed in 2002 when Israel invaded, leaving much of the city in ruins. Several of the factories used to make soap, Nablus was known for them, but no longer.

Inching along in gnarled traffic, we eventually got to the campus of An-Najah National University. I was to do a concert there that evening to a large and appreciative audience. Due to circumstances beyond my control, each organizer on my tour of Palestine had only a few days to put together a concert, and Saed Abu-Hijleh managed to pull it off brilliantly.

Contrary to the warnings of the Israeli soldier, I only met really nice people like Saed during my stay in Nablus. He was my age, in his late thirties, a good-looking man in a sports jacket. He greeted us warmly and together we walked across the campus to his office. As we passed hundreds of students and other people on this extremely crowded, bustling campus, it was obvious that Saed commanded a deep respect and admiration from everyone.

Saed is a professor, and administrator in charge of public relations. Under the current restrictions of the Israeli occupation, the only way he could potentially get out of Nablus would be on foot at great personal danger. He, and his car, are not allowed to leave the city. Before the Al-Aqsa Intifada, when travel was easier for most Palestinians, he had studied for nine years in Iowa City, and remembered his time there fondly.

We got to his small office, and Saed was showing me a lovely booklet one of his students had made with Arabic translations of some of my songs, which was to be handed out to everybody coming to the concert that night. There was a picture of a woman on his desk, and I asked him who she was. He explained to me that she was his mother, and she had recently been killed by Israeli occupation soldiers.

They had pulled up to the house where both of them lived, where he still lives, and opened fire. Saed didn’t know whether they meant to kill her or him. Her greatest crime was being involved with a program that distributed food to poor people in Nablus. His crime was being a prominent member of his community, and an eloquent critic of the occupation. Just the sort of voice the Israelis have a habit of silencing.

Later I asked Saed if he had considered trying to leave Palestine after his mother was assassinated. He seemed slightly annoyed at the question, and told me that everybody was a target. He pointed to various students nearby. “Him, her, him – they’re all targets. Why should I be the one to leave? I’m not special. These are my people, this is where I belong. I’m not leaving.” Along with the annoyance, there was a look on his face that I would describe as a sort of fierce compassion.

Events like the assassination of Saed’s mother are a daily occurrence under the Israeli occupation. You can read a blow-by-blow account on the website of the International Middle East Media Center from Bethlehem. Woman killed by Army as she tries to save man bleeding to death on her doorstep. Settlers beat girl to death in Hebron. 21 residents of Jenin rounded up and arrested by the Army. Electricity plant bombed by IDF, several towns without electricity or water. Pregnant woman and her baby die in childbirth, prevented by Army from reaching hospital. Helicopter gunship demolishes home, killing Hamas activist and family of seven. Two school girls shot by snipers as they sat at their desks in their classroom.

And for each person like Saed’s mother, there is someone like Saed, refusing to be cowed. For every school girl shot by Israeli snipers, there are a hundred more who still go to class the next day.

The daily carnage in Palestine rarely makes it into the corporate news media, but every once in a while developments are dramatic enough to warrant the reluctant attention of the New York Times. During the recent Israeli invasion (“incursion”) of Beit Hanoun in Gaza, there was a stand-off at a mosque. Sixty resistance fighters had taken refuge in it, trying to avoid being killed by Israeli tanks. The IDF had surrounded the building.

From the local radio station the call went out for women to come to the mosque and try to protect those inside, in the hopes that the Israelis wouldn’t massacre a crowd of unarmed women. Scores of women responded quickly to the call and walked in between the tanks and the mosque. The Israelis then proceeded to start firing with tank-mounted machine guns directly into the crowd of women.

One line in the Times’ article particularly caught my eye. Women were falling from the gunfire, many injured and screaming in pain, two dead, and dozens running from the scene in panic. Still other women, though, were doing something else. The Israelis were firing, their compatriots were falling all around them, but they kept on walking towards the mosque.

A few days later, Gaza once again made it into the Times. The Israelis had identified a house in Jabaliya as being inhabited by a resistance fighter. Of course, the house was also occupied by his entire extended family. And of course, his was a legitimate resistance against a brutal, illegal, horribly violent occupation. Nonetheless, the IDF was preparing to do to his house what they had done to thousands of other homes around Palestine – destroy it with missiles fired from an American fighter jet.

This time the IDF telephoned the house first and told everybody to get out, that the house would be destroyed. On countless other occasions, the Israelis have destroyed houses with no warning, or almost immediately after issuing a warning, while people were still in the house, and many people have died that way. Knowing this, the residents of the house refused to leave.

Instead, they called on the community to come join them, which they did. People packed into the house and on the roof, including the Palestinian Prime Minister Ismael Hanieh. Knowing that death was quite likely around the corner, the people stood their ground. This time, the IDF backed down, and left the house intact.

It’s in moments like these, and in the faces of people like Saed Abu-Hijleh, that you can get a glimpse of the dignity that pervades the spirit of the Palestinian people. As with the women outside the mosque in Beit Hanoun, as with the boys and girls defiantly returning to school day after day, as with those trying simply to live in their houses, the Palestinian people are increasingly faced with the reality that they have only two real choices. To stand their ground one way or to stand their ground another. To die the death of a martyr or to live the life of a hero.

Before I got to Palestine I was having dinner in Beirut with an older, well-respected Lebanese man who worked for the UN there. I asked him what he thought of Israel. His was a long-term, philosophical outlook, I suppose. “The Moors occupied Spain for 800 years, but eventually they were kicked out, because they didn’t belong there,” he said. “The Romans occupied Jerusalem for 700 years, but they were eventually kicked out, because they didn’t belong there. Israel has been a state for only 50 years.”

Whether it takes eight years or 800 years to end the Israeli occupation of Palestine, there will surely be many more martyrs like Saed’s mother. And just as surely, as long as there are Palestinians left alive, there will be many like Saed -- refusing to leave, standing up, there in what remains of Nablus when the occupation is finally defeated.

David Rovics is a singer-songwriter who tours regularly around North America, Europe and occasionally elsewhere. His website is www.davidrovics.com.

Click Here to Read More...

SOA Protests 2006

As usual, it was almost completely ignored by the corporate media. But once again, tens of thousands of people of conscience made what has become an annual pilgrimage to Columbus, Georgia, to protest a large terrorist training camp. The camp is located within Fort Benning, and once again, there we were outside one of the entrances to the military base, remembering the dead, hoping to prevent future deaths.

While some protests can resemble TV caricatures of a protest – such as those that ANSWER is generally responsible for, with endless hours of rhetoric blasting from the big stage and then everybody goes home – this protest is equal parts heart, mind and spirit. It’s theater, it’s a convention, it’s a permitted protest, it’s civil disobedience, and it’s a big series of small and large celebrations.


This was the 15th annual rally at Fort Benning, and I believe it’s the eighth that I’ve participated in. Times have changed, but the size of the rally has consistently grown through the years. This one was estimated to be the largest yet. There was no Indymedia Center this year, and other aspects of the anarchist youth scene that was so prominent several years ago were missing. The dilapidated condominiums that used to line the road on stage left were gone, with what used to be the front yards lined with a big fence reading “private property.” So the Catholic Worker hospitality house, the puppetistas’ staging ground, and the SOA Watch media office had to move to other, disparate locations, but still the sense of community among those who had come to Columbus for the weekend was palpable all over the city.

Every hotel in Columbus, as in previous years, was taken over for the weekend by the movement to close down the School of the Assassins. Large delegations from several Jesuit universities occupied the Sheraton. Pax Christi had their annual SOA get-together at Howard Johnson’s. The Columbus Convention Center was full of nonstop nonvioelence trainings, presentations on US foreign policy, screenings of new and old documentaries, and nightly concerts.

For many thousands of people every year it’s their first time at the annual protest, and many lives are changed profoundly. For them the weekend is an initiation, a gateway drug into the greater world, which will lead to years of activism, probably Spanish lessons, trips to Latin America, and a much more personal awareness of the fact that they are living in the center of an empire bent on global domination. For the first time, they hear stories from the survivors of torture and US-sponsored massacres. For them, the emperor is suddenly and forever naked.

For those of us who come most every year, it is a reunion. For many of us working on related issues but living in different parts of the country or the world, it is the only time each year that we see each other. For others it depends on what’s going on. Some of us may have seen a lot more of each other when the movement against the war in Iraq was in fuller swing, in 2003. For yet others, we saw more of each other when the movement against the IMF and the World Bank was still happening, before it began it’s slow decline after essentially being killed by Al Qaeda on 9/11.

But whatever else is or isn’t going on in terms of the progressive movement, there is always, it seems, the SOA. There are always more people coming to the protest, always a vibrant mix of young and old, Christian and atheist, spanning the political spectrum from liberal to anarchist. Staffing tables along the road to the gates of Fort Benning, there are always the familiar faces from CISPES, AFSC, and Witness for Peace. This year there are many new faces from Iraq Veterans Against the War, and the Common Ground Collective doing their invaluable work in New Orleans.

My favorite part of the whole thing is seeing so many of my fellow musicians. A strange thing about being a professional musician is you rarely see other professional musicians. Most of us make a living by touring, so anytime we’re in each other’s home towns, the other one is usually on the road, too. The times we get to see each other are at festivals and at protests. As with most other politically-obsessed musicians, they never let me play at the festivals, so I mainly get to see my musician friends at protests.

When Pete Seeger sang at the protest several years ago he called the movement to close down the SOA “the singingest movement since the Civil Rights movement.” This is surely the case (at least when we’re talking about the US). About every other person getting on the stage is a musician, or a group of musicians, singing new and old songs about making a better world. The calibre is generally very good, with folks like Charlie King and Karen Brandow, Jon Fromer, Francisco Herrera, the Prince Myshkins, Emma’s Revolution, Colleen Kattau, Chris Chandler, Anne Feeney, Dave Lippman, the Indigo Girls, Llatsasujo and the Chestnut Brothers being regulars. About half of the folks on my links page, there every year, all staying at the Day’s Inn with me! This year particularly featured the eloquent voice of Holly Near, and great musicians I had never heard before, such as Jose Saavedra. Other great musicians I had heard before but never met, such as Sara Thomsen. Others who only come now and then, but who add so much with their presence, such as Tao Rodriguez-Seeger.

After all the music, meetings, impromptu parties and reunions, the culminating event on Sunday took me by surprise, as it always does. I’m not a big fan of liturgical music, or songs from the 60’s that I’ve heard once too often over the years. Every time, I start out on Sunday with a sense of foreboding. Oh no, not another three-hour marathon of Gregorian Chanting. But then I get there and my reticence melts away. Like the thousands of young and old people standing around, taken by surprise by the intensity of the moment, sobbing unexpectedly, I am once again bowled over by the power of this ritual.

Slowly walking to the gates of Fort Benning are thousands of people, each holding a little white cross with the name of someone killed by a graduate of the SOA. On the stage are a few men and women, singing a few sparse notes in brilliant, somber harmony. They’re musicians, so the harmonies sometimes get a little more interesting than they need to be, sometimes resembling the Bulgarian Women’s Choir a bit, but this only adds to the power of the thing. They’re singing the names of the dead, and their ages, alternating between English and Spanish. So often they’re just children, often babies who are being remembered. After each name, we all sing the word, “presente” – present.

It’s 5:00 and the ritual is over, after a few more short speeches and songs. One of the organizers, Chris Inserra, announces that the 14th person has crossed the line through a hole in the fence. Thus, fourteen more people have joined the 283 before them, and are facing the possibility of a six-month jail sentence for trespassing on a military base. Father Roy Bourgeois, the founder of School of the Americas Watch, standing on the stage only fifty feet from his humble apartment right by the gates of Fort Benning (stage right, where the apartments still stand), says a few closing words.

The Democrats now control the Congress, but most of us are under the impression that we’ll see each other again next year. The empire needs it’s terrorist training camps. The US certainly can’t control Latin America through democratic means -- Venezuela and Bolivia have recently proven that.

The musicians and organizers all bid each other adieu. Speakers come and go, but the musicians generally all hang around backstage, so we’re mostly all there at the end of the day. Some folks are going off to spend Thanksgiving with family. Others are doing some more gigs in the area while they’re in the southeast. I’m sitting on this plane to go do another tour of Scandinavia. But whatever else happens, most of us will see each other next year at the gates of Fort Benning. Thousands of people will come from all over the US and elsewhere to protest. For many it will be their fourth, fifth or tenth time. For many others it will be their first protest anywhere, and their initiation into the progressive movement. And as usual, the mass media will be nowhere to be seen. At least some things are predictable.

Click Here to Read More...

The Plowshares 5 and the Raytheon 9

I drive off the ferry into the new Dublin. Much of it still looks like the old Dublin, before the EU and Celtic Tigerhood. The Liffey is still there, the foot bridges over it, the majestic buildings, the Winding Stair bookstore. I can still smell the sweat of the men marching to their deaths on the Easter Rising. Somebody on Grafton Street is still playing “The Foggy Dew” on uilean pipes. But the center of Dublin is a place for drunk college students and black-clad nouveau yuppies eating nouveau cuisine in nouveau restaurants. From what I’ve tasted it’s often the same guys who used to cook at Bewley’s who are now cooking in smaller kitchens, making smaller portions of the same food and charging a lot more money for it.

But other things haven’t changed. According to it’s constitution Ireland is a neutral country. Although it’s a member of the European Union, it hasn’t joined NATO, and there are people aiming to keep it that way. That night I’m doing a benefit for the Pitstop Plowshares, five men and women who are awaiting sentencing for their crimes. Their crimes were essentially trying to enforce Irish law when the Irish government wouldn’t.


These folks had noticed planes passing through en route to land at Shannon Airport that didn’t look like commercial planes. Upon closer inspection (accomplished easily enough by passing by the sleeping security guard watching over the airport), it turned out these were American warplanes refueling on their way to Iraq. When asked, the authorities told them these planes didn’t exist. When someone painted the planes’ windshields orange so they’d be a bit more visible, the authorities were embarrassed.

But the planes that officially didn’t exist also didn’t go away, and some people then engaged in what has become a long and honorable tradition. They took sledgehammers to the nosecones and other parts of some of the warplanes, causing millions of dollars in damage.

They were awaiting sentence when I saw them. They were preparing for what would likely be long jail sentences. But unusually, the judge had allowed international law to be brought into the equation, and the defendants were allowed to bring expert witnesses like Scott Ritter onto the stand and to talk about the illegality of the war in Iraq, how it was based on lies and all that. And as I was leaving Dublin the next day I heard on the radio that the Pitstop Plowshares 5 had been found not guilty.
As with a similar case in England ten years before, a jury had essentially found that what the government was doing was illegal, and what the activists did was an effort at law enforcement.

There was a general state of elation for a little while on the Irish left, it seemed, a little sense of vindication. And, not to rest on any laurels, the next day I’m watching the news in my hotel room and there’s a woman who came to the benefit in Dublin, getting dragged off by the cops for disrupting a speech of George Bush Sr. during his little visit to Ireland.

The last gig on my little Irish tour was in Derry, a lovely town which has also benefitted from Celtic Tigerhood. Among the new employers in town is Raytheon, where lots of software developers work. The Derry City Council was assured that no military-related work would be going on there. But word had gotten out that they were designing software for guided missiles, and Raytheon was a popular subject of conversation when I was passing through.

A couple months later I heard from my friend Fiachra, from Donegal (for which Derry was traditionally the capital city, before partition). He tells me that nine people, representing between them three different political parties, went into the Raytheon plant and started throwing computers and filing cabinets out the windows. It took the police eight hours before they got around to storming the place and arresting them. Perhaps smelling the wind after the acquittal of the Pitstop Plowshares, Raytheon has apparently been reluctant to press charges or otherwise publicize the event.

It’s enough to give one a momentary sense of optimism. With heroic people like the Pitstop Plowshares and the Raytheon 9, and sensible judges and juries like those that acquitted these sledgehammer-wielding women and men, who knows what could happen.

Click Here to Read More...

Syrian Influence

It’s all over the news, Pierre Gemayel has been murdered in Beirut. Gemayel was a member of the Phalange party, who’s pro-Israeli militia in 1982 carried out a massacre of thousands of Palestinian women and children in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. A lot of people are upset with the Phalangists since then, and recent developments haven’t helped. Namely the airborne demolition of the country by Israel last summer, which the Bush administration encouraged. Nonetheless, the corporate media is awash with President Bush announcing he will “stand by Lebanon.” It’s this sort of thing which often makes me wonder if people like him are living on a different planet from the rest of us, or some sort of parallel universe.

He could have stood by Lebanon when Israel bombed the country into rubble, erasing all the progress made during the post-war years, destroying it’s infrastructure, killing over a thousand people, one-third of them children, all on the pretext of two captured soldiers. But no, a Phalangist government minister has been assassinated, Syria is surely to blame for everything, and now we’re going to stand by Lebanon. All the talk is of Syria, and Syrian influence in Lebanon. Though the Syrian Army withdrew when the UN told them to, and were not in the country when Israel destroyed it, the talk is all about Syria.


I visited Lebanon just over a year ago. My friend Rana is from Beirut, and she has cousins all over the country – in her family there are Sunnis, Shia, Palestinians and Maronites. I saw as much of Lebanon in a week as it was possible to see. We visited a lovely castle that the Israelis bombed for good measure in 1996. We visited the liberated Khiam Prison, where we saw the tiny cages in which it was impossible to do anything but kneel, where they tortured those they suspected of being Hezbollah fighters. It looked just like some of the photos from Abu Ghraib. Former prisoners were giving tours of the prison. Children were having a karate test in one of the rooms that had been turned into a community center.

But Khiam Prison is now a pile of rubble, along with all of the bridges we crossed as we traversed Lebanon, north, south and central.

Condoleeza Rice actually talked about “the birth pangs of a new Middle East.” As babies were dying along with their mothers, asphyxiated in their mother’s arms, as in one photograph. As other babies were arriving stillborn in the hospitals from their traumatized mothers. As other women in labor were unable to cross bombed bridges to get to those hospitals. There’s that alternate reality again, I guess.

I heard a Lebanese woman speaking from Beirut on a community radio station in California. She was talking about a joke that was going around Lebanon during the Israeli bombardment. Feyrouz, the famous Lebanese singer, sings a song called “The Bridge.” The Israeli military called her up and asked, “Ms. Feyrouz, where exactly is that bridge you sang about?” It seems that one way Israel’s foreign policy could be summed up is, once you burn your bridges, the next thing to do is to bomb them.

As excited as I was to see Lebanon when I visited, and as busy as my tour of the country was, I was staying up late every night in my hotel room, following news on the internet and on television. A massive hurricane had hit New Orleans, thousands were dying, the levees had broke. The National Guard was busy participating in the imperial adventure in Iraq, and nowhere to be seen on the Gulf Coast. The money that should have been spent on maintaining the levees was instead spent on the war in Iraq, and on military aid for Isr