These raids come on the heels of the Obama administration’s decision to pursue its right to assassinate its own citizens. Earlier this year, the administration approved of the assassination of a radical, US-born Muslim cleric named Anwar Al Awlaki. The American Civil Liberties Union and other groups denounced the administration’s position. “The idea that courts should have no role whatsoever in determining the criteria by which the executive branch can kill its own citizens is unacceptable in a democracy.”

This country has had a long history of suppressing the words and political activities of people of color. In July of last year, on my blog, OurNewAnahuac.net, I posted a story about the military sending undercover spies into non-violent anti-war organizations in the Northwest. In the post, I made some connections to COINTELPRO, which was a government program used to suppress activist groups in the sixties. After the sixties, some of the program’s shocking activities were revealed.

One Chicano leader who had helped organize a group called the Brown Berets was actually a Treasury Department operative under the COINTELPRO program. Anyone even slightly familiar with today’s Brown Berets knows that the government has left a scar on the organization which exists even today. In many other instances, activists who had engaged in violence or encouraged it were actually government operatives.

In that July post, I wrote, “The problem is, I don’t believe that such surveillance has ever ended. It has just changed forms, using more decentralized forms of management. It is becoming clear that there might be much more centralized control of such surveillance resurfacing.” A little over a year later, it seems clear that I was correct.

The structure of this society and government is most in trouble with these new trends. Traditionally, minorities of all colors have had to deal with official oppression in differing forms. This is nothing new. In fact, to my own disappointment, I have had to come to terms with the fact that injustice is so much a tradition in or community, that it is often no longer a cause for outrage. The minority communities who are victims of this repression will survive, as we always have, damaged, scarred and with more mal-adaptive behaviors.

The true issue is that, this society, this government or whatever term you wish to use, is setting itself up for an explosion. The only spirit which holds this fragmented country together is the constitution, and all the myths that the constitution sells to minorities. Most countries are bound by some combination of culture, religion, language, and history.

In the US, there is no official culture; there is no official language; we expect to have a freedom of religion, and the history of this country is so exploitative, that history would be a more effective way to divide the country than to unite it. Instead, the only promise that this country can sell to the people who would normally go in their own directions, is that here, unlike anywhere in the world, you are supposed to have the freedom of speech, the right to petition the government, the right to religion, the right to hate the country, and most importantly the right to life while enjoying these freedoms. Rights, and the ability to convince minorities of all kinds that we can enjoy these rights, are the only thing holding this country together. It did not matter that in practice we could not enjoy these rights. As long as we were convinced that we were afforded these rights by the constitution, we would get in line and wait for these rights to be handed out. Sure, we might make a raucous, but over all we would not leave the line, no matter how long it was.

As long as the repression was done secretly, as was the case with COINTELPRO, the government could always put up a show, telling the people of color that, in fact, the people behind these secret programs were out of line, and were acting against the constitution. We just needed to end this program or punish that person and the constitution would take care of the rest.

What makes today different are a few things: the raids of a few days ago were conducted on many white people. Additionally, the government is no longer making efforts to hide the fact that if you hate its policies, and speak openly about its destruction (even if you take no violent actions) they will not hesitate to order your assassination.

With the government telling us and showing us to our face that we cannot speak our mind in an organized manner and that if we do, they can kill us; and with them showing us that they will not even stop with minorities, what other ideas do they have to sell us?

It is especially difficult to hold back when the theme of the movie has to do with socio-political reality or history. I barely saw Avatar last night…spoiler alert. Avatar was well received in the progressive community internationally, and Filmmaker James Cameron, become recognized as a champion of indigenous and environmental rights almost overnight.

Perhaps it was this acclaim that allowed me to begin watching Avatar with a generally open mind. I usually expect the worst when Hollywood picks up such a theme, but I thought I would give the movie a chance.

The movie acts as a mirror for today’s corporate-driven imperialist politics. It is an allegory for what is happening today in Afghanistan and what has happened historically at the hands of white imperialism.

In the film, it becomes clear early on, and in no uncertain terms, that the invading, white human army is after a mineral deposit which sits under the tree that the Na’vi, an alien race, inhabit. The tree is miles tall and houses thousands of Na’vi families.

One of the techniques used by the humans to get the Na’vi to leave the tree is to create a Na’vi look-alike with some human DNA. This creation is called an Avatar. This Avatar is controlled by a white human counterpart named Jake Sully.

This was a reference to the racial politics of early Spanish and English colonization, where explicit imperialist strategies were to inter-marry invading men with native female royalty. One northern native elder called this strain of imperialists, “liberal” imperialists. The goal of the liberal was very much to take land, gold and women from the natives. They only disagreed with their conservative counterparts as to the most useful strategy.

This Avatar was to ingratiate himself with the Na’vi and influence them to move elsewhere. It was clear that if the Avatar was unsuccessful, the corporate contractor would then authorize the military to move in and blast the tree and the civilization to Mictlan. The corporate administrator, played by Giovanni Ribisi, says something along the lines of, “Shareholders are greatly bothered by media images of natives being slaughtered, but they are bothered much more by quarterly losses, so hurry up an get them to move.”

Long story short, Jake fails to persuade the Na’vi to move, and he falls in love with an alien native. He never warns the natives that they will be under attack. It is only until the military begins its assault that Jake bothers to protest.

The army does come in and does blast the Tree of Life and the Na’vi to Mictlan. The Na’vi leave and mount a conventional counter-attack on the invading whites. Some Na’vi die, but in the end, Jake is successful in uniting different clans of the alien race, and under his leadership he defeats the white humans. The Na’vi goddess permanently transfers his soul from his human body to his Avatar body, and he becomes a hero of the resistance and a recognized leader of the Na’vi.

Generally, the movie did an adequate job in portraying the imperialist culture as one which has no problems with trading the lives of “savages and their children” for corporate profits. For all of the leftist acclaim, I found it surprising that it was, at essence a white savior film. It took a white alien human to unite the Na’vi and create the new technology (the domestication of a large bird) to defeat the white aliens. I mean, come on, really? For being a darling of the left, Avatar sure played into this tired ass theme. The white savior complex has been done almost everytime there has been a story about uplifting minorities: Wildcats, Dangerous Minds, The Last Samurai, Dances With Wolves, Gran Torino, The Blind Side, Mississippi Burning, but the list is really endless.

I also took issue with the fact that the liberal imperialist ended up as the hero. Jake conspired to have their society destroyed, and he never for one minute before the invasion tipped off the Na’vi that it was coming. He was an agent for liberal white imperialism and ended up as the hero of the film.

The film also fetishizes the response of the Na’vi. In the white mind, the only honorable way for an oppressed, obliterated, colonized society is to pull itself up from it’s bootstraps and engage in a conventional warfare response. Even in this Hollywood version of resistance, the response of native people is held to a higher, double standard. In reality, most colonized people have beaten the colonizer not by engaging in conventional warfare, but by being elusive and using effective, guerrilla tactics, by tiring and exasperating the invaders so much that they lose their will to occupy.

Finally, in the Hollywood version of colonial resistance, the native army simply rounded up the invaders and sent them back home with not so much as a handcuff to inconvenience them. The white psyche only wishes that the resistance would be so forgiving, even though the invaders themselves are guilty of intentionally killing unarmed civilian children. Deep in the white psyche, it is just for them to be strongly reprimanded and sent home. wrong. Think more along the lines of scorched earth.

The film did a good job of characterizing colonialist tendencies, which admittedly I did not cover in depth in this post, but it did a characteristically poor job in characterizing native response to colonialism. In the end, I give the film the score of fifty out of a hundred, which is higher than all other Hollywood films of a similar nature.

Finally, Diane Feinstein hobbled together an answer to the question at hand. Success, in her eyes, would be the creation of an independent Afghan government that would be able to sustain itself.

Then, Zakaria, the host pulled out the stats. Nine out of ten military recruits could not read the manual for their assault rifles. I don’t remember the other stats exactly, but they went something like this: A quarter of the recruits went AWOL in their first leave, a tenth of the weapons given to recruits got back into the hands of the Taliban, millions are being made from poppy and the drugs that come from them, etc. etc.

It became clear that as bad as the Taliban might have been, they were probably amongst the most skilled and disciplined in the country, being overwhelmingly militant in their commitments and schooled in military tactics. I’m guessing that they were generally more literate than the new recruits.

What else, oh yeah, there was that little matter of a trillion dollars worth of minerals being found in Afghanistan. From the Huff Post

Yes, it is true that these minerals do exist in Afghanistan but it is by no means news. The U.S. Geological survey made the discovery back in 2007. However, the U.S. government is pushing the story now because the coalition here has been rocked by some particularly bad press here the past week (Ironically from the New York Times. This causes me to wonder if the Times is attempting to buy its way back into the good graces of the Embassy in Kabul.)

It kind of like reminds me of that whole 1849 “magic discovery” of gold in California, one year after the US seized the state from Mexico by force…

Herminia Balli De Chavana (Mama Mine) and Rogerio Chavana (Papa Roger)

I have to admit that I got a little emotional last night discussing the DREAM Act on my other post.  I think many people have the impression that because I have had the benefit of some material privilege, that my arguments are somewhat based on scholasticism or pure ideology.  It is true that I am an ideologue.  I believe in nationalism and progressive leftist values. 

Take a look at that sweet, teddy bear of a man in that picture up there.  This is my Papa Roger.  He is a man by which many others should be judged, but I guess most of our grandparents are.  If you look closely enough, you can see that even at his age, he is peacocking for the camera.  Look at his left hand, and you will see that he has removed his glasses to take a good picture.  He is a Chavana after all.

He went to the Mexican school, and he went with no shoes.  I interviewed him on his deathbed, and asked why he had joined the army during World War II.  He answered simply, “because I was hungry.”  There was no talk of fighting fascism, no talk of saving democracy or hating the Third Reich.  My grandfather joined because he was hungry and found no other option to alleviate his hunger.  He told me that General McArthur would nickname his squad “His Pancho Villa Boys.”

When I talk about a de facto draft, I don’t talk out of some theory.  No, my grandfather was not “forced” to join the army, but he was the victim of a system which created such pressures, that in effect, there was a de facto draft for him.

That young, hungry man went on to burn other men alive in WWII with flamethrowers.  Sometimes instead of being burned alive, his enemies died because they were deprived of oxygen by his flamethrower.  He was too dignified to tell me, his grandson,  about what happened over there, but I have heard the story from other family members.  His friends fell next to him, and when he came back, he had “shell shock,” now referred to as PTSD, which he did discuss with me.  He went under medical care, but I think that even his grandchildren have had some effect from what he was made to do to other humans, and for what?  Because he was hungry. 

Incidentally, my mother’s father and his six brothers also fought in WWII. 

After coming home, my uncle Tony would get drunk and make his hands into machine guns and re-live the death of his “enemies.”  In a trance, he would return to the battlefield and take his family with him.

It kind of touched something in me when in my other recent post on the DREAM Act a DREAMer friend asked me not to destroy her by fighting against the DREAM Act.  Then I realized that while I might have some material priviledge now, others have the priviledge of not having an ancestor who was the victim of a de facto draft.

DREAMers are hungry. Some are literally hungry like my Papa Roger.  Some are not.  But that is exactly my point.  There are many people for whom college is not a reality.  It has nothing to do with intellect or capability, as one of the other comments suggest on my other post.

For those hungry youth, this DREAM Act, with no work or community service provision, can be their WWII.  I don’t take the phrase “de facto draft” lightly.  I apologize to my good friends whom I might offend, but this is not something that I can sweep under the rug.

I hope that you can see, that I am not simply putting my ideology before your need for documentation.  I am driven by my own family’s experience too. 

May the creator bless all of you on your quest.  May the creator bless our unity.  Y que en paz descansen los abuelos.

In his interview with Candy Crowley, Allen confirmed my initial thoughts: the government is acting so permissively, because they don’t have the power to do otherwise. I don’t mean the formal, regulatory power. What I mean is that the government does not have the technical power to oversee what is going on. Neither did they have the power to properly regulate the rig before the spill.

What those at the top do not openly dare admit is that private industry has surpassed the abilities of the US government in several sectors. Private industry has more technology, more creativity, more discipline and more knowledge than the agencies which pretend to regulate them.

The Admiral admitted that in the instance of the oil spill, BP had the technology required to work on the spill and the government does not. He said that “partnering” with BP to shut off the oil spill was the “necessary modality” which will be used to shut off the spill. He was later asked if he trusts BP. If the Admiral does not have the technology to do his own work, what choice does he have but to trust BP?  He is required to trust BP because he can’t do his own verifications.

Private industry has surpassed the ability of its regulators in many industries including, finance, weapons, computer tech and energy. I don’t say this to argue for the free market. I say this to warn against my previous prediction that the decline of government’s authority could one day make democracy irrelevant to the “masters of the universe,” the CEOs of these multi-nationals.

In this case, the government serves only as the guy in the room saying, “um do you think you can kind of hurry up? Do you need some water uh or help or something?”

In the end, the Admiral was forced to answer the question, “Do you trust BP?” He responded something like, “I trust Tony Hayward (BP’s CEO). I even have his cel phone, and he picks right up when I call him.” For real? That’s why? He answers your phone calls and answers your questions? He kind of sounded like a teenager bragging that they had spoken to one of their singing idols. Let’s hope Hayward doesn’t change his cel phone number.

Their change in perception was unintentional, but it made me aware of the power and efficacy of propaganda.  Admittedly, the speed with which this propaganda took root caught me off guard, as jaded as I am about the machinations of politics, conspiracy and media manipulation.  The original rationale for invading Iraq is important, to be sure, but more shocking is how quickly national media outlets can skew the public’s perception of what happened only a few years ago.  I have not seen any polls, but I am more than certain that the vast, vast majority of United Statesians now believe the original cause of the Iraq invasion to be the War of Terror. 

It made me think a little bit about the great shift if public perception that the Texas State Board of Education might be responsible for by changing the curriculum standards in the text books.  History is replete with forgotten movements and unnoticed heroes, especially our history and our heroes.  These movements and heroes are intentionally forgotten by curriculum writers and boards.  It is a shame that these handful of people might have the power to completely erase the Civil Rights movement from scholastic discourse within few years.

I remember looking up Chicano Movement once in my high school history book’s index.  There was only a “Chicago Movement,” listed.  When I looked up this “Chicago Movement,” I actually found what I was looking for, or at least a portion of it:  two paragraphs on the Chicano Movement existed in the book after all.  The index was mislabeled.

It will be a sad day, indeed, when I will wish that at least the Chicago Movement would still exist in the book’s index.

UPDATE: Stace Medellin from DosCentavos.net did a post on the specifics of how the board’s mandates will take its toll on our history.

What has a society become, if it is forced to militarily occupy its own community to “control” the youth? A police state.

I thought I’d just post the CNN file, so that you’d believe me.