Tag: history

Oct 13 2008

Not Columbus Day: Baracoa, The Beginning

cross-posted and updated from The Dream Antilles and NION

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The Church In Baracoa, Cuba

Across the Caribbean from desde Desdemona is Baracoa, a small town inaccessible by land from before 1500 (when Colombus first landed there in 1492) until the 1960’s. In 1512 Baracoa was the first Spanish settlement in Cuba. It’s like Macondo. The lush forest of the Sierra Maestre and El Yunque, the tallest peak in Cuba, tower over the town. The town is nestled against the warm ocean. North of town is Maguana, a beautiful, white beach, shared by tourists and occasional foraging pigs.

Join me in Baracoa.  We can celebrate Not Columbus Day together.

Oct 12 2008

Christopher Columbus & His Crimes Against Humanity

Christopher Columbus:


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The Christian Crusades had ended in 1291, the Black Death had been deliberately blamed on innocent Jews who said what their Christian torturers forced them to, that they poisoned water wells, causing the Black Death.  

Oct 11 2008

America’s West Bank: McCain’s Forced Navajo Relocation

For more clarification,see here.


Source

Not that long ago, the United Nations performed a Human Rights Investigation of the forced Navajo resettlement from Arizona to Nevada, under Special Rapporteur A. Amor. A law revised and submitted to Congress by Senator John McCain and others before him was determined to be the root cause of violations, which after ratification by President Clinton in 1999 during a globally publicized sit in by Songstress Julia Butterfly Hill at Big Mountain, Arizona.

Oct 05 2008

Poem Against Land Theft, McCain, & Hate Crimes

Esoteric spiritual madness has accompanied me as I have watched the continuing web of land theft spreading, still, from the Arctic to across the United States.

I know why, but I don’t know why. I have watched Manifest Destiny pair with Climate Change on what is a repetition of land theft from the gun to the gavel. I have watched a leading Republican presidential candidate who is getting away with having enacted legislation that forcefully removed the Navajo. That’s the last straw. The straw that breaks the camel’s back is hate crimes that don’t get noticed by the general public like other hate crimes would.

Oct 04 2008

The McCain Relocation

John McCain was out of the torturous grip of the North Vietnamese for approximately one year when Congress passed Public Law 93-531 in 1974. Public Law 93-531 was called the Relocation Act, and was falsely justified by what “Peabody Coal Company’s public relations and lobbying firms” falsely constructed  as the “Hopi-Navajo land dispute.” This “range war” was not true. What was true, was lawyer John Boyden with the assimilated Hopi Tribal Council.


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Boyden formed a Hopi Tribal Council that consisted of several First Mesa Hopi who had been converted to Mormonism, based on an election in which about 10 percent of the Hopis on the reservation voted. The newly elected Tribal Council then hired Boyden as their lawyer.

John Boyden with his assimilated Hopi Tribal Council wanted Peabody Coal to strip mine Black Mesa after the natural resources had been discovered. More than 10,000 Navajo and 100 Hopi did not want Black Mesa stripped.  

Sep 30 2008

Boom and Bust, from a Notable Economist

While many of us find ourselves swallowed up by the panic stimulated by 24-hour news cable services and the dying daily press, when we consider the current credit crunch and threats of doomsday, it is important to get some perspective on what is really happening.

History provides us that perspective. The following description of the famous economic panic that followed the collapse of the speculative bubble that surrounded railway expansion in Britain in the mid-nineteenth century presents an illustrative example.

The economist writing here looked back at this famous economic collapse and drew some serious conclusions. The parallels between then and now are striking, even if “then” was over 150 years ago (emphases added):

Sep 23 2008

Opinion: American Fascists or Christian Fascists?

American fascism is the term used by Dr. James Luther Adams, who “was in Germany in 1935 and 1936 and worked with the underground anti-Nazi church.” He said that American fascists would dismantle the open society, using scripture, during “prolonged social instability or a national crisis.” Either of those conditions certainly meets the living conditions on many reservations of their social structure and their Nation. I argue from definition that “Christian fascists” or American fascists are appropriate to be applied to those who christianize Indigenous People as well as to be applied to those who committed  “the slaughters of yesteryear” for the following reasons:  

Sep 22 2008

269-269: The Nightmare Scenarios

All right, Chicken Littles.  You wanna play “the sky is falling?”  Okay, I’ll bite.  How ’bout these possible outcomes?:

Cheney becomes Temporary President in January, 2009…or… casts a tie-breaking vote in Senate balloting to determine who will be Succeeder to the Decider…or…Obama is elected President, but is saddled with Cariboucuda as his Vice President…

All this misery – and more! – can be yours, for the simple price of an Electoral College vote of 269-269.  Join me, if you will, in the Cave of the Moonbat, where tonight’s theme is “The Implausible and its Potentially Apocalyptic Consequences upon Humankind.”  The subject is the ticking time bomb represented by the Twelfth Amendment – and just for fun, let’s look at some best- and worst-case scenarios it might spawn in the event of an Electoral tie.  The suggested headgear for the evening is a tinfoil hat; umbrellas might also be helpful, since everyone knows that the sky can’t be falling if you can’t see it headed toward you.  

Sep 08 2008

Meet the Luddites!

Mention the term “Luddite” to most folks nowadays, and it’ll conjure up images of John McCain types – elderly folks still mystified by the electric typewriter, with “12:00” blinking perpetually on their VCRs – or the hard-core back-to-the-Earth sorts, who bristle at any device with moving parts.  As usual, the actual history is far more complex: these “frame-breakers” of early 19th-century England were not a variant on Amish farmers given over to vandalism, but rather the product of a complicated confluence of occurrences involving everything from newfangled labor-saving machines to the Napoleonic Wars.

Join me, if you will, in the Cave of the Moonbat, where tonight we’ll take a look inside the changing marketplace at the dawn of the 1800s – and at a group of folks who tried to plow the sea by attempting to arrest the flow of history.

Aug 29 2008

Dreaming The Dream Making History

Dreams give us hope. They inspire us to reach heights of creativity and invention that we believed were not possible. Dreams help us through are most desperate times because they allow us to see a future that is beyond the place we presently occupy.  Dreams are not just personal moments they can also be public.

Public, being that we allow others dreams to be our dreams by embracing them as if they belonged to us this has happened throughout the history of America. In recent history its been people like Franklin Roosevelt who offered America and Americans a New Deal and delivered it. Roosevelt brought electricity to rural America, created the Social Security Administration providing all Americans with a social safety net something no previous administration had ever done.  Rosa Parks a seamstress living in Alabama and a Civil Rights Activist who refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery Alabama to a white customer setting the stage for the Montgomery bus boycott and the furtherance of the civil rights movement.  The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King who inspired by the ideals of Gandhi and his use of nonviolence to achieve his goals applied those same principles to the American Civil Rights Movement inspiring millions to join his cause.  President John F. Kennedy a man who just didn’t allow Americans to dream but inspired millions around the world to dream. How popular was he?  So popular that his picture could find in the most unexpected places in the world be, it in America, Europe or Africa. So popular that he gave a speech to 10’s of thousands West Berliners at the Brandenburg gate one of the most famous speeches ever given.      

All of these people and millions more had one common thread among them.  They dared to dream.  Dreams sometimes which others believed to be impossible but they still dreamt they could be reached.

So, yesterday not only did a dream come true but history was made when Barack Obama was nominated by the Democratic Party to be their presidential nominee. He is the first person of African American heritage or African decent in either America or Europe to be given the opportunity to be the leader of a major political or economic power.

Dreams can come true and Barack Obama has proven just that.  

Aug 28 2008

I have a dream

Forty-five years ago tomorrow, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke these famous words on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial:

Aug 21 2008

Attempted Encroachment on the Medicine Bluffs

I guess I always thought that at least the Medicine Bluffs would be safe from development. In fact, I just told someone today that it probably would be, since it is on an Army Base.


Source

A federal judge has blocked the U.S. Army from starting a construction project at Fort Sill in Oklahoma out of concern for the religious rights of the Comanche Nation.

The tribe says it wasn’t consulted about the development of a training service center near the foot of Medicine Bluffs, a sacred site at Fort Sill. Work was scheduled to begin on Monday until Judge Timothy D. DeGiusti issued a temporary restraining order.

“The court finds that, given the nature of the interests which plaintiffs in this case seek to protect, irreparable harm will result if the construction project commences,” DeGiusti wrote in the five-page order.

I was wrong.

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