Tag: massacre

Upset about the massacre of Peruvian indigenous people?

Upset about the massacre of Peruvian indigenous people?

Please consider voting at progressive.org to have this question asked at their next Q&A session:

What do you intend to do about the massacre of Peruvian indigenous people?

What do you intend to do regarding the Peruvian Free Trade Agreement which is being used as justification for the massacre indigenous protestors who have been protesting the oil and mining projects in the northern Peruvian province of Bagua.

With the Peruvian Free Trade Agreement as excuse, the Peruvian government is now taking away indigenous rights and creating a threat to the Amazon rainforest by taking away land from indigenous people and allowing that land, rainforest, to be reclassified as agricultural land so that biofuel companies can move in with plantations and to allow oil companies and mining companies to be able to work in the area without having to negotiate or speak to the local communities before using THEIR lands.

How can we stand by and allow this to happen in the name of “free trade?”

If enough people vote for this question, it will be answered on the floor of the House of Representatives by members of the Progressive Caucus live on C-SPAN and also be recorded as part of the official Congressional Record.

Admittedly it’s a small step, but IMO anything that adds visibility to this issue is a good thing.

How I Learned to Savor Thanksgiving

I’ve again been entreated by numerous people to post the Thanksgiving Diary that I’ve put up here the past four years. I’m reposting a slightly edited version of last year’s entry. For those of you who’ve read it before, I apologize. I also urge you to read my friend Winter Rabbit’s The Massacre For Which Thanksgiving Is Named.

• • •

I forced myself to watch the History Channel’s Desperate Crossing: The Untold Story of the Mayflower last weekend. I don’t feel as if I totally wasted my time. Including performances and interviews of some Wampanoags, descendants of the indigenes who saw the Pilgrims make landfall 388 years ago, made the program a good deal more palatable than it might have been.

I would have preferred a bit more about how one reason the Pilgrims were “persecuted” in England and Holland was because of their efforts to get everyone to comply with their own crabbed view of religion. Something they and the Puritans who followed them also did here in America. Not dissimilar from what some modern day others would like to do now. But what an improvement the program was over past efforts.

Lest we forget what war means

It was a year or so before it became a story, but 40 years ago today US soldiers committed the worst of the known atrocities of the Viet Nam war.  A short article in the Economist gives the briefest of thumbnail sketches,

VICTIMS’ bodies were mutilated; women were gang-raped; a baby was used for target practice.

And here we are 40 years later, in a regime that had the apologist for My Lai, Colin Powell as Secretary of Defense engaged in another war started under another pretext.  When will we get the revelations about this war?  What we know is bad enough, certainly, but we know that worse will come.  Even just the daily destruction, dismemberment, humiliations of the occupation are atrocious, but there will be stories that come out that put the lie to this being a righteous occupation done by pristine warriors firmly on the side of the right.

As in all wars, this is a war fought by the young and the bored and the scared.  A war fought in a land where we are unwanted-even when we act our best.  I never thought that we would let ourselves get into another war without good reason, but once again I was wrong.