Cornel West Says Obama’s Policies Have Same Racist Effects As Bush’s

Washington — Cornel West has continued his harsh post election criticism of President Barack Obama. According to Firedog Lake, West told the show “Democracy Now”

Gonzalez had asked Prof. West to comment on Kanye West’s assertion that “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people;” but the professor diverted into criticism of the current Administration. He said he thinks neither Bush nor Obama acts out of “racist motivation and intention,” but that both Administrations inflict(ed) “racist effect and consequence” on people of color, and that their policies have “generated levels of misery among Black people, Brown people, Red people, but especially among the working class poor.”

Cornel West echoed Kanye West in rebuking Obama: “… He doesn’t care about the Black poor: The evidence is overwhelming! … His policies [a]re racist in effect and consequence and especially classist in terms of generating misery among poor people, disproportionately Black and Brown. … The Obama Administration seems to have very little concern about poor people and their social misery: Look at the policies vis-a-vis Wall Street – downplaying Main Street; look at the policies of Black Farmers – a settlement already in place but they don’t want to execute it because they don’t want to be associated with Black folk too explicitly; look at the policies of dilapidated housing; we can go right across the board – look at the policies of the new Jim Crow – the Prison-Industrial Complex.”

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9-Year-Old Pulls 5 Other Kids Out Of Burning Home In Florida

Thanksgiving 2010: Single Georgia Mom Of 4 Awarded New Home

Georgia — One Savannah family is living out the American dream this Thanksgiving, as a single mom and her four kids have a brand new home to call their own, thanks to Habitat for Humanity.

Most of us take the little things for granted, like having a kitchen where you can cook Thanksgiving dinner. But after struggling for years, Monique Black now has a home of her own where she can do just that.

“We’re very fortunate to have it, very fortunate to have Habitat and all the volunteers that worked on the house. If it wasn’t for the volunteers we wouldn’t be in here for the Thanksgiving holidays,” said Black.

How I Stopped Hating Thanksgiving and Learned to Be Afraid

By Robert Jensen

I have stopped hating Thanksgiving and learned to be afraid of the holiday.

Over the past few years a growing number of white people have joined the longstanding indigenous people’s critique of the holocaust denial that is at the heart of the Thanksgiving holiday. In two recent essays, I have examined the disturbing nature of a holiday rooted in a celebration of the European conquest of the Americas, which means the celebration of the Europeans’ genocidal campaign against Indigenous people that is central to the creation of the United States.

Many similar pieces have been published in predominantly white left/progressive media, while indigenous people continue to mark the holiday as a “National Day of Mourning.”

In recent years I have refused to participate in Thanksgiving Day meals, even with friends and family who share this critical analysis and reject the national mythology around manifest destiny. In bowing out of those gatherings, I would often tell folks that I hated Thanksgiving. I realize now that “hate” is the wrong word to describe my emotional reaction to the holiday. I am afraid of Thanksgiving. More accurately, I am afraid of what Thanksgiving tells us about both the dominant culture and much of the alleged counterculture.

Here’s what I think it tells us: As a society, the United States is intellectually dishonest, politically irresponsible, and morally bankrupt. This is a society in which even progressive people routinely allow national and family traditions to trump fundamental human decency. It’s a society in which, in the privileged sectors, getting along and not causing trouble are often valued above honesty and accountability. Though it’s painful to consider, it’s possible that such a society is beyond redemption. Such a consideration becomes frightening when we recognize that all this goes on in the most affluent and militarily powerful country in the history of the world, but a country that is falling apart — an empire in decline.

Thanksgiving should teach us all to be afraid.

Although it’s well known to anyone who wants to know, let me summarize the argument against Thanksgiving: European invaders exterminated nearly the entire indigenous population to create the United States. Without that holocaust, the United States as we know it would not exist. The United States celebrates a Thanksgiving Day holiday dominated not by atonement for that horrendous crime against humanity but by a falsified account of the “encounter” between Europeans and American Indians. When confronted with this, most people in the United States (outside of indigenous communities) ignore the history or attack those who make the argument. This is intellectually dishonest, politically irresponsible, and morally bankrupt.

In left/radical circles, even though that basic critique is widely accepted, a relatively small number of people argue that we should renounce the holiday and refuse to celebrate it in any fashion. Most leftists who celebrate Thanksgiving claim that they can individually redefine the holiday in a politically progressive fashion in private, which is an illusory dodge: We don’t define holidays individually or privately — the idea of a holiday is rooted in its collective, shared meaning. When the dominant culture defines a holiday in a certain fashion, one can’t pretend to redefine it in private. To pretend we can do that also is intellectually dishonest, politically irresponsible, and morally bankrupt.

I press these points with no sense of moral superiority. For many years I didn’t give these questions a thought, and for some years after that I sat sullenly at Thanksgiving dinners, unwilling to raise my voice. For the past few years I’ve spent the day alone, which was less stressful for me personally (and, probably, less stressful for people around me) but had no political effect. This year I’ve avoided the issue by accepting a speaking invitation in Canada, taking myself out of the country on that day. But that feels like a cheap resolution, again with no political effect in the United States.

The next step for me is to seek creative ways to use the tension around this holiday for political purposes, to highlight the white-supremacist and predatory nature of the dominant culture, then and now. Is it possible to find a way to bring people together in public to contest the values of the dominant culture? How can those of us who want to reject that dominant culture meet our intellectual, political, and moral obligations? How can we act righteously without slipping into self-righteousness? What strategies create the most expansive space possible for honest engagement with others?

Along with allies in Austin, I’ve struggled with the question of how to create an alternative public event that could contribute to a more honest accounting of the American holocausts in the past (not only the indigenous genocide, but African slavery) and present (the murderous U.S. assault on the developing world, especially in the past six decades, in places such as Vietnam and Iraq).

Some have suggested an educational event, bringing in speakers to talk about those holocausts. Others have suggested a gathering focused on atonement. Should the event be more political or more spiritual? Perhaps some combination of methods and goals is possible.

However we decide to proceed, we can’t ignore the ugly ideological realities of the holiday. My fear of those realities is appropriate but facing reality need not leave us paralyzed by fear; instead it can help us understand the contours of the multiple crises — economic and ecological, political and cultural — that we face. The challenge is to channel our fear into action. I hope that next year I will find a way to take another step toward a more meaningful honoring of our intellectual, political, and moral obligations.

As we approach Thanksgiving Day, I’m eager to hear about the successful strategies of others. For such advice, I would be thankful.

Robert Jensen is a professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin and author of Citizens of Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity and Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity (South End Press, 2007). His latest book is All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice, published by Soft Skull Press. He can be reached at: rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu.

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Thanksgiving: First Genocide, Then Lie About It

By Mitchel Cohen

With much material contributed by Peter Linebaugh and others whose names have over the years been lost.–MC

The year was 1492. The Taino-Arawak people of the Bahamas discovered Christopher Columbus on their beach.

Historian Howard Zinn tells us how Arawak men and women, naked, tawny, and full of wonder, emerged from their villages onto the island’s beaches and swam out to get a closer look at the strange big boat. When Columbus and his sailors came ashore, carrying swords, speaking oddly, the Arawaks ran to greet them, brought them food, water, gifts. Columbus later wrote of this in his log. Here is what he wrote:

“They brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks’ bells. They willingly traded everything they owned. They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features. They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of sugar cane. They would make fine servants. With 50 men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.”

And so the conquest began, and the Thanotocracy — the regime of death — was inaugurated on the continent the Indians called “Turtle Island.”You probably already know a good piece of the story: How Columbus’s Army took Arawak and Taino people prisoners and insisted that they take him to the source of their gold, which they used in tiny ornaments in their ears. And how, with utter contempt and cruelty, Columbus took many more Indians prisoners and put them aboard the Nina and the Pinta — the Santa Maria having run aground on the island of Hispañola (today, the Dominican Republic and Haiti). When some refused to be taken prisoner, they were run through with swords and bled to death. Then the Nina and the Pinta set sail for the Azores and Spain. During the long voyage, many of the Indian prisoners died. Here’s part of Columbus’s report to Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain:

“The Indians are so naive and so free with their possessions that no one who has not witnessed them would believe it. When you ask for something they have, they never say no. To the contrary, they offer to share with anyone.” Columbus concluded his report by asking for a little help from the King and Queen, and in return he would bring them “as much gold as they need, and as many slaves as they ask.”

Columbus returned to the New World — “new” for Europeans, that is — with 17 ships and more than 1,200 men. Their aim was clear: Slaves, and gold. They went from island to island in the Caribbean, taking Indians as captives. But word spread ahead of them. By the time they got to Fort Navidad on Haiti, the Taino had risen up and killed all the sailors left behind on the last voyage, after they had roamed the island in gangs raping women and taking children and women as slaves. Columbus later wrote: “Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold.” The Indians began fighting back, but were no match for the Spaniard conquerors, even though they greatly outnumbered them. In eight years, Columbus’s men murdered more than 100,000 Indians on Haiti alone. Overall, dying as slaves in the mines, or directly murdered, or from diseases brought to the Caribbean by the Spaniards, over 3 million Indian people were murdered between 1494 and 1508. What Columbus did to the Arawaks of the Bahamas and the Taino of the Caribbean, Cortez did to the Aztecs of Mexico, Pizarro to the Incas of Peru, and the English settlers of Virginia and Massachusetts to the Powhatans and the Pequots. Literally millions of native peoples were slaughtered. And the gold, slaves and other resources were used, in Europe, to spur the growth of the new money economy rising out of feudalism. Karl Marx would later call this “the primitive accumulation of capital.” These were the violent beginnings of an intricate system of technology, business, politics and culture that would dominate the world for the next five centuries. All of this were the preconditions for the first Thanksgiving. In the North American English colonies, the pattern was set early, as Columbus had set it in the islands of the Bahamas. In 1585, before there was any permanent English settlement in Virginia, Richard Grenville landed there with seven ships. The Indians he met were hospitable, but when one of them stole a small silver cup, Grenville sacked and burned the whole Indian village. The Jamestown colony was established in Virginia in 1607, inside the territory of an Indian confederacy, led by the chief, Powhatan. Powhatan watched the English settle on his people’s land, but did not attack. And the English began starving. Some of them ran away and joined the Indians, where they would at least be fed. Indeed, throughout colonial times tens of thousands of indentured servants, prisoners and slaves — from Wales and Scotland as well as from Africa — ran away to live in Indian communities, intermarry, and raise their children there. In the summer of 1610 the governor of Jamestown colony asked Powhatan to return the runaways, who were living fully among the Indians. Powhatan left the choice to those who ran away, and none wanted to go back. The governor of Jamestown then sent soldiers to take revenge. They descended on an Indian community, killed 15 or 16 Indians, burned the houses, cut down the corn growing around the village, took the female leader of the tribe and her children into boats, then ended up throwing the children overboard and shooting out their brains in the water. The female leader was later taken off the boat and stabbed to death. By 1621, the atrocities committed by the English had grown, and word spread throughout the Indian villages. The Indians fought back, and killed 347 colonists. From then on it was total war. Not able to enslave the Indians the English aristocracy decided to exterminate them. And then the Pilgrims arrived. When the Pilgrims came to New England they too were coming not to vacant land but to territory inhabited by tribes of Indians. The story goes that the Pilgrims, who were Christians of the Puritan sect, were fleeing religious persecution in Europe. They had fled England and went to Holland, and from there sailed aboard the Mayflower, where they landed at Plymouth Rock in what is now Massachusetts. Religious persecution or not, they immediately turned to their religion to rationalize their persecution of others. They appealed to the Bible, Psalms 2:8: “Ask of me, and I shall give thee, the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession.” To justify their use of force to take the land, they cited Romans 13:2: “Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation.” The Puritans lived in uneasy truce with the Pequot Indians, who occupied what is now southern Connecticut and Rhode Island. But they wanted them out of the way; they wanted their land. And they seemed to want to establish their rule firmly over Connecticut settlers in that area. In 1636 an armed expedition left Boston to attack the Narragansett Indians on Block Island. The English landed and killed some Indians, but the rest hid in the thick forests of the island and the English went from one deserted village to the next, destroying crops. Then they sailed back to the mainland and raided Pequot villages along the coast, destroying crops again. The English went on setting fire to wigwams of the village. They burned village after village to the ground. As one of the leading theologians of his day, Dr. Cotton Mather put it: “It was supposed that no less than 600 Pequot souls were brought down to hell that day.” And Cotton Mather, clutching his bible, spurred the English to slaughter more Indians in the name of Christianity. Three hundred thousand Indians were murdered in New England over the next few years. It is important to note: The ordinary Englishmen did not want this war and often, very often, refused to fight. Some European intellectuals like Roger Williams spoke out against it. And some erstwhile colonists joined the Indians and even took up arms against the invaders from England. It was the Puritan elite who wanted the war, a war for land, for gold, for power. And, in the end, the Indian population of 10 million that was in North America when Columbus came was reduced to less than one million. The way the different Indian peoples lived — communally, consensually, making decisions through tribal councils, each tribe having different sexual/marriage relationships, where many different sexualities were practiced as the norm — contrasted dramatically with the Puritan’s Christian fundamentalist values. For the Puritans, men decided everything, whereas in the Iroquois federation of what is now New York state women chose the men who represented the clans at village and tribal councils; it was the women who were responsible for deciding on whether or not to go to war. The Christian idea of male dominance and female subordination was conspicuously absent in Iroquois society. There were many other cultural differences: The Iroquois did not use harsh punishment on children. They did not insist on early weaning or early toilet training, but gradually allowed the child to learn to care for themselves. And, they did not believe in ownership of land; they utilized the land, lived on it. The idea of ownership was ridiculous, absurd. The European Christians, on the other hand, in the spirit of the emerging capitalism, wanted to own and control everything — even children and other human beings. The pastor of the Pilgrim colony, John Robinson, thus advised his parishioners: “And surely there is in all children a stubbornness, and stoutness of mind arising from natural pride, which must, in the first place, be broken and beaten down; that so the foundation of their education being laid in humility and tractableness, other virtues may, in their time, be built thereon.” That idea sunk in. One colonist said that the plague that had destroyed the Patuxet people — a combination of slavery, murder by the colonists and disease — was “the Wonderful Preparation of the Lord Jesus Christ by His Providence for His People’s Abode in the Western World.” The Pilgrims robbed Wampanoag graves for the food that had been buried with the dead for religious reasons. Whenever the Pilgrims realized they were being watched, they shot at the Wampanoags, and scalped them. Scalping had been unknown among Native Americans in New England prior to its introduction by the English, who began the practice by offering the heads of their enemies and later accepted scalps. “What do you think of Western Civilization?” Mahatma Gandhi was asked in the 1940s. To which Gandhi replied: “Western Civilization? I think it would be a good idea.” And so enters “Civilization,” the civilization of Christian Europe, a “civilizing force” that couldn’t have been more threatened by the beautiful anarchy of the Indians they encountered, and so slaughtered them. These are the Puritans that the Indians “saved”, and whom we celebrate in the holiday, Thanksgiving. Tisquantum, also known as Squanto, a member of the Patuxet Indian nation. Samoset, of the Wabonake Indian nation, which lived in Maine. They went to Puritan villages and, having learned to speak English, brought deer meat and beaver skins for the hungry, cold Pilgrims. Tisquantum stayed with them and helped them survive their first years in their New World. He taught them how to navigate the waters, fish and cultivate corn and other vegetables. He pointed out poisonous plants and showed how other plants could be used as medicines. He also negotiated a peace treaty between the Pilgrims and Massasoit, head chief of the Wampanoags, a treaty that gave the Pilgrims everything and the Indians nothing. And even that treaty was soon broken. All this is celebrated as the First Thanksgiving. My own feeling? The Indians should have let the Pilgrims die. But they couldn’t do that. Their humanity made them assist other human beings in need. And for that beautiful, human, loving connection they — and those of us who are not Indian as well — paid a terrible price: The genocide of the original inhabitants of Turtle Island, what is now America. Let’s look at one example of the Puritan values — which were not, I repeat, the values of the English working class values that we “give thanks for” on this holiday. The example of the Maypole, and Mayday. In 1517, 25 years after Columbus first landed in the Bahamas, the English working class staged a huge revolt. This was done through the guilds. King Henry VIII brought Lombard bankers from Italy and merchants from France in order to undercut wages, lengthen hours, and break the guilds. This alliance between international finance, national capital and military aristocracy was in the process of merging into the imperialist nation-state. The young workers of London took their revenge upon the merchants. A secret rumor said the commonality — the vision of communal society that would counter the rich, the merchants, the industrialists, the nobility and the landowners — would arise on May Day. The King and Lords got frightened — householders were armed, a curfew was declared. Two guys didn’t hear about the curfew (they missed Dan Rather on t.v.). They were arrested. The shout went out to mobilize, and 700 workers stormed the jails, throwing bricks, hot water, stones. The prisoners were freed. A French capitalist’s house was trashed. Then came the repression: Cannons were fired into the city. Three hundred were imprisoned, soldiers patrolled the streets, and a proclamation was made that no women were allowed to meet together, and that all men should “keep their wives in their houses.” The prisoners were brought through the streets tied in ropes. Some were children. Eleven sets of gallows were set up throughout the city. Many were hanged. The authorities showed no mercy, but exhibited extreme cruelty. Thus the dreaded Thanatocracy, the regime of death, was inaugurated in answer to proletarian riot at the beginning of capitalism. The May Day riots were caused by expropriation (people having been uprooted from their lands they had used for centuries in common), and by exploitation (people had no jobs, as the monarchy imported capital). Working class women organizers and healers who posed an alternative to patriarchal capitalism — were burned at the stake as witches. Enclosure, conquest, famine, war and plague ravaged the people who, in losing their commons, also lost a place to put their Maypole. Suddenly, the Maypole became a symbol of rebellion. In 1550 Parliament ordered the destruction of Maypoles (just as, during the Vietnam war, the U.S.-backed junta in Saigon banned the making of all red cloth, as it was being sewn into the blue, yellow and red flags of the National Liberation Front). In 1664, near the end of the Puritans’ war against the Pequot Indians, the Puritans in England abolished May Day altogether. They had defeated the Indians, and they were attempting to defeat the growing proletarian insurgency at home as well. Although translators of the Bible were burned, its last book, Revelation, became an anti-authoritarian manual useful to those who would turn the Puritan world upside down, such as the Family of Love, the Anabaptists, the Diggers, Levellers, Ranters, and Thomas Morton, the man who in 1626 went to Merry Mount in Quincy Mass, and with his Indian friends put up the first Maypole in America, in contempt of Puritan rule. The Puritans destroyed it, exiled him, plagued the Indians, and hanged gay people and Quakers. Morton had come over on his own, a boat person, an immigrant. So was Anna Lee, who came over a few years later, the Manchester proletarian who founded the communal living, gender separated Shakers, who praised God in ecstatic dance, and who drove the Puritans up the wall. The story of the Maypole as a symbol of revolt continued. It crossed cultures and continued through the ages. In the late 1800s, the Sioux began the Ghost Dance in a circle, “with a large pine tree in the center, which was covered with strips of cloth of various colors, eagle feathers, stuffed birds, claws, and horns, all offerings to the Great Spirit.” They didn’t call it a Maypole and they danced for the unity of all Indians, the return of the dead, and the expulsion of the invaders on a particular day, the 4th of July, but otherwise it might as well have been a Mayday! Wovoka, a Nevada Paiute, started it. Expropriated, he cut his hair. To buy watermelon he rode boxcars to work in the Oregon hop fields for small wages, exploited. The Puget Sound Indians had a new religion — they stopped drinking alcohol, became entranced, and danced for five days, jerking twitching, calling for their land back, just like the Shakers! Wovoka took this back to Nevada: “All Indians must dance, everywhere, keep on dancing.” Soon they were. Porcupine took the dance across the Rockies to the Sioux. Red Cloud and Sitting Bull advanced the left foot following with the right, hardly lifting the feet from the ground. The Federal Agents banned the Ghost Dance! They claimed it was a cause of the last Sioux outbreak, just as the Puritans had claimed the Maypole had caused the May Day proletarian riots, just as the Shakers were dancing people into communality and out of Puritanism. On December 29 1890 the Government (with Hotchkiss guns throwing 2 pound explosive shells at 50 a minute — always developing new weapons!) massacred more than 300 men, women and children at Wounded Knee. As in the Waco holocaust, or the bombing of MOVE in Philadelphia, the State disclaimed responsibility. The Bureau of Ethnology sent out James Mooney to investigate. Amid Janet Reno-like tears, he wrote: “The Indians were responsible for the engagement.” In 1970, the town of Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts held, as it does each year, a Thanksgiving Ceremony given by the townspeople. There are many speeches for the crowds who attend. That year — the year of Nixon’s secret invasion of Cambodia; the year 4 students were massacred at Kent State and 13 wounded for opposing the war; the year they tried to electrocute Black Panthers Bobby Seale and Erica Huggins — the Massachusetts Department of Commerce asked the Wampanoag Indians to select a speaker to mark the 350th anniversary of the Pilgrims’ arrival, and the first Thanksgiving. Frank James, who is a Wampanoag, was selected. But before he was allowed to speak he was told to show a copy of his speech to the white people in charge of the ceremony. When they saw what he had written, they would not allow him to read it. First, the genocide. Then, the suppression of all discussion about it. What do Indian people find to be Thankful for in this America? What does anyone have to be Thankful for in the genocide of the Indians, that this “holyday” commemorates? As we sit with our families on Thanksgiving, taking any opportunity we can to get out of work or off the streets and be in a warm place with people we love, we realize that all the things we have to be thankful for have nothing at all to do with the Pilgrims, nothing at all to do with Amerikan history, and everything to do with the alternative, anarcho-communist lives the Indian peoples led, before they were massacred by the colonists, in the name of privatization of property and the lust for gold and labor. Yes, I am an American. But I am an American in revolt. I am revolted by the holiday known as Thanksgiving. I have been accused of wanting to go backwards in time, of being against progress. To those charges, I plead guilty. I want to go back in time to when people lived communally, before the colonists’ Christian god was brought to these shores to sanctify their terrorism, their slavery, their hatred of children, their oppression of women, their holocausts. But that is impossible. So all I look forward to the utter destruction of the apparatus of death known as Amerika — not the people, not the beautiful land, but the machinery, the State, the capitalism, the Christianity and all that it stands for. I look forward to a future where I will have children with Amerika, and they will be the new Indians. Mitchel Cohen is co-editor of “Green Politix”, the national newspaper of the Greens/Green Party USA,, and organizes with the NoSpray Coalition and the Brooklyn Greens. In memorium. Lest we forget. The First Thanksgiving From the Community Endeavor News, November, 1995, as reprinted in Healing Global Wounds, Fall, 1996 The first official Thanksgiving wasn’t a festive gathering of Indians and Pilgrims, but rather a celebration of the massacre of 700 Pequot men, women and children, an anthropologist says. Due to age and illness his voice cracks as he talks about the holiday, but William B. Newell, 84, talks with force as he discusses Thanksgiving. Newell, a Penobscot, has degrees from two universities, and was the former chairman of the anthropology department at the University of Connecticut. “Thanksgiving Day was first officially proclaimed by the Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1637 to commemorate the massacre of 700 men, women and children who were celebrating their annual green corn dance-Thanksgiving Day to them-in their own house,” Newell said. “Gathered in this place of meeting they were attacked by mercenaries and Dutch and English. The Indians were ordered from the building and as they came forth they were shot down. The rest were burned alive in the building,” he said. Newell based his research on studies of Holland Documents and the 13 volume Colonial Documentary History, both thick sets of letters and reports from colonial officials to their superiors and the king in England, and the private papers of Sir William Johnson, British Indian agent for the New York colony for 30 years in the mid-1600s. “My research is authentic because it is documentary,” Newell said. “You can’t get anything more accurate than that because it is first hand. It is not hearsay.” Newell said the next 100 Thanksgivings commemorated the killing of the Indians at what is now Groton, Ct. [home of a nuclear submarine base] rather than a celebration with them. He said the image of Indians and Pilgrims sitting around a large table to celebrate Thanksgiving Day was “fictitious” although Indians did share food with the first settlers.

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As a person of African descent with Indigenous ancestry I do not celebrate Thanksgiving and stopped doing so a very long time ago. I do celebrate the spirit of family and giving thanks to the creator for family friends and a healthy life. But that is something I do everyday. Only in American culture is a simple thing as family values commodified into something to make $$ from. I was just talking to a coworker recently about the fact the Africans are the only people known to celebrate the genocide of our own people by celebrating the holidays and ancestors of our former enslavers, kidnappers and those who commit genocide against our people even until this very day.  Hopefully this article will lay out for those who do not know what Thanksgiving is truly all about.

The Truth about The First Thanksgiving

By James W. Loewen

Over the last few years, I have asked hundreds of college students, “When was the country we now know as the United States first settled?”

That is a generous way of putting the question. Surely “we now know as” implies that the original settlement happened before the United States. I had hoped that students would suggest 30,000 BC, or some other pre-Columbian date. They did not. Their consensus answer was “1620.”

Part of the problem is the word “settle.” “Settlers” were white. Indians did not settle. Nor are students the only people misled by “settle.” One recent Thanksgiving weekend, I listened as a guide at the Statue of Liberty told about European immigrants “populating a wild East Coast.” As we shall see, however, if Indians had not already settled New England, Europeans would have had a much tougher job of it.

Starting with the Pilgrims not only leaves out the Indians, but also the Spanish. In the summer of 1526 five hundred Spaniards and one hundred black slaves founded a town near the mouth of the Pedee River in what is now South Carolina. Disease and disputes with nearby Indians caused many deaths. Finally, in November the slaves rebelled, killed some of their masters, and escaped to the Indians. By now only 150 Spaniards survived, and they evacuated back to Haiti. The ex-slaves remained behind. So the first non-Native settlers in “the country we now know as the United States” were Africans.

The Spanish continued their settling in 1565, when they massacred a settlement of French Protestants at St. Augustine, Florida, and replaced it with their own fort. Some Spanish were pilgrims, seeking regions new to them to secure religious liberty: these were Spanish Jews, who settled in New Mexico in the late 1500s. Few Americans know that one third of the United States, from San Francisco to Arkansas to Natchez to Florida, has been Spanish longer than it has been “American.” Moreover, Spanish culture left an indelible impact on the West. The Spanish introduced horses, cattle, sheep, pigs, and the basic elements of cowboy culture, including its vocabulary: mustang, bronco, rodeo, lariat, and so on.

Beginning with 1620 also omits the Dutch, who were living in what is now Albany by 1614. Indeed, 1620 is not even the date of the first permanent British settlement, for in 1607, the London Company sent settlers to Jamestown, Virginia. No matter. The mythic origin of “the country we now know as the United States” is at Plymouth Rock, and the year is 1620. My students are not at fault. The myth is what their testbooks and their culture have offered them. I examined how twelve textbooks used in high school American history classes teach Thanksgiving. Here is the version in one high school history book, THE AMERICAN TRADITION:

After some exploring, the Pilgrims chose the land around Plymouth Harbor for their settlement. Unfortunately, they had arrived in December and were not prepared for the New England winter. However, they were aided by friendly Indians, who gave them food and showed them how to grow corn. When warm weather came, the colonists planted, fished, hunted, and prepared themselves for the next winter. After harvesting their first crop, they and their Indian friends celebrated the first Thanksgiving.

My students also learned that the Pilgrims were persecuted in England for their religion, so they moved to Holland. They sailed on the Mayflower to America and wrote the Mayflower Compact. Times were rough, until they met Squanto. He taught them how to put fish in each corn hill, so they had a bountiful harvest.

But when I ask them about the plague, they stare back at me. “What plague? The Black Plague?” No, that was three centuries earlier, I sigh.

“THE WONDERFUL PLAGUE AMONG THE SAVAGES”

The Black Plague does provide a useful introduction, however. Black (or bubonic) Plague “was undoubtedly the worst disaster that has ever befallen mankind.” In three years it killed 30 percent of the population of Europe. Catastrophic as it was, the disease itself comprised only part of the horror. Thinking the day of judgment was imminent, farmers failed to plant crops. Many people gave themselves over to alcohol. Civil and economic disruption may have caused as much death as the disease itself.

For a variety of reasons — their probable migration through cleansing Alaskan ice fields, better hygiene, no livestock or livestock-borne microbes — Americans were in Howard Simpson’s assessment “a remarkable healthy race” before Columbus. Ironically, their very health now proved their undoing, for they had built up no resistance, genetically or through childhood diseases, to the microbes Europeans and Africans now brought them. In 1617, just before the Pilgrims landed, the process started in southern New England. A plague struck that made the Black Death pale by comparison.

Today we think it was the bubonic plague, although pox and influenza are also candidates. British fishermen had been fishing off Massachusetts for decades before the Pilgrims landed. After filling their hulls with cod, they would set forth on land to get firewood and fresh water and perhaps capture a few Indians to sell into slavery in Europe. On one of these expeditions they probably transmitted the illness to the people they met. Whatever it was, within three years this plague wiped out between 90 percent and 96 percent of the inhabitants of southern New England. The Indian societies lay devastated. Only “the twentieth person is scarce left alive,” wrote British eyewitness Robert Cushman, describing a death rate unknown in all previous human experience. Unable to cope with so many corpses, survivors fled to the next tribe, carrying the infestation with them, so that Indians died who had never seen a white person. Simpson tells what the Pilgrims saw:

The summer after the Pilgrims landed, they sent two envoys on a diplomatic mission to treat with Massasoit, a famous chief encamped some 40 miles away at what is now Warren, Rhode Island. The envoys discovered and described a scene of absolute havoc. Villages lay in ruins because there was no one to tend them. The ground was strewn with the skulls and the bones of thousands of Indians who had died and none was left to bury them.

During the next fifteen years, additional epidemics, most of which we know to have been smallpox, struck repeatedly. Europeans caught smallpox and the other maladies, to be sure, but most recovered, including, in a later century, the “heavily pockmarked George Washington.” Indians usually died. Therefore, almost as profound as their effect on Indian demographics was the impact of the epidemics on the two cultures, European and Indian. The English Separatists, already seeing their lives as part of a divinely inspired morality play, inferred that they had God on their side. John Winthrop, Governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, called the plague “miraculous.” To a friend in England in 1634, he wrote:

But for the natives in these parts, God hath so pursued them, as for 300 miles space the greatest part of them are swept away by the small pox which still continues among them. So as God hath thereby cleared our title to this place, those who remain in these parts, being in all not fifty, have put themselves under our protect….

Many Indians likewise inferred that their God had abandoned them. Cushman, our British eyewitness, reported that “those that are left, have their courage much abated, and their countenance is dejected, and they seem as a people affrighted.” After all, neither they nor the Pilgrims had access to the germ theory of disease. Indian healers offered no cure, their religion no explanation. That of the whites did. Like the Europeans three centuries before them, many Indians surrendered to alcohol or began to listen to Christianity.

These epidemics constituted perhaps the most important single geopolitical event of the first third of the 1600s, anywhere on the planet. They meant that the British would face no real Indian challenge for their first fifty years in America. Indeed, the plague helped cause the legendary warm reception Plymouth enjoyed in its first formative years from the Wampanoags. Massasoit needed to ally with the Pilgrims because the plague had so weakened his villages that he feared the Narragansetts to the west.

Moreover, the New England plagues exemplify a process which antedated the Pilgrims and endures to this day. In 1492, more than 3,000,000 Indians lived on the island of Haiti. Forty years later, fewer than 300 remained. The earliest Portuguese found that Labrador teemed with hospitable Indians who could easily be enslaved. It teems no more. In about 1780, smallpox reduced the Mandan’s of North Dakota from nine villages to two; then in 1837, a second smallpox epidemic reduced them from 1600 persons to just 31. The pestilence continues; a fourth of the Yanomamos of northern Brazil and southern Venezuela died in the year prior to my writing this sentence.

Europeans were never able to “settle” China, India, Indonesia, Japan, or most of Africa because too many people already lived there. Advantages in military and social technology would have enabled Europeans to dominate the Americas, as they eventually dominated China and Africa, but not to “settle” the New World. For that, the plague was required. Thus, except for the European (and African) invasion itself, the pestilence was surely the most important event in the history of America.

What do we learn of all this in the twelve histories I studied? Three offer some treatment of Indian disease as a factor in European colonization. LIFE AND LIBERTY does quite a good job. AMERICA PAST AND PRESENT supplies a fine analysis of the general impact of Indian disease in American history, though it leaves out the plague at Plymouth. THE AMERICAN WAY is the only text to draw the appropriate geopolitical inference about the importance of the Plymouth outbreak, but it never discusses Indian plagues anywhere else. Unfortunately, the remaining nine books offer almost nothing. Two totally omit the subject. Each of the other seven furnishes only a fragment of a paragraph that does not even make it into the index, let alone into students’ minds.

Everyone knew all about the plague in colonial America. Even before the Mayflower sailed, King James of England gave thanks to “Almighty God in his great goodness and bounty towards us,” for sending “this wonderful plague among the savages.” Today it is no surprise that not one in a hundred of my college students has ever heard of the plague. Unless they read LIFE AND LIBERTY or PAST AND PRESENT, no student can come away from these books thinking of Indians as people who made an impact on North America, who lived here in considerable numbers, who settled, in short, and were then killed by disease or arms.

ERRAND INTO THE WILDERNESS

Instead of the plague, our schoolbooks present the story of the Pilgrims as a heroic myth. Referring to “the little party” in their “small, storm-battered English vessel,” their story line follows Perry Miller’s use of a Puritan sermon title, ERRAND INTO THE WILDERNESS. AMERICAN ADVENTURES even titles its chapter about British settlement in North America “Opening the Wilderness.” The imagery is right out of Star Trek: “to go boldly where none dared go before.”

The Pilgrims had intended to go to Virginia, where there already was a British settlement, according to the texts, but “violent storms blew their ship off course,” according to some texts, or else an “error in navigation” caused them to end up hundreds of miles to the north. In fact, we are not sure where the Pilgrims planned to go. According to George Willison, Pilgrim leaders never intended to settle in Virginia. They had debated the relative merits of Guiana versus Massachusetts precisely because they wanted to be far from Anglican control in Virginia. They knew quite a bit about Massachusetts, from Cape Cod’s fine fishing to that “wonderful plague.” They brought with them maps drawn by Samuel Champlain when he toured the area in 1605 and a guidebook by John Smith, who had named it “New England” when he visited in 1614. One text, LAND OF PROMISE, follows Willison, pointing out that Pilgrims numbered only about thirty-five of the 102 settlers aboard the Mayflower. The rest were ordinary folk seeking their fortunes in the new Virginia colony. “The New England landing came as a rude surprise for the bedraggled and tired [non-Pilgrim] majority on board the Mayflower,” says Promise. “Rumors of mutiny spread quickly.” Promise then ties this unrest to the Mayflower Compact, giving its readers a uniquely fresh interpretation as to why the colonists adopted it.

Each text offers just one of three reasons—storm, pilot error, or managerial hijacking–to explain how the Pilgrims ended up in Massachusetts. Neither here nor in any other historical controversy after 1620 can any of the twelve bear to admit that it does not know the answer—that studying history is not just learning answers–that history contains debates. Thus each book shuts students out from the intellectual excitement of the discipline.

Instead, textbooks parade ethnocentric assertions about the Pilgrims as a flawless unprecedented band laying the foundations of our democracy. John Garraty presents the Compact this way in AMERICAN HISTORY: “So far as any record shows, this was the first time in human history that a group of people consciously created a government where none had existed before.” Such accounts deny students the opportunity to see the Pilgrims as anything other than pious stereotypes.

“IT WAS WITH GOD’S HELP…FOR HOW ELSE COULD WE HAVE DONE IT?”

Settlement proceeded, not with God’s help but with the Indians’. The Pilgrims chose Plymouth because of its cleared fields, recently planted in corn, “and a brook of fresh water [that] flowed into the harbor,” in the words of TRIUMPH OF THE AMERICAN NATION. It was a lovely site for a town. Indeed, until the plague, it had been a town. Everywhere in the hemisphere, Europeans pitched camp right in the middle of native populations—Cuzco, Mexico City, Natchez, Chicago. Throughout New England, colonists appropriated Indian cornfields, which explains why so many town names—Marshfield, Springfield, Deerfield–end in “field”.

Inadvertent Indian assistance started on the Pilgrims’ second full day in Massachusetts. A colonist’s journal tells us:

We marched to the place we called Cornhill, where we had found the corn before. At another place we had seen before, we dug and found some more corn, two or three baskets full, and a bag of beans. ..In all we had about ten bushels, which will be enough for seed. It was with God’s help that we found this corn, for how else could we have done it, without meeting some Indians who might trouble us. …The next morning, we found a place like a grave. We decided to dig it up. We found first a mat, and under that a fine bow…We also found bowls , trays, dishes, and things like that. We took several of the prettiest things to carry away with us, and covered the body up again. A place “like a grave!”

More help came from a live Indian, Squanto. Here my students are on familiar turf, for they have all learned the Squanto legend. LAND OF PROMISE provides an archetypal account.

Squanto had learned their language, the author explained, from English fishermen who ventured into the New England waters each summer. Squanto taught the Pilgrims how to plant corn, squash, and pumpkins. Would the small band of settlers have survived without Squanto’s help? We cannot say. But by the fall of 1621, colonists and Indians could sit down to several days of feast and thanksgiving to God (later celebrated as the first Thanksgiving).

What do the books leave out about Squanto? First, how he learned English. As a boy, along with four Penobscots, he was probably stolen by a British captain in about 1605 and taken to England. There he probably spent nine years, two in the employ of a Plymouth merchant who later helped finance the Mayflower. At length, the merchant helped him arrange passage back to Massachusetts. He was to enjoy home life for less than a year, however. In 1614, a British slave raider seized him and two dozen fellow Indians and sold them into slavery in Malaga, Spain. Squanto escaped from slavery, escaped from Spain, made his way back to England, and in 1619 talked a ship captain into taking him along on his next trip to Cape Cod.

It happens that Squanto’s fabulous odyssey provides a “hook” into the plague story, a hook that our texts choose to ignore. For now Squanto walked to his home village, only to make the horrifying discovery that, in Simpson’s words, “he was the sole member of his village still alive. All the others had perished in the epidemic two years before.” No wonder he throws in his lot with the Pilgrims, who rename his village “Plymouth!” Now that is a story worth telling! Compare the pallid account in LAND OF PROMISE. “He had learned their language from English fishermen.” What do we make of books that give us the unimportant details–Squanto’s name, the occupation of his enslavers–while omitting not only his enslavement, but also the crucial fact of the plague? This is distortion on a grand scale.

William Bradford praised Squanto for many services, including his “bring[ing] them to unknown places for their profit.” “Their profit” was the primary reason most Mayflower colonists made the trip. It too came from the Indians, from the fur trade; Plymouth would never have paid for itself without it. Europeans had neither the skill nor the desire to “go boldly where none dared go before.|” They went to the Indians.

“TRUTH SHOULD BE HELD SACRED, AT WHATEVER COST”

Should we teach these truths about Thanksgiving? Or, like our textbooks, should we look the other way? Again quoting LAND OF PROMISE. “By the fall of 1621, colonists and Indians could sit down to several days of feast and thanksgiving to God (later celebrated as the first Thanksgiving).” Throughout the nation, elementary school children still enact Thanksgiving every fall as our national origin myth, complete with Pilgrim hats made of construction paper and Indian braves with feathers in their hair. An early Massachusetts colonist, Colonel Thomas Aspinwall, advises us not to settle for this whitewash of feel – good – history.

“It is painful to advert to these things. But our forefathers, though wise, pious, and sincere, were nevertheless, in respect to Christian charity, under a cloud; and, in history, truth should be held sacred, at whatever cost.”

Thanksgiving is full of embarrassing facts. The Pilgrims did not introduce the Native Americans to the tradition; Eastern Indians had observed autumnal harvest celebrations for centuries. Our modern celebrations date back only to 1863; not until the 1890s did the Pilgrims get included in the tradition; no one even called them “Pilgrims” until the 1870s. Plymouth Rock achieved ichnographic status only in the nineteenth century, when some enterprising residents of the town moved it down to the water so its significance as the “holy soil” the Pilgrims first touched might seem more plausible. The Rock has become a shrine, the Mayflower Compact a sacred text, and our textbooks play the same function as the Anglican BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER, teaching us the rudiments of the civil religion of Thanksgiving.

Indians are marginalized in this civic ritual. Our archetypal image of the first Thanksgiving portrays the groaning boards in the woods, with the Pilgrims in their starched Sunday best and the almost naked Indian guests. Thanksgiving silliness reaches some sort of zenith in the handouts that school children have carried home for decades, with captions like, “They served pumpkins and turkeys and corn and squash. The Indians had never seen such a feast!” When his son brought home this “information” from his New Hampshire elementary school, Native American novelist Michael Dorris pointed out “the Pilgrims had literally never seen `such a feast,’ since all foods mentioned are exclusively indigenous to the Americas and had been provided by [or with the aid of] the local tribe.”

I do not read Aspinwall as suggesting a “bash the Pilgrims” interpretation, emphasizing only the bad parts. I have emphasized untoward details only because our histories have suppressed everything awkward for so long. The Pilgrims’ courage in setting forth in the late fall to make their way on a continent new to them remains unsurpassed. In their first year, like the Indians, they suffered from diseases. Half of them died. The Pilgrims did not cause the plague and were as baffled as to its true origin as the stricken Indian villagers. Pilgrim-Indian relations began reasonably positively. Thus the antidote to feel-good history is not feel-bad history, but honest and inclusive history. “Knowing the truth about Thanksgiving, both its proud and its shameful motivations and history, might well benefit contemporary children,” suggests Dorris. “But the glib retelling of an ethnocentric and self-serving falsehood does no one any good.” Because Thanksgiving has roots in both Anglo and Native cultures, and because of the interracial cooperation the first celebration enshrines, Thanksgiving might yet develop into a holiday that promotes tolerance and understanding. Its emphasis on Native foods provides a teachable moment, for natives of the Americas first developed half of the world’s food crops. Texts could tell this–only three even mention Indian foods—and could also relate other contributions from Indian societies, from sports to political ideas. The original Thanksgiving itself provides an interesting example: the Natives and newcomers spent the better part of three days showing each other their various recreations.

Origin myths do not come cheaply. To glorify the Pilgrims is dangerous. The genial omissions and false details our texts use to retail the Pilgrim legend promote Anglocentrism, which only handicaps us when dealing with all those whose culture is not Anglo. Surely, in history, “truth should be held sacred, at whatever cost.”

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Conned by Democracy: The Middle East’s Stagnant ‘Change’

By Ramzy Baroud

Democracy in the Middle East continues to be a hugely popular topic of discussion. Its virtues are tirelessly praised by rulers and oppositions alike, by intellectuals and ordinary people, by political prisoners and their prison guards. Yet, in actuality, it also remains an illusion, if not a front to ensure the demise of any real possibility of public participation in decision-making.

Bahrain was the latest Arab country to hold free and fair elections. It managed a reasonable voter turnout of 67 percent. The opposition also did very well, winning 45 percent of the seats. In terms of fairness and transparency, the Bahraini elections could serve as an excellent example of how ‘things are changing’ in the Middle East. More, they might provide Western leaders, such as US President Barack Obama an opportunity to commend the contribution of American guidance to ‘progress’ in the region.

In actual fact, nothing is changing – except for the insistence by some that it is. Arab governments have made two important discoveries in the last decade.

The first discovery is that US interests cannot peacefully co-exist with true democracies in the region. Egypt had a rude awaking in 2005, when Muslim Brotherhood candidates won fifth of the votes, if not more. This was followed by the unmatched democratic revolution in Palestine when Hamas won the majority of the vote. The aftermath of both of these events was enough to remind both Arabs and the US of the folly of their so-called democracy project.

The second realization is that Arabs are not judged by the genuineness of their democracy; rather, the success of their democratic experiences is judged on the basis of how well they can serve and protect US interests. Since the democracy radar is measured by Washington, Arab countries deemed lacking in democratic reforms are often cited as promising and fledgling democracies in Congressional reports or White House statements. Countries deemed hostile to US economic and political interests are remorselessly shunned, as if their experiments with democracy could never yield anything of worth or consideration.

These two realizations led to a superficial change of course, forming a new trend that Shadi Hamid, writing in Foreign Policy, refers to as “free but unfair — and rather meaningless — election.”

Free elections are known to be the cornerstone of true democracy. Thus by giving the impression of freedom, automatically one tends to conclude fairness. But fairness is nowhere to be found, for if it truly exists then change becomes possible and is likely to follow. Those who have followed the new democratic experiences of some Arab countries will have observed that they have also been defined by the same political stagnation of the pre-democracy years.

American journalist, Sydney J. Harris once wrote, “Democracy is the only system that persists in asking the powers that be whether they are the powers that ought to be.” If Harris is correct, then whatever is underway in the Middle East is anything but democracy. Although new parliamentarians are elected, new faces flash on television, and an increasing number of women are paraded along with their male colleagues following each election, the powers that be remain unchanged, unhinged and truly unchallenged.

Most polls, whether conducted by Arab or non-Arab pollsters, indicate that the vast majority of Arab people view democracy in very positive terms. But the plot has truly thickened in recent years, when on the one hand democracy has become a household name in much of the Middle East, and not one ruler or government contests its virtues. Yet, no true democracy has in fact actualized in any shape or form.

Have Middle Eastern ruling elites figured out the democracy trick, the great con of our time? Have they realized that democracy in the Middle East is only what the White House says it can be?

Israel has mastered this very trick since the day of its inception. This is what Hasan Afif El-Hasan argues in his new and very instructive book, Is the Two-State Solution Already Dead? “The identity of the Israelis in their legal documents and ID cards is expressed in terms of their group religious affiliation as ‘Jewish,’ ‘Muslim,’ ‘Christian’, ‘Bahai,’ ‘Durzi,’ etc., where all privileges are conferred by the state on the Jews by virtue of being Jews, thus making Israel an religio-ethnocracy rather than a liberal democracy.”

Israel’s unique democracy is in fact getting more unique, as non-Jewish citizens of Israel are subjected to increasing levels of legal harassment and are constantly asked to jump through all sorts of political hoops to prove their loyalty to the Jewish state. Still, clever and persistent Israel has managed to present itself to the world at large, Arabs included, as being a model democracy.

This was and continues to be the original democracy con in the Middle East. It took some Arab governments decades to catch up and also present themselves as democratic, whatever the reality on the ground. This is not your everyday democracy scheme. It is particularly devious because it can boast of being free, fair and transparent – and the numbers would actually attest to that – but the political structure would still be construed in such a way that the freely elected parliaments are blocked from legislating effectively to challenge the powers that be. If any legislation is allowed to pass, through, say, unelected upper houses, and approved by the ultimate ruler (both usually serving as an insurance system against elected parliaments), it tends to be unimportant and largely decorative.

Since democracy is always a work in progress, for no country can claim to be perfectly democratic, then Middle East governments can always use this idea to justify their own shortcomings. Expectedly, the US tends to honor that, bestowing praise on their friends, and condemning their enemies – the former for courageously taking on democratic initiatives and the latter for failing the democracy test.

The great democracy con would not succeed, were it not for the fact that many players, including the US, are so invested in its success. As for the ordinary people, who are eager to see their rights respected, freedoms honored, and political horizons expanded, well, they can always vote – even if only their vote actually counts for nothing, and only further validates the very system they are trying to change.

– Ramzy Baroud (www.ramzybaroud.net) is an internationally-syndicated columnist and the editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His latest book is My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story (Pluto Press, London), now available on Amazon.com.

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As the African proverb says :The Ant will always topple the elephant.” Venezuela by assisting Cuba in developing it’s own fiber optic network to facilitate the building and development of Cuba’s communications systems is proof that by coming together marginalized and subjugated countries dominated by imperialist powers don;t need these giants to thrive or survive. Sanctions both financial and technological is the rule of thumb to gain control over people and govt’s that the US and other European / Arab powers get countries to fall in-line with their rogue policies.

Venezuela Helps Cuba Overcome US-Imposed Internet Restrictions

By Tamara Pearson

Cuba and Venezuela will jointly install a fibre-optic submarine cable between the two nations, a move which will “revolutionise telecommunications” according to Cuban Information and Communications Minster Ramiro Valdez yesterday.

The governments want to begin installation of the cable this January and hope to finish it by the second half of 2011. It will connect Cuba with both Venezuela and then with Jamaica, and involves an investment of US$ 70 million.

The cable represents the first possibility for Cuba to have relatively fast internet. Valdez highlighted the importance of “breaking the historical dependence by [Venezuela and Cuba] in telecommunications”.

Currently all Cuban internet is via satellite, meaning it is slow, limited, and expensive. There is an optical-fibre connection between Cancun, Mexico and Miami, US, that passes 32 kilometres from Havana but the U.S denies Cuba access to it.

Venezuelan engineer Carlos Orfila explained, “If the blockade [by the US against Cuba] didn’t exist, connecting Cuba would cost some US $500,000, but it can’t be done because the Cuban companies never receive permission from the U.S State Department.”

The new cable however, passes almost entirely through international waters, but, “because of certain national and economic borders through which the United States attempts to impose its conditions, the length of the cable had to be extended by about 100 kilometres,” Orfila said.

The Cuban government hopes the project will improve communications on the island as well as help with the transmission of medical consultations, teleconferences, and educational courses.

Waldo Roboredo, vicepresident of the Venezuelan-Cuban company Telecomunicaciones de Gran Caribe, which will build the cable, said the system is expected to multiply data transmission and voice transmission speeds by 3,000-fold, the cable has a capacity of 640 gigabytes, 10 million simultaneous telephonic transmissions, and is 1,630 kilometres long. He said Cuba would also save 25% of its current satellite costs.

Nevertheless, both governments have been announcing that construction of the cable was due to start shortly since October 2009. The deadline of 2010- 2011 has been consistent however.

Discussions around the project first began in 2007 when Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez announced he would obtain a loan from China to cover the costs then signed the agreement with Cuba.

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Bush Pens a True Crime Book

By Bill Quigley

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In his memoir (which some wise people have already moved in bookstores to the CRIME section) George W. Bush admitted that he authorized that detainees be waterboarded, tortured, a crime under US and international law.

Bush’s crime confession coincides with reports that no one will face criminal charges from the US Department of Justice for the destruction of 92 CIA videotapes which contained interrogations using waterboarding.

Where is the accountability for these crimes?

Bush and other criminals will be brought to justice if the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) have their way.

CCR and ECCHR jointly intervened into a criminal investigation in Spain examining the role of former civilian and military officials from the Bush administration in the commission of international law violations, including torture. The investigation is ongoing and includes the crimes that Bush admitted he authorized.

CCR and ECCHR made it clear that they are committed to pursuing criminal accountability and Bush’s confessions help. In a joint statement they said:

“As Attorney General Eric Holder stated during his confirmation hearings, waterboarding is torture. Calling these acts what they are, torture, is not the result of differing legal ‘opinion,’ as Bush states; it is a matter of law. Harold Koh, the State Department Legal Adviser, confirmed this in Geneva last week, stating during the U.S. Universal Periodic Review that “the Obama administration defines waterboarding as torture as a matter of law” and it is not a ‘policy choice.’

“There are no circumstances or excuses—including ‘national security’—under domestic and international law that allow for the use of torture. And there is an obligation to investigate and prosecute torture.

“Bush’s decision to authorize torture and other illegal acts against detainees held in U.S. custody led to the use of torture at Guantánamo, in Iraq, Afghanistan, and in secret prisons by U.S. forces, and contractors, certain allies and the national forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. His decision led to Abu Ghraib.

“Debates as to whether or not waterboarding of detainees led to intelligence or make the nation ‘safer’ are not relevant questions. The only valid question is: can we torture? The answer is no.

“Without accountability it is impossible to ensure that such actions are never authorized by any future president or other U.S. official. No immunity protects Bush from prosecution for acts which violate federal and international law. The Pinochet precedent demonstrates that the law eventually catches up with former presidents—even those who flout their impunity.

“Bush states that accountability ‘would set a terrible precedent for our democracy.’

“We answer that not doing so is failing our democracy—yet again. We therefore urge the Obama administration and the Department of Justice to act upon their recognition that waterboarding is torture as a matter of law, to investigate and prosecute acts of torture and other serious violations carried out by officials of the former administration, including George W. Bush.

“But we will not wait any longer for the Obama administration to act—we will continue seeking justice and accountability under the principle of universal jurisdiction and as counsel in the ongoing investigation in Spain.”

Sell those books, George W, you may need the money for legal fees yet!

Click here for more information on CCR’s work towards accountability.

Bill Quigley is Legal Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights and professor of law at Loyola University New Orleans. You can reach him at

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