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The Iraqi Threat
Posted Feb 8, 2003
One of the most difficult things to understand about Bush's pretext for warring on Iraq is the notion that Saddam has "weapons of mass destruction." If this is really true, then Bush's policy is the one most likely to provoke the use of such weapons against American military personnel or civilians.
Consequently, if Bush has any expectation at all of avoiding such a catastrophy, he must be trusting that Saddam won't risk subjecting his own people to American retaliation by actually using his "weapons of mass destruction". That's a very strange expectation for Bush to have given how he's villified Saddam.
Of course, it's also possible that Bush just doesn't give a damn about the American people or the military. For him they might be only tools to advance his personal agenda, much in the same way as Hitler exploited the German people and military.
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Latest reply: Feb 8, 2003
Ghost Dance
Posted Feb 7, 2003
Kyaa quoted from professor Davis as follows,
'Perhaps the explanation can be found in the following excerpts from the 'OC Register' of what the Ghost Dance tradition offers to the historian, as expressed by History Prof. Mike Davis of UC Irvine:
"White People Are a Bad Dream." The title doesn’t come from a white guy; it is a quotation from Wovoka, the Paiute spiritual leader who introduced the Ghost Dance into Native American culture at the end of the 1880s.
The quotation of the above noted statement isn’t Davis’ entry in the Self-Loathing Whitey Sweepstakes but rather an examination of the Ghost Dance, including its continuing religious significance for some Native Americans and its potential value to historians.
Davis sets out what he’s trying to accomplish in the rest of 'Dead Cities' (a recent book by Mike Davis, well worth the read): to turn on its head the traditional approach to the history of the American West.
Though they differ on many points, Davis says, the major schools of Western historiography "acknowledge a certain stable core regional identity and historical continuity." But "the heirs to Wovoka" reject this. As Davis recounts, they reject a belief in "the finished product, the conquered landscape, the linear historical narrative, the managed ecosystem. . . . They know the supposedly ‘permanent’ structures of tradition and meaning in the white West seldom endure more than a single generation . . . including our most dearly held conceptions of the West as a region."
This is the meaning of the concept of "radical contingency."
"Radical" is the key word, both in its original sense of getting to the root of the matter and because of its political connotations. Davis isn’t indulging in some New Age fawning over Native Americans; he is exploring how the teachings of the Ghost Dance tradition complement the very secular tradition in which he works. "Like a certain German philosopher," he writes of Wovoka’s heirs, "they are all too aware that ‘all that is solid melts into air.’" Davis would expect his readers to recognize that famous line from The Communist Manifesto.
It’s a measure of just how eclectic and non-dogmatic Davis’ radicalism is that he can blend the insights of a Paiute shaman with, among others, those of Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and philosopher Ernst Bloch.
"Wovoka, in other words, sustains his great-great-grandchildren with an apocalyptic vision of the history of the American West. Since "apocalyptic" is such an overused and cheapened term, it is important to recall its precise meaning in the Abrahamic religions. An apocalypse is literally the revelation of the Secret History of the world as becomes possible under the terrible clarity of the Last Days. It is the alternative, despised history of the subaltern classes, the defeated peoples, the extinct cultures. I am claiming, in other words, that Wovoka offers us a neo-catastrophic epistemology for reinterpreting Western history. . . . He invites us to reopen that history from the vantage point of an already visible future when sprawl, garbage, addiction, violence and simulation will have overwhelmed every vital life-space west of the Rockies."
Davis is interested in "catastrophes" and "apocalyptic" themes; he isn’t reveling in the misfortune of others but attempting to make use of the unique vantage point that can be found in the midst of the sprawl and the garbage and the violence. And, far from being "a merchant of spiritless misanthropy," as Jim Lewis of the NYC 'Village Voice' calls him, Davis acknowledges the wisdom of the Ghost Dance tradition—that the "end point is also paradoxically the point of renewal and restoration."'
I recently responded to that as follows,
I can't help wondering though if this ought to be seen in such abstract, academic terms. That's rather typical of the Euroamerican take on things. It makes it easy to discuss atrocity with some measure of detachment.
Wovoka's faith, however, wasn't academic or detached but based on a real vision interpreted in the light of Christian eschateology. It was a response to real, not abstract, desperation.
Wovoka tells of how the savior will come if the people dance and show true contrition. The savior will come and stop the atrocities, the abuse, the assimulation. The savior will restore what was promised but never rendered by the whites. The savior will make good on those promises contained in the treaties.
So here we see the abused people trying to take some control over their destinies, trying to become protaganists rather than passive victims. The military options have been brutally suppressed and the legal options thwarted. What's left is the spiritual option, the power to make things happen.
That is what Wovoka sought to use in implementing the Christian Apocalypse. Justice will be served sooner or later. That's the faith and we're just going to try to make it sooner than later. That's the dance.
If Davis or others sees some sort of conceptual convergence with what a reasonable person might predict will happen with continued environmental abuse, that's an interesting correlation, but again highly impersonal and unvisionary. However, it explains in satisfactory Euroamerican terminology what people ought to feel in their gut, having been there already a few times.
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Latest reply: Feb 7, 2003
Indian Gaming and Much More Under Attack in Connecticut
Posted Feb 7, 2003
http://indiancountry.com/?1044633100
Discuss this Journal entry [4]
Latest reply: Feb 7, 2003
Anthropology
Posted Feb 7, 2003
From around the late 18th century until the mid-20th century, cultural anthrology, as defined by Euroamericans, was devised, based on the notion that human cultures evolve through hierarchal levels from savagery, through barbarism to modern civilization. Along the way, the Greeks and Romans rated pretty high marks, but any non-Aryan contributions were pretty much discounted or ignored.
At the same time, physical anthropology was devised along parallel lines with Man, specially WHITE MAN, as the pinnacle of evolutionary creation. Much "research" was offered proving this, specifically studies of cranial capacity that could properly order the "races" in a hierarchy beginning from the bottom from the indian and black through the asian to the caucasian.
These disciplines reflect to some extent the more ancient notions of Supalveda, referencing Aristotle, that certain people by nature are masters and most others are slaves. The slave classes were not fully human, despite protestations from the Catholic Church to contrary.
The Church endorsed Las Casas' view that indians were possessed of souls and hence fully human in the eyes of God. Not that it mattered much in practice because the indian couldn't remain in any sense significantly indian while becoming Christian and Spanish.
English and German views essentially rendered the argument mute. The indian wasn't redeemable in most cases, not being accounted one of the Elect, so there was little point in debating his humanity. Nor did they bother to note the diversity of indian people.
All people inhabiting the Americas before the Europeans invasion were by definition savages, subhuman, and beyond the redemption of church or civilized society. That was convenient and together with the colonial Spanish attitudes precipitated one of the most horrendous genocides in history. In comparison, the crimes of the nazis are a drop in the bucket.
The ultimate conclusion then was that God had created the world to be settled by white people or later, that human evolution had selected the white race to dominate the world. Histiography and anthropology were both coopted to justify these assertions and until the mid-20th century, this process continued unabated.
During the 1970s, there began to be challenges to the prevailing orthodoxy. Evolution began to be perceived as more than a pyramid of life with WHITE MAN at the top, but as a series of levels in which the diversity of life expanded and all creatures evolved to fill ecological niches appropriate to their life ways.
Cultural diversity began to be appreciated as more than another pyramid with Euroamerican civilization at the apex. Human life ways began to be perceived as evolving according to local conditions without any global "right way" of doing things.
Unfortunately, political science and economics haven't kept pace with these trends. The same old mantras of white, Euroamerican supremacy seem to be major factors in how people perceive national organization and ways of provisioning societies.
I hope that can be corrected at some point, but given the current bellacose tendencies of the rich and powerful of the world, I'm not very optimistic it will be anytime soon.
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Latest reply: Feb 7, 2003
From ICT
Posted Feb 6, 2003
The musings of a Cuban revolutionary poet,
'Jose Martí, the Cuban national hero, was quoted by elders at the repatriation in Caridad de los Indios. Martí is one poetic voice from the anti-Spain liberation movements that has become an integral part of the Cuban spirit. The prophetic Martí, who is respected throughout Latin America, declared to the world, over 100 years ago: "The American intelligence is to be found in an Indian head dress." He also wrote, "America will not walk until the Indian walks."'
Discuss this Journal entry [2]
Latest reply: Feb 6, 2003
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