Gilad Atzmon argues that in order to best support Palestine we must cease to view the Palestinian struggle as “just another apartheid” or “just another colonial project”
What makes the occupation of Palestine “unique” is not the “specialness” of the suffering of Palestinians, nor is it the “uniqueness” of their tragedy or the “importance” of their cause.
What makes it “unique” is the fact that: those Jewish Zionists who occupy Palestine, those Jewish Zionists who support them, and even many of those Jewish anti-Zionists who oppose them view themselves as “unique”.
Many Jewish anti-Zionists view themselves as unique in the sense that they frantically hold on to the notion of the “uniqueness” of the “Jewish suffering” and the inevitability of future “multi-holocausts” due to an historic, intrinsic and incurable human-condition called “anti-Semitism” which is in their view a “special” case of racism, of inexplicable “hatred” for Jews.
With a considerable majority, whether hard-core Zionists, soft, liberal, or anti-Zionists, they have acquired a distorted image of themselves, their suffering, their history, their morality, and that of the world.
The failure of Jewish communities -liberal and otherwise- to acknowledge, address and deal with this “heritage” in a sincere and healing manner will provoke severe and unavoidable consequences.
As it appears, many people of those who identify themselves as Jews fail to see that there is a fundamental contradiction and total incompatibility between their claim of humanism and their practices of exclusivity, and their claim of “high Jewish morality” and their real life practices of slander and excommunication when dealing with others with whom they disagree.
How can they talk about such a notion as “Jewish morality” or “Jewish heritage”:
While practicing oppression, either physical -as in the case of Zionist occupiers- or mental and psychological as in the case of anti-Zionists practice of thought oppression;
whileviewing “the other” as less able intellectually or morally (i.e inferior) who is in constant need for guidance;
while placing themselves “at the helm” of social progress and imposing themselves as “guardians” of anti-racist campaigns and as “leaders” of liberation movements;
while appointing themselves as the intellectual and moral “elite” with the exclusive privilege to define the meaning of words such as racism and the right to identify who is racist or not;
while granting themselves the irrevocable and the unquestionable right to label, ostracize and excommunicate others as they wish;
Those who are engaged in the above appear to lack the most rudimentary qualities of modesty and humility needed to enable us humans to examine and evaluate our own words, actions and thoughts.
Thus they fail to gain the insight needed to self-reflect, self-criticize, self-improve thus to integrate without causing others to feel intimidated or oppressed.
Sooner or later people of the world (Palestinians included) will have to come to face such dreadful reality and deal with it.
Last week (March 6), McDonald’s, the international fast-food juggernaut, was surprised and, one hopes, publicly embarrassed when a group of student “guest workers” in central Pennsylvania called an impromptu strike to protest working conditions. According to these guest workers, McDonald’s failed to comply with the terms of their agreement, and used intimidation and threats or retaliation to keep them at bay.
These “guests” (from Latin America and Asia) came to the U.S. under the J-1 Exchange Visitor Visa Program, part of the Mutual Educational and Cultural Exchange Act (AKA the Fulbright-Hays Act of 1961). A J-1 is a “non-immigrant visa,” given to visitors who participate in programs designed to promote cultural exchange. Inaugurated in 1961, at the height of the Cold War, the program was both a valid attempt to introduce foreigners to the American Way of Life as well as a standard propaganda tool.
Originally, the program’s charter had it focusing primarily on medical or business training, along with visiting scholars who were in the U.S. temporarily to teach and do research. And because it was specifically a cultural exchange program, the J-1 visa fell under the auspices of the now defunct USIA (United States Information Agency) rather than the INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service). How it evolved from medical and business training to flipping hamburgers is easily explained. Business interests lobbied hard for its expansion.
These visiting workers have turned out to be a bonanza. Each year hundreds of thousands of them are brought to the United States under programs like J-1, and, according to the National Guestworker Alliance (NGA), the agency that keeps track of them (and who encouraged and supported the McDonald’s protest), these so-called “cultural exchanges” have, over the years, been badly compromised. Given the overwhelming temptation to engage in mischief, employee abuse is now rampant.
What’s happened is that guest workers are now viewed by American businesses as a “captive workforce”—a gullible and needy collection of workers unschooled in American customs and expectations, and without recourse to labor laws or union representation. Not surprisingly, these visitors are being systematically screwed over. According to the NGA, the McDonald’s “employees” had paid approximately $3,000 each for the opportunity to work in the United States. Presumably, that money was spent on transportation costs and fees to GeoVision, the for-profit organization that sponsored them.
Among the “abuses” alleged by McDonald’s guest workers: (1) They’d been promised full-time jobs, but most were given only a few hours a week. (2) They were nonetheless forced to be on call twenty-four hours a day, and were intimidated and threatened if they complained. (3) The company failed to pay them overtime they were entitled to. (5) According to NGA, their employer is also their landlord, and even though there are as many as half a dozen co-workers sharing a room, their rent (which is automatically taken out of their paycheck) renders them making less than minimum wage. Any complaints, and they’re threatened with being sent back home.
None of this should come as a surprise. When there’s an opportunity to lower operating costs by exploiting labor, management will usually take advantage of it. Call it the Law of the Jungle, call it succumbing to market forces, call it “gaining a competitive edge.” But whatever we choose to call it, it’s the workers who get skinned.
Southern California’s restaurant and car-washing industries are sparkling examples of this phenomenon. These businesses are notorious for exploiting frightened, undocumented Mexican workers by paying them less than minimum wage, and breaking with impunity every labor and safety statute in the book. Why? Because they CAN. After all, who’s going to report them?
David Macaray, CounterPunch’s labor correspondent, is a Los Angeles playwright and author (“It’s Never Been Easy: Essays on Modern Labor,” 2nd Edition). He was a former labor union rep. He can be reached at dmacaray@earthlink.net
One of the more bizarre takes on Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s death comes from Associated Press business reporter Pamela Sampson (3/5/13):
Chavez invested Venezuela’s oil wealth into social programs including state-run food markets, cash benefits for poor families, free health clinics and education programs. But those gains were meager compared with the spectacular construction projects that oil riches spurred in glittering Middle Eastern cities, including the world’s tallest building in Dubai and plans for branches of the Louvre and Guggenheim museums in Abu Dhabi.
That’s right: Chavez squandered his nation’s oil money on healthcare, education and nutrition when he could have been building the world’s tallest building or his own branch of the Louvre. What kind of monster has priorities like that?
In case you’re curious about what kind of results this kooky agenda had, here’s a chart (NACLA, 10/8/12) based on World Bank poverty stats–showing the proportion of Venezuelans living on less than $2 a day falling from 35 percent to 13 percent over three years. (For comparison purposes, there’s a similar stat for Brazil, which made substantial but less dramatic progress against poverty over the same time period.)
Of course, during this time, the number of Venezuelans living in the world’s tallest building went from 0 percent to 0 percent, while the number of copies of the Mona Lisa remained flat, at none. So you have to say that Chavez’s presidency was overall pretty disappointing–at least by AP‘s standards.
It’s no secret that most cities, counties, states and school districts in the U.S. are facing big deficits. What is less understood is the extent to which austerity cuts have become politicians’ bi-partisan response to the situation. The dramatic measures being implemented in Portland, Oregon are no exception.
By “austerity” is meant a bag of policies intent on “reforming,” that is, reducing spending by cutting jobs and public services, tearing up social contracts that workers have benefited from, and, in general, making workers and the poor do all the sacrificing to close budgetary imbalances. These austerity measures range from potential cuts to Social Security and Medicare to cuts on a local level that go after our schools, social services, parks, and infrastructure.
While this “sacrificing” is imposed on the vast majority of citizens, obscenely low tax rates for big business and the wealthy are being left in place as their profits swell and their dominance over the political system increases. To appreciate the scope of this trend, one need merely note The New York Times report that there are “nearly $1.1 trillion in annual deductions, credits and other tax breaks that flow disproportionately to the highest income Americans and that cost more, each year, than Medicare and Medicaid combined.”
The Case in Portland
Portland’s newly elected Democratic Mayor Charlie Hales has announced that there is a $25 – $40 million hole in the city’s budget. In response, he is demanding that all 27 city bureaus submit budget proposals with 10 percent cuts. This latest round follows several consecutive years of budget cuts.
The cuts already put into effect have resulted in lost jobs, underfunded services and a decline in Portland’s livability. While it is not clear yet how Hales will wield his cleaver, he is signaling that his cuts will be the deepest yet. The programs that he has already targeted — at-risk teen summer internships, job-training efforts and youth bus passes, among others — will have an immediate impact on great numbers of households, shifting the costs of these publicly funded programs onto the shoulders of families that can least take the burden.
The majority of Portland’s residents can ill afford the costs of trying to close the deficit without damaging the regional economy further. Portland’s unemployment rate is 7.9 percent. According to the Business Journal, 8.3 percent of Portland families live below the poverty level; for families with children the number is 12.9 percent, and 27.4 percent for single, divorced and separated women. If he gets his way, Mayor Hales’ austerity axe will continue to swing at the city’s most vulnerable citizens.
Portland’s top companies make hundreds of millions, if not billions, every year. In Oregon the share of total state income collected by the wealthiest 1 percent increased by 70 percent from 1979 to 2009. In contrast, during that same period, the bottom 80 percent of Oregonians saw their income decline.
In 2009 the highest effective state tax rate for corporations with profits over $10 million was less than 1 percent. For a middle income Oregon household, the average effective rate of payment was 4.1 percent.
If corporations paid the same rate of state and city income taxes that is expected of most citizens, there would be no deficit, no crisis, no need for cuts. Given the vast amount of untouched revenue tucked away in these corporate coffers, Hales’ call for public “sacrifice” to balance the city’s budget amounts to a shell game to distract people from asking, “Where is the money?”
Portland is not broke. The problem is that those with the money are being let off the hook.
Special Arrangements
In addition, Portland’s city budget is far from transparent. It is divided into a General Fund, which is where the so-called deficit is located, as well as Internal Service Funds (ISF). ISFs are unrestricted net assets of the city. They can be used for any purpose. The amount of money in this part of the budget has been steadily increasing. In 2010-2011, the ISF balance was $120.6 million.
But rather than using this money to benefit Portland’s working class communities, the City Council keeps it stashed away for pet projects to lure wealthy investors to the city. Since the ISF lacks transparency and accountability, it is difficult to determine how the money in these funds is used; we only know that it isn’t available when the tax paying public needs it.
Another way Portland’s politicians stash away huge sums to benefit big business is through the use of Urban Renewal (UR). UR requires that money be spent on development projects in a certain area. The revenue created by this development, including property taxes, remains locked up in the area for decades — from 20 to 50 years.
UR taxes in 2010-2011 amounted to $35 million for the city of Portland alone. These funds can only be spent in the UR areas from which they were collected. Consequently, while the posh UR area of Portland’s Pearl District enjoys more public funds than it needs, elsewhere in Portland school closures are looming, streets remain unpaved and infrastructure and park maintenance is done on the cheap, if at all.
Put simply, UR is a means of enriching developers and other corporate interests — like big contributors to politicians’ campaign funds — to the detriment of Portland’s working class communities. The fact that this model, which results in widening inequality, continues to be pursued by those advocating cuts to public programs could not make more clear where these politicians’ allegiances lie.
While Mayor Hales is blaming the city’s deficit on several factors, the math does not add up. When low corporate tax rates, the millions kept in shady city funds, and the revenue drain of development programs such as UR are taken into account, it becomes clear that Portland’s deficit hawks are manufacturing a crisis in order to continue arrangements where workers are left to pay for big business’ greed.
Our Priorities, Our Budget
In addition to the “I feel your pain” displays by Mayor Hales towards those affected by his cuts, he will also employ the tactic of divide and conquer. Those threatened by these cuts will be told the lie that raising revenue by taxing big business and the wealthy is off the table. “The pie is only so big,” promoters of the cuts moan, “you must decide your own priorities.” And in this way they hope to set different communities and unions against one another.
It should be clear, for reasons already discussed, how false this storyline is. While there is likely more than a little padding in upper management that can be cut, and plenty of taxes that remain uncollected, the truth is that a real solution to Portland’s deficit won’t emerge until these priorities are confronted and turned around.
What would a budget that prioritizes peoples’ needs look like? Rather than job cutting, it would fund job creation. Instead of slashing social programs, it would build a thriving and accountable public sector. And corporate interests would take second place behind the health of working class communities. A people’s budget could easily be funded if the 1 percent paid their fair share in taxes and were not given the driver’s seat in determining Portland’s development and political policies.
To change business as usual in Portland will require mobilizing an independent grassroots social force to oppose Hales’ cuts and the corporate interests behind them. It will take a unified Labor and community movement capable of expanding its goals towards winning a people’s budget.
The demands to unite such a movement must be those that the greatest numbers are willing to mobilize behind. “No Cuts! Tax the Rich!” would be a good place to start. While each union and community group has its own priorities, highlighting those which build the broadest unity in mass campaigns and rallies is the best way to bring these organizations’ specific concerns and struggles to the greatest number.
With his austerity cuts, Mayor Hales has issued a challenge to the grassroots. A unified fightback is necessary to meet it. With such a movement it will be possible to shift the political dialogue towards measures that serve the vast majority of citizens. Without it, Portland will be left with Hales’ cuts and worse.
At the same time, a big fight is gearing up as Oregon’s democratic governor has threatened cuts to public workers’ jobs and retirement benefits, on the tail of passing emergency legislation to lock in Nike’s absurdly low tax rate for 30 years. In building a citywide response, Labor and community groups will be strengthening their capacity to take on austerity at a statewide level as well.
Every city, county and statewide struggle against the corporate austerity attacks can set an example for and strengthen our ability to resist cuts to Medicare, Social Security and other socially needed federal programs. From this resistance a movement can develop with the ability not only to resist attacks — but to fight for and implement policies that benefit all working people.
Mark Vorpahl is a union steward, social justice activist and a writer for Workers Action and Occupy.com. He can be reached at Portland@workerscompass.org
Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who is globally discredited for his war crimes, has tried to defend his decision to invade Iraq in 2003, claiming the country is a “safer place” after the execution of dictator Saddam Hussein.
In an interview on BBC2’s Newsnight marking the tenth anniversary of UK armed forces joining a US-led invasion of Iraq, he said despite the death toll among both British troops and Iraqi civilians being “very, very high”, the decision to wage a war against the Arab country was the right one.
He also conceded people are still “very abusive” to him years after the war on Iraq, adding that he had given up trying to “persuade people it was the right decision”.
Being asked if he minded being called a “liar” and “war criminal”, former leader of Britain’s Labour party said it did not matter whether the controversy about Iraq had “taken a toll on” him.
Moreover, he admitted that life in Iraq today was not what he had hoped for 10 years ago.
His comments come as hundreds of thousands were killed and injured in illegal interventions, and hundreds of thousands more were made refugees between 1997 and 2007, under Blair’s premiership.
Meanwhile, according to a recent Guardian/ICM poll a decade after the invasion of Iraq, the majority of Britons believe that the war “sold on a false prospectus delivered little but bloodshed.”
In 2003, the US and Britain invaded Iraq in blatant violation of international law and under the pretext of finding weapons of mass destruction (WMD) allegedly stockpiled by the former Iraqi ruler. However, no WMD were ever discovered in Iraq.
More than one million Iraqis were killed as a result of the invasion and subsequent occupation of the country, according to the California-based investigative organization Project Censored.
A new book by controversial American anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon has triggered a wave of protests among experts and Yanomami Indians:
Marshall Sahlins, ‘the world’s most respected anthropologist alive today’, has resigned from the US National Academy of Sciences in protest at Chagnon’s election to the Academy. Sahlins previously wrote a devastating critique of Chagnon’s work in the Washington Post.
Davi Kopenawa, a spokesman for Brazil’s Yanomami and President of the Yanomami association Hutukara, has spoken out about Chagnon’s work: ‘[Chagnon] said about us, ‘The Yanomami are savages!’ He teaches false things to young students. ‘Look, the Yanomami kill each other because of women.’ He keeps on saying this. But what do his leaders do? I believe that some years ago his leader waged a huge war – they killed thousands of children, they killed thousands of girls and boys. These big men killed almost everything. These are the fierce people, the true fierce people. They throw bombs, fire machine guns and finish off with the Earth. We don’t do this…’
A large group of anthropologists who have each worked with the Yanomami for many years have issued a statement challenging Chagnon’s assessment of the tribe as ‘fierce’ and ‘violent’. They describe the Yanomami as ‘generally peaceable.’
Survival International’s Director Stephen Corry has said, ’Chagnon’s work is frequently used by writers, such as Jared Diamond and Steven Pinker, who want to portray tribal peoples as ‘brutal savages’ – far more violent than ‘us’. But none of them acknowledge that his central findings about Yanomami ‘violence’ have long been discredited.’
Napoleon Chagnon’s autobiography ‘Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes – the Yanomamö and the Anthropologists’, has just been published. His 1968 book ‘Yanomamö: The Fierce People’ portrayed the Yanomami as ‘sly, aggressive and intimidating’, and claimed they ‘live in a state of chronic warfare’. It is still a standard work in undergraduate anthropology.
The Yanomami live in Brazil and Venezuela and are the largest relatively isolated tribe in South America. Their territory is protected by law, but illegal goldminers and ranchers continue to invade their land, destroying their forest and spreading diseases which in the 1980s killed one out of five Brazilian Yanomami.
Most recently, Chagnon’s work was cited in Jared Diamond’s highly controversial book ‘The World Until Yesterday’, in which he states that most tribal peoples, including the Yanomami, are ’trapped in cycles of violence and warfare’ and calls for the imposition of state control in order to bring them peace.
Survival International’s Director Stephen Corry said today, ‘The greatest tragedy in this story is that the real Yanomami have largely been written out of it, as the media have chosen to focus only on the salacious details of the debate that rages between anthropologists or on Chagnon’s disputed characterizations. In fact, Yanomamö: The Fierce People had disastrous repercussions both for the Yanomami and tribal peoples in general. There’s no doubt it’s been used against them and it has brought the 19th century myth of the ‘Brutal Savage’ back into mainstream thinking.’
Last month marked the 90th anniversary of the Rosewood Massacre in Florida and calls a similar Texas slaughter to mind.
The 1923 Rosewood Massacre saw six blacks and two whites killed. The 1910 Slocum Massacre in East Texas saw 8-22 blacks killed and no whites. The Rosewood Massacre is remembered as a national tragedy, even receiving Hollywood treatment; the Slocum Massacre has become a dirty Lone Star secret, remarkable more for the inattention it’s received than its remembrance.
Unlike most Texas and Anderson County communities in the early 20th century, the unincorporated town of Slocum—like Rosewood—was mostly African-American, with several black citizens considerably propertied, and a few owning stores, businesses, etc. This alone, in parts of the south, might have been enough to foment violence. But in the Slocum area, which included the small towns of Ioni Creek, Priscilla and Denison Springs, there were other issues.
When a white man reportedly tried to collect a disputed debt from a well-regarded black citizen, a confrontation occurred and hard feelings lingered. When a regional road construction foreman put an African-American in charge of some local road improvements, a prominent white citizen named Jim Spurger was infuriated and became a vociferous agitator.
Rumors began to spread, warning of threats against Anglo citizens and plans for race riots. White malcontents manipulated the local Anglo population and, on July 29th, white hysteria transmogrified into bloodshed.
Stoked and goaded by Spurger and others, hundreds of Anglo citizens from all over Anderson County converged on Slocum armed with pistols, shotguns and rifles. That morning, near Saddlers Creek, they fired on three African-Americans headed to feed their cattle, killing 18-year-old Cleveland Larkin and wounding 15-year-old Charlie Wilson. The third, 18-year-old Lusk Holly, escaped, only to be shot at again later in the day while he, his 23-year-old brother Alex and their friend William Foreman, were fleeing to Palestine. Alex was killed and Lusk was wounded. Foreman fled and disappeared. Lusk pretended to be dead so a group of 20 white men would not finish him off.
White mobs marched through the area shooting black folks at will. A 30-year-old African-American named John Hays was found dead in a roadway and 28-year-old Sam Baker was shot to death in front of his house. When three of the Baker’s relatives (Dick Wilson, Jeff Wilson and a 70-year-old man named Ben Dancer) attempted to sit up with his body the following night, they, too, were gunned down in cold blood. According to an August 1 report in the Galveston Daily News, bloodstains at the residence indicated they were shot while relaxing on the front porch and then dragged inside.
In addition to the Anderson County murders, which occurred near the county line, Will Burley was killed in Houston County.
According to the August 1 edition of the Newark Daily Advocate, the mobs traveled from house to house, shooting African-Americans who answered their calls and slaughtering more while they tended their fields.
Every early newspaper report (in the New York Times, Galveston Daily News, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, et al.) on the transpiring bloodshed in and around Slocum portrayed the African-Americans as armed insurrectionists that the local Anglo community was simply defending itself against. These accounts were gross mischaracterizations. When district judges in Palestine closed saloons and ordered local gun and ammunition stores to stop selling their wares on July 30, it was not to quell a Black uprising; it was to defuse what the Galveston Daily News called an indescribable, one-sided “reign of terror” characterized by “a fierce manhunt in the woods” and resulting in “riddled bodies found on lonesome roads.”
When reporters gathered on July 31, up to two dozen murders had been reported and more were suspected, but local authorities only had eight bodies. Once the carnage had begun, hundreds of African-American’s had fled to the surrounding piney woods and local marshes. By the time the Texas Rangers and state militia arrived, there was no way to estimate the number of African-American dead.
On August 1, a few Texas Rangers and other white men gathered up six of the African American bodies and buried them (wrapped in blankets and placed in a single large box) in a pit four miles south of Slocum. Farther north, Marsh Holly, owner of a Slocum store and father of Alex and Lusk, was found on a road just outside Palestine. He was terrified and begged the authorities in Palestine for help, requesting that he be locked up in jail for protection. He identified himself as the well-regarded black citizen involved in the promissory note dispute, but denied that the affair comprised a serious provocation.
After the first several murders, much of the African-American community had been in various stages of flight, but this didn’t stop the white mobs. They shot down blacks they discovered in the countryside, even if they were clearing out. Two bodies found near the town of Priscilla still had travel bundles of food and clothing at their sides.
Anderson County Sheriff William H. Black said it would be “difficult to find out just how many were killed” because they were “scattered all over the woods.” He also admitted that buzzards would find many of the victims first, if at all.
It’s reasonable to suspect that after the initial bloodlust had subsided, some of the transgressors returned to the murder scenes to remove the evidence of their crimes. Certainly with the arrival of the press—and after early attempts at spinning the news reports to portray the African-American victims as armed insurrectionists had failed—the guilty Anglo contingents engaged in damage control efforts. But Sheriff Black was inexorable and unflinching.
“Men were going about killing Negroes as fast as they could find them,” Black told the New York Times. “And, so far as I was able to ascertain, without any real cause.”
“These Negroes have done no wrong that I can discover,” Black continued. “I don’t know how many [whites] were in the mob, but there may have been 200 or 300. Some of them cut telephone wires. They hunted the Negroes down like sheep.”
According to the local law enforcement leaders on hand at the time, eight casualties was a conservative number. Sheriff Black and others insisted there were at least a dozen more and some reports suggest there may have been dozens more. Frank Austin, the president of the First State Bank of Frankston, reported the death of an African-American named Anderson Austin near Slocum, but it was never investigated. Abe Wilson—who Houston County Justice of the Peace Pence Singletary identified as the African-American who had been put in charge of the local road improvements—disappeared and was never heard from again. Some witnesses counted 22 casualties. Elkhart native F. M. Power said there were 30 “missing negroes.” Slocum-area resident Luther Hardeman claimed to have knowledge of 18 African-American casualties, and that’s the original number reported by the Galveston Daily News and the New York Times (on July 31), but the body count seemed to shrink as the massacre’s publicity grew. A reliable fatality count was impossible, especially with the perpetrators likely covering their tracks. And the deceased weren’t the only folks becoming scarce; the surviving African-Americans began to disappear as well.
It was one thing to return to your home or your daily routine after the odd murder or infrequent lynching of one of your friends, neighbors or relatives—black folks in the south were not unused to that. But a localized campaign of genocide, where the executioners surrounded you and cut phone lines to prevent you from getting help? That was not something Slocum-area African-Americans could easily relegate to a list of bygones.
If the proverbial water under the bridge was auburn with African-American blood, home was no longer a place to remain attached or return to. And with a large contingent of the black community running for their lives, some victims went unidentified and some disappearances went unreported.
The arrival of the Texas Rangers and the state militia stabilized the situation or at least made it safe enough for many of the remaining African-Americans to pack their belongings and leave without being fired on. The saloons in Anderson County were re-opened for business at noon on August 1.
When a Galveston Daily News correspondent visited Lusk Holly and Charlie Wilson on July 31st (two days before their Grand Jury testimony), they were both suffering from incredible levels of pain due to the gunshot wounds they had received. The correspondent reported that their injuries would be “relieved only by death unless medical attention is speedily afforded.” Wilson had a fractured thigh, damage to one ankle and “glancing wounds through his chest.” Holly had 8-10 pieces of buckshot in his lower left abdominal area and damage to one arm. Physicians had perfunctorily treated their wounds when they were first discovered two days prior, but not since.
Wilson told the Galveston Daily News correspondent that he had recognized two of the assailants during the first shooting on July 29. Holly said that after he had been wounded in the second shooting later in the day, a different group of white men had come upon him while he pretended to be dead. He said he recognized the voice of a prominent, local farmer named Jeff Wise, who deemed his apparent and his brother’s actual death “a shame” as he passed by.
In the weeks and months following what came to be known as the Slocum Massacre, the African-American population made a mass exodus, leaving homes, properties, businesses and personal connections to the land and the community.
And the whites who perpetrated the massacre as active participants or passive bystanders?
At the initial Grand Jury hearing, nearly every remaining Slocum resident was subpoenaed; some residents refused to testify and were arrested. The Grand Jury judge, B. H. Gardner, of Palestine, told the all-male, all-white jury that the massacre was “a disgrace, not only to the county, but to the state” and it was up to them to do their “full duty.”
According to the August 2 edition of the Palestine Daily Herald, Judge Gardner attempted to clarify the charges and the issues at hand, explaining various statutes to the jury. He said that even if there had been threats or conspiracies “on the part of any number of Negroes to do violence to white persons, it would not justify anybody to take the law into their own hands.”
“The law furnishes ample remedy,” Gardner continued. “There is no justification for shooting men in the back, waylaying or killing them in their houses.”
When the Grand Jury findings were reported on August 17, several hundred witnesses had been examined. Though eleven men were initially arrested, seven were finally indicted, but only six were named—and they were only accused in the murders of five of the identified victims. Defendants Reagon McKenzie, T. W. Bailey and Morgan Henry were released without being charged. Jim Spurger was indicted in two cases, B. J. Jenkins in four cases and Curtis Spurger, Steve Jenkins, Isom Garner and Andrew Kirkwood in three cases. The seventh indicted man was not arrested or named; only Kirkwood was immediately granted bail. No one was ever indicted for the deaths of John Hays or Alex Holly.
After the Grand Jury indictments came down, Judge Gardner decided to move the trial for the indicted, identified perpetrators of the Slocum Massacre to Harris County, distrusting the potential jury of peers the defendants might receive in Anderson County. The indictments received no interest in Harris County.
On May 4, 1911, Judge Ned R. Morris of Palestine petitioned the Travis County Court of Criminal Appeals to grant bail for the remaining defendants and it was granted. Eventually, all those charged were released and none of the indictments were ever prosecuted.
In the meanwhile, the personal holdings of many Slocum area Anglo citizens fortuitously increased.
The abandoned African-American properties were absorbed or repurposed as the now majority white population saw fit. The standard southern Anglo-centric world order was restored, and this order has endured, even to the present day.
According to recent demographic statistics, most of the communities around Slocum have an African-American population that ranges between 20-25%. Grapeland’s is 35%, Rusk’s is 30% and Palestine’s and Alto’s is 25%. Slocum’s African-American population is just under 7%.
Today, Slocum is still an unincorporated community and that’s probably wise. If there was an elected civic leader or assembly in Slocum, they might be asked to apologize for the massacre or explain why there are no placards acknowledging the event or the American citizens who were slaughtered there and covered up in unmarked graves in the woods and creek bottoms.
On April 24, 1929, a tornado rolled through Slocum, leveling the town, killing seven and injuring 20. Organizations from all over East Texas went to great lengths to raise money for the victims and help the town get back on its feet. Though the Slocum Massacre’s casualties were greater and its African-American community’s coerced migration was arguably just as landscape-altering, the twister overshadowed the localized genocide of 1910, and the event is largely forgotten today.
In the Rosewood Massacre, six blacks and two whites were killed and a special, governor-appointed grand jury found no one to prosecute. In the Slocum Massacre, at least eight blacks were killed and no whites were even injured and, though seven men were indicted by a grand jury, none were ever prosecuted. In both cases, thriving African-American populations vacated their own communities to survive a racially-motivated bloodbath.
In the Rosewood Victims v. the State of Florida decision in 1994, Florida became the first U.S. State to compensate the victims and the descendants of victims of racial violence and, ten years later, the site of Rosewood was designated a Florida Heritage Landmark.
In Texas, the Slocum Massacre—which was at least as heinous as the Rosewood Massacre—hasn’t even received a historical marker. And there have been no investigations to determine the toll of the carnage, the extent of the personal losses or the exact number of victims.
On March 30, 2011, after a February 27 story on the Slocum Massacre in the Fort Worth Star Telegram (by Tim Madigan), the 82nd Texas Legislature adopted House of Representatives Resolution 865 (filed by Reps. Marc Veasey and Lon Burnam), acknowledging the Slocum Massacre of 1910. It admitted that a mob comprised of hundreds of armed white men in the Slocum area went on a “bloody rampage” that resulted in eight and perhaps many more African-American deaths, forcing the black community there to abandon their homes and properties and flee. The resolution concluded with flowery language stating that “only by shining a light on previous injustices can we learn from them and move forward,” but the little-publicized gesture hardly accomplishes that.
In testimony presented at the bail hearing on May 10, 1911, defense witness Alvin Oliver criticized the “insolent manner and conduct” of the blacks in that part of Anderson County after the lynching of an African-American in neighboring Cherokee County a couple of years before and brazenly noted that things were different after the massacre.
“The Negroes down there are not disbehaving now,” Oliver observed.
And he was right.
There were hardly any left.
E.R. Bills is a writer from Ft Worth, Texas. His recent works appear in Fort Worth Weekly, South Texas Nation, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Fort Worth Magazine, etc. He can be reached at: erbillsthinks@gmail.com.
History is commonly regarded as an attempt to produce a structured account of the past. It proclaims to tell us what really happened, but in most cases it fails to do that. Instead it is set to conceal our shame, to hide those various elements, events, incidents and occurrences in our past which we cannot cope with. History, therefore, can be regarded as a system of concealment. Accordingly, the role of the true historian is similar to that of the psychoanalyst: both aim to unveil the repressed. For the psychoanalyst, it is the unconscious mind. For the historian, it is our collective shame.
Yet, one may wonder, how many historians really engage in such a task? How many historians are courageous enough to open the Pandora Box? How many historians are brave enough to challenge Jewish History for real? How many historians dare to ask why Jews? Why do Jews suffer time after time? Is it really the Goyim who are inherently murderous, or is there something unsettling in Jewish culture or collectivism? But Jewish history is obviously far from being alone here: every people’s past is, in fact, as problematic. Can Palestinians really explain to themselves how is it that after more than a decade of struggle, they wake up to find out that their current capital has become a NGO haven largely funded by George Soros’ Open Society? Can the Brits once and for all look in the mirror and explain to themselves why, in their Imperial Wars Museum, they erected a Holocaust exhibition dedicated to the destruction of the Jews? Shouldn’t the Brits be slightly more courageous and look into one of the many Shoas they themselves inflicted on others? Clearly they have an impressive back catalogue to choose from.
The Guardian vs. Athens
The past is dangerous territory; it can induce inconvenient stories. This fact alone may explain why the true Historian is often presented as a public enemy. However, the Left has invented an academic method to tackle the issue. The ‘progressive’ historian functions to produce a ‘politically correct’, ‘inoffensive’ tale of the past. By means of zigzagging, it navigates its way, while paying its dues to the concealed and producing endless ad-hoc deviations that leave the ‘repressed’ untouched. The progressive subject is there to produce a ‘non- essentialist’ and ‘unoffending’ account of the past at the expense of the so-called ‘reactionary’. The Guardian is an emblem of such an approach, it would, for instance, ban any criticism of Jewish culture or Jewishness, yet it provides a televised platform for two rabid Zionist so they can discuss Arab culture and Islamism. The Guardian wouldn’t mind offending ‘Islamists’ or British ‘nationalists’ but it would be very careful not to hurt any Jewish sensitivities. Such version of politics or the past is impervious to truthfulness, coherence, consistency or integrity. In fact, the progressive discourse is far from being ‘the guardian of the truth’, it is actually set as ‘the guardian of the discourse’ and I am referring here to Left discourse in particular.
But surely there is an alternative to the ‘progressive’ attitude to the past. The true historian is actually a philosopher – an essentialist – a thinker who posits the question ‘what does it mean to be in the world and what does it take to live amongst others’? The true historian transcends beyond the singular, the particular and the personal. He or she is searching for the condition of the possibility of that which drives our past, present and future. The true historian dwells on Being and Time, he or she is searching for a humanist lesson and an ethical insight while looking into the poem, the art, the beauty, the reason but also into the fear. The true historian is an essentialist who digs out the concealed, for he or she knows that the repressed is the kernel of the truth.
Leo Strauss provides us with a very useful insight in that regard. Western civilization, he contends, oscillates between two intellectual and spiritual poles – Athens and Jerusalem. Athens — the birthplace of democracy, home for reason, philosophy, art and science. Jerusalem — the city of God where God’s law prevails. The philosopher, the true historian, or the essentialist, for that matter, is obviously the Athenian. The Jerusalemite, in that regard, is ‘the guardian of the discourse’, the one who keeps the gate, just to maintain law and order at the expense of ecstasies, poesis, beauty, reason and truth.
Spielberg vs. Tarantino
Hollywood provides us with an insight into this oscillation between Athens and Jerusalem: between the Jerusalemite ‘guardian of the discourse’ and the Athenian contender – the ‘essentialist’ public enemy. On the Left side of the map we find Steven Spielberg, the ‘progressive’ genius. On his Right we meet peosis itself, Quentin Tarantino, the ‘essentialist’.
Spielberg, provides us with the ultimate sanitized historical epic. The facts are cherry picked just to produce a pre meditated pseudo ethical tale that maintains the righteous discourse, law and order but, most importantly, the primacy of Jewish suffering (Schindler’s List and Munich). Spielberg brings to life a grand epic with a clear retrospective take on the past. Spielberg’s tactic is, in most cases, pretty simple. He would juxtapose a vivid transparent binary opposition: Nazis vs. Jews, Israelis vs. Palestinians , North vs. South, Righteousness vs. Slavery. Somehow, we always know, in advance who are the baddies and who are the goodies. We clearly know who to side with.
Binary opposition is indeed a safe route. It provides a clear distinction between the ‘Kosher’ and the ‘forbidden’. But Spielberg is far from being a banal mind. He also allows a highly calculated and carefully meditated oscillation. In a universalist gesture of courtesy he would let a single Nazi into the family of the kind. He would allow the odd Palestinian to be a victim. It can all happen as long as the main frame of the discourse remains intact. Spielberg is clearly an arch guardian of discourse – being a master of his art-form, he will certainly maintain your attention for at least 90 minutes of a historic cinematic cocktail made of factual mishmash. All you have to do is to follow the plot to the end. By then the pre-digested ethical message is safely replanted at the hub of your self-loving narcissistic universe.
Unlike Spielberg, Tarantino is not concerned with factuality; he may even repel historicity. Tarantino may as well believe that the notion of ‘the message’ or morality are over rated. Tarantino is an essentialist, he is interested in human nature, in Being and he seems to be fascinated in particular in vengeance and its universality. For the obvious reasons, his totally farfetched Inglorious Bastards throws light on present Israeli collective blood thirstiness as being detected at the time of Operation Cast lead. The fictional cinematic creation of a revengeful murderous WWII Jewish commando unit is there to throw the light on the devastating contemporary reality of Jewish lobbies’ lust for violence in their relentless push for a world war against Iran and beyond. But Inglorious Bastards may as well have a universal appeal because the Old Testament’s ‘eye for an eye’ has become the Anglo American political driving force in the aftermath of 9/11.
Abe’le vs. Django
What may seem a spiritual clash between Jerusalemite Spielberg and Athenian Tarantino is more than apparent in their recent works.
The history of slavery in America is indeed a problematic topic and, for obvious reasons, many aspects of this chapter are still kept deeply within the domain of the concealed. Once again Spielberg and Tarantino have produced distinctively different accounts of this chapter.
In his recent historical epic Lincoln, Spielberg, made Abraham Lincoln into a Neocon ‘moral interventionist’ who against all (political) odds, abolished slavery. I guess that Spielberg knows enough American history to gather that his cinematic account is a crude Zigzag attempt, for the anti slavery political campaign was a mere pretext for a bloody war driven by clear economical objectives.
As one may expect, Spielberg peppers his tale with more than a few genuine historical anecdotes. He is certainly paying the necessary dues just to keep the shame shoved deep under the carpet. His Lincoln is cherished as a morally driven hero of human brotherhood. And the entire plot carries all the symptoms of contemporary AIPAC lobby assault within the Capitol. Being one of the arch guardians of the discourse, Spielberg has successfully fulfilled his task. He added a substantial cinematic layer to ensure that America’s true shame remains deeply repressed or shall we say, untouched.
Needles to mention that Spielberg’s take on Lincoln has been cheered by the Jewish press. They called the president Avraham Lincoln Avinu (our father, Hebrew) in The Tablet Magazine. ‘Avraham’, according to the Tablet, is the definitive good Jew. “As imagined by Spielberg and Kushner, Lincoln’s Lincoln is the ultimate mensch. He is a skilled natural psychologist, an interpreter of dreams, and a man blessed with an extraordinarily clever and subtle legal mind.” In short, Spielberg’s Lincoln is Abe’le who combines the skills, the gift and the traits of Moses, Freud as well as Alan Dershowitz. However, some Jews complain about the film. “As an American Jewish historian, writes Lance J. Sussman, “I’m afraid I have to say I am somewhat disappointed with the latest Spielberg film. So much of it is so good, but it would have been even better if he had put at least one Jew in the movie, somewhere.”
I guess that Spielberg may find it hard to please the entire tribe. Quentin Tarantino, however, doesn’t even try. Tarantino is, in fact, doing the complete opposite. Through a phantasmic epic that confesses zero interest in any form of historicity or factuality whatsoever, he manages, in his latest masterpiece Django Unchained, to dig out the darkest secrets of Slavery. He scratches the concealed and judging by the reaction of another cinematic genius Spike Lee, he has clearly managed to get pretty deep.
By putting into play a stylistic spectacle within the Western genre Tarantino manages to dwell on every aspect we are advised to leave untouched. He deals with biological determinism, White supremacy and cruelty. But he also turns his lens onto slaves’ passivity, subservience and collaboration. The Athenian director builds here a set of Greek mythological God like characters; Django (Jamie Fox), is the unruly king of revenge and Schultz (Christoph Waltz) the German dentist turned bounty hunter is the master of wit, kindness and humanity with a giant wisdom tooth shining over his caravan. Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio) is the Hegelian (racist) Master and Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson) is the Hegelian Slave, emerging as the personification of social transformation. To a certain extent, the relationships between Candie and Stephen could be seen as one of the most profound yet subversive cinematic takes on Hegel’s master-slave dialectic.
In Hegel’s dialectic two self-consciousnesses are constituted via a process of mirroring. In Django Unchained, Stephen the slave, seems to convey the ultimate form of subservience, yet this is merely on the surface. In reality Stephen is way more sophisticated and observant than his master Candie. He is on his way up. It is hard to determine whether Stephen is a collaborator or if he really runs the entire show. And yet in Tarantino’s latest, Hegel’s dialectic is, somehow, compartmentalized. Django, once unchained, is clearly impervious to the Hegelian dialectic spiel. His incidental liberation induces in him a true spirit of relentless resilience. When it comes to it, he kills the Master, the Slave and everyone else who happens to be around, he bends every rule including the ‘rules of nature’ (biological determinism). By the time the epic is over, Django leaves behind a wreckage of the Candie’s plantation, the cinematic symbol of the dying old South and the ‘Master Slave Dialectic’. Yet, as Django rides on a horse towards the rising sun together with his free wife Broomhilda von Shaft (Kerry Washington), we are awakened to the far fetched cinematic fantasy. In reality, I mean the world out of the cinema, the Candie’s plantation would, in all likelihood, remain intact and Django would probably be chained up again. In practice, Tarantino cynically juxtaposes the dream (the cinematic reality) and reality (as we know it). By doing so he manages to illuminate the depth of misery that is entangled with the human condition and in Black reality in America in particular.
Tarantino is certainly not a ‘guardian of the discourse.’ Quite the opposite, he is the bitterest enemy of stagnation. As in his previous works, his latest spectacle is an essentialist assault on correctness and ‘self-love’. Tarantino indeed turns over many stones and unleashes many vipers into the room. Yet being a devout Athenian he doesn’t intend to produce a single answer or a moral lesson. He leaves us perplexed yet cheerful. For Tarantino, I guess, dilemma is the existential essence. Spielberg, on, the other hand, provides all the necessary answers. After all, within the ‘progressive’ politically-correct discourse, it is the answers that determine, in retrospective, what questions we are entitled to raise.
If Leo Strauss is correct and Western civilization should be seen as an oscillation between Athens and Jerusalem, truth must be said – we can really do with many more Athenians and their essentialist reflections. In short, we are in a desperate need of many more Tarantinos to counter Jerusalem and its ambassadors.
US Ambassador in Lebanon Maura Connelly’s convoy violated on Tuesday the antiquities in the southern city of Tyre, as it insisted to pass near the Roman Arc of Triumph, through a narrow, dirt road supported by an old stone wall.
The act could be considered a message from the embassy, that its staff and vehicles can enter anywhere without any considerations.
Connelly went to the region with the city’s mayor Hussein Dbouk, and the cars accompanying her followed her through the dirt road. However, one of the cars veered off the road and destroyed the stone wall.
The accident did not very much affect Connelly’s visit, it only caused a short delay to the program, as the group had to wait for a winch to arrive and pull the deviated vehicle off the road.
Through a secret program called the Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), there was a concerted effort to subvert the will of the people to avoid the rise “of a black Messiah” that would mobilize the African-American community into a meaningful political force.
This documentary establishes historical perspective on the measures initiated by J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI which aimed to discredit black political figures and forces of the late 1960′s and early 1970′s.
Combining declassified documents, interviews, rare footage and exhaustive research, it investigates the government’s role in the assassinations of Malcolm X, Fred Hampton, and Martin Luther King Jr. Were the murders the result of this concerted effort to avoid “a black Messiah”?
This marked the first time in history that public schools reported more than one million homeless children and youth.
Nationally, the total of homeless students increased 13% from the previous year (2009-2010). In 15 states, the increase was 20% or higher. Kentucky and Utah experienced a 47% jump, Michigan and West Virginia 38%, and Mississippi 35%.
The National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty said the number of homeless children attending public schools has soared 57% since the beginning of the recession (2006-2007 school year).
From its very beginning, gun control — the attempt to regulate the possession of means of self-defense by the ordinary populace — has been closely associated with class rule and the class state.
In early modern England, regulation of firearm ownership was closely intertwined with the struggle by the landed classes and capitalist agriculture to restrict the laboring classes’ access to independent subsistence from the land. This included enclosure of common woodland, fen and waste — in which landless and land-poor peasants had previously hunted small game — for sheep pasturage or arable land. It also included exclusion of the common people from forests via the Game Laws and restriction of hunting to the gentry.
Under the slaveocracy of the American south, firearm ownership was prohibited by Black Codes that regulated free blacks. And after Emancipation, whenever the old landed gentry managed to successfully assert its power against the Reconstruction regime, former slaves were disarmed by house-to-house patrols, either under the Black Codes or by such irregular bodies as the Klan.
The same was true of the Civil Rights struggle a century later, after World War II. In areas where armed self-defense efforts by civil rights activists were widespread, they significantly improved the balance of power against the Klan and other racist vigilante movements. Numerous armed self-defense groups — e.g. the Deacons for Defense and Justice, whose members used rifles and shotguns to repel attacks by white vigilantes in Louisiana in the 1960s — helped equalize the correlation of forces between civil rights activists and racists in many small towns throughout the south.
Especially notable was Robert Williams, who in 1957 organized an armed defense of the Monroe, NC NAACP chapter president’s home against a Klan raid and sent the vigilantes fleeing for their lives. Williams’s book Negroes With Guns later inspired Huey Newton, a founder of the Black Panthers Party.
Speaking of the Black Panthers, no discussion of the origins of modern American gun control would be complete without recognizing their role in inspiring the modern right-wing gun control agenda.
Foreshadowing current groups like Copwatch and Cop Block, the Panthers in 1966 organized armed patrols of Oakland streets with rifles and shotguns, stopping to witness police interactions with local residents and provide information and offers of legal assistance when necessary.
In 1967 Republican state assemblyman Don Mulford of Oakland, a vocal enemy of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the Black Panthers, responded with a bill to prohibit publicly carrying firearms in California. The BPP’s Bobby Seale protested the bill by leading a Panther detachment, armed with .357 Magnums, 12-gauge shotguns and .45-caliber pistols, up the steps of the statehouse (“All right, brothers, we’re going inside”), through its doors, and into the public viewing area. There Seale read a statement denouncing Mulford’s bill as an attempt “at keeping the black people disarmed and powerless at the very same time that racist police agencies throughout the country are intensifying the terror and repression of black people,” and warning that “the time has come for black people to arm themselves against this terror before it is too late.”
Mulford’s gun control bill was signed into law three months later by Governor Ronald Reagan.
Irregular workers’ militias and armed defense formations played a significant role in labor history, both in the US and abroad. During the Copper Wars at the turn of the 20th century, the governors of several Rocky Mountain states instituted martial law — including door-to-door confiscation of firearms from workers’ homes and striker encampments. In some cases, as with the West Virginia Coal Wars and the Homestead strike, workers fought pitched battles against Pinkertons, state militia and sheriffs’ deputies.
In Spain it was largely owing to workers’ militias, organized under the auspices of the CNT trade union federation and the parties of the Left, that Franco’s July 1936 coup attempt failed. In the areas of southern and eastern Spain where Franco’s forces failed to carry the day, workers’ militias often played a decisive role. In some areas armed workers drove Franco’s troops back into their barracks after pitched battles and burned them alive inside.
From its beginnings the state has been an executive committee of the economic ruling class and an instrument of armed force by the owners of the means of production, enabling them to extract surplus labor from the rest of us. I can’t imagine why anyone would expect the state’s gun control policies to display any less of a class character than other areas of policy.
Regardless of the “liberal” or “progressive” rhetoric used to defend gun control, you can safely bet it will come down harder on the cottagers than on the gentry, harder on the workers than on the Pinkertons, and harder on the Black Panthers than on murdering cops.
Soybeans generate approximately $80 million annually in mandatory producer assessments alone, funding a marketing apparatus that has transformed an industrial commodity into one of America’s most trusted “health foods.” The campaign succeeded. Soy milk lines supermarket shelves beside dairy. Soy protein fortifies everything from infant formula to energy bars. Vegetarians rely on tofu and tempeh as dietary staples. Doctors recommend soy to menopausal women. School lunch programs serve soy-based meat substitutes to children. An estimated 60 percent of processed foods contain soy derivatives. The premise underlying this proliferation—that Asians have thrived on soy for millennia and that modern science validates its health benefits—has been repeated so often it functions as established fact.
Kaayla T. Daniel’s The Whole Soy Story dismantles this premise through systematic examination of the scientific literature. The book documents that traditional Asian soy consumption averaged roughly one tablespoon daily, consumed as fermented condiments after processing methods that neutralized inherent toxins—a pattern bearing no resemblance to American consumption of industrially processed soy protein isolate, soy flour, and soy oil. Daniel catalogs the antinutrients that survive modern processing (protease inhibitors, phytates, lectins, saponins), the toxic compounds created by industrial methods (nitrosamines, lysinoalanine, hexane residues), and the heavy metals concentrated in soy products (manganese, aluminum, fluoride, cadmium). She traces the mechanisms by which soy isoflavones—plant estrogens present at pharmacologically significant levels—disrupt thyroid function, impair fertility, and interact with hormone-sensitive cancers. The evidence emerges from peer-reviewed journals, FDA documents, and industry sources themselves.
The stakes extend beyond individual dietary choices. Infants fed soy formula receive isoflavone doses equivalent to several birth control pills daily, with blood concentrations 13,000 to 22,000 times higher than their natural estrogen levels. Soy protein isolate—the ingredient in formula, protein bars, and thousands of products—has never received GRAS (Generally Recognized as Safe) status; its only pre-1960s use was as an industrial paper sealant. Two senior FDA scientists formally protested their own agency’s approval of soy health claims, citing evidence of thyroid damage and reproductive harm. The Honolulu Heart Program found that men consuming tofu twice weekly showed accelerated brain aging and increased dementia. These findings have not penetrated public awareness because the institutions responsible for consumer protection have been compromised by the industry they regulate. The Whole Soy Story presents the evidence that has been systematically excluded from mainstream health messaging, enabling readers to evaluate for themselves what the soy industry prefers they never learn. … continue
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Davi Kopenawa, Yanomami spokesperson and shaman, has spoken out against Napoleon Chagnon’s new book ‘Noble Savages’.
Napoleon Chagnon’s view that the Yanomami are ‘sly, aggressive and intimidating’ and that they ‘live in a state of chronic warfare’ has been widely discredited.
US Ambassador in Lebanon Maura Connelly’s convoy violated on Tuesday the antiquities in the southern city of Tyre, as it insisted to pass near the Roman Arc of Triumph, through a narrow, dirt road supported by an old stone wall.
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