Thursday, May 31, 2012

Via: http://rebelyouth-magazine.blogspot.com/2012/05/activists-in-quebec-respond-to-debates.html
This letter is in response to a recent call to criticize the Canadian Federation of Students, and demand this student union in Ontario call a general student strike. That letter can be read here.

We write as student activists in Qu̩bec who have been involved in organizing the 2011-2012 general student strike Рon both anglophone and francophone campuses.

We are ecstatic to hear that so many students in English Canada are building a campaign to mobilize similar strikes in Ontario and elsewhere. We are heartened by the outpouring of solidarity, and we believe that the best way that students outside Québec can join the movement is by mobilizing strikes from the ground up in their own communities.

Open Letter to the CFS assumes that strikes can be organized by “elected student leaders” and masterminded provincially, if not nationally. Certainly, the Federation can and must support strike initiatives. However, these have to be built from the ground up and through structures of direct democracy – specifically, general assemblies which are fully empowered to make real decisions. This is something that we have learned again and again in Québec, and this method of organizing has consistently proven to be the only way to build viable strike movements. Students feel a sense of ownership over movements created this way, which cannot be undermined by claims of a minority imposing their will on a majority.

Strike campaigns or votes must not be imposed by student federations, or even individual unions. They must be organized by activists on the ground and discussed in regular general assemblies to involve the broader student body. Strategically, organizing strikes first where they’re most likely to succeed – in traditionally progressive departmental unions rather than faculty or campus unions – will ensure the kind of momentum-building that could lead to a general strike of Ontario students.

There are, however, a number of things that the Federation can and must do to support a general strike movement. Educational campaigns, facilitating solidarity delegations, workshops, and activist exchanges are extremely important, even if they do not replace locally-focused campaigns. Perhaps most importantly, the CFS could facilitate the creation or mobilization of politically autonomous departmental associations, which barely exist on many anglophone campuses. In fact, the first unlimited strikes in the history of McGill and Concordia Universities were organized mainly in previously dormant departmental unions.

The formation of mobilized, combative departmental unions built upon structures of direct democracy needs to be seen as a consequence of strike campaigns, not a necessary precondition without which activists’ hands are tied. There is always a way forward.

We are optimistic that a general student strike in Ontario can and will succeed, given the right ingredients. The Open Letter to the CFS represents a first step towards creating a radical, democratic strike movement in Ontario and beyond. As we watch students lay the foundations for powerful strike movements across the country, we hope we can continue to share our experience in Quebec – both successes and failures.

The letter has been signed by a number of student activists from English and French-speaking campuses in Quebec. The full letter is posted on facebook here.

Via www.peoplesworld.org

by: Leslie S. Robinson
May 30 2012

A May 24 demonstration outside the Fort Hood main gate in Killeen, Texas, honored soldiers who have committed suicide due to trauma inflicted in combat, and asked General Campbell, the Commanding General of III Corps at Fort Hood, to enforce policies which would improve service members’ access to behavioral healthcare.

A group of veterans and civilian supporters identifying as Operation Recovery passed out flyers for a memorial day BBQ along with copies of command policies MEDCEN01 and SURG1 to vehicles entering and exiting the gate.

MEDCEN01 and SURG1 were enacted on Fort Hood to give soldiers’ treatment plans the weight of law over operational readiness and allow them to seek care without fear of retaliation from their unit. They are not always enforced at company or battalion level for the sake of expediency and also due to a culture of silence around these issues.

“This action is to shine a light on the fact that those two policies are in place but are not being enforced, and the general needs to take steps to ensure that the policies he put down on the books aren’t just merely words but that those words carry meaning.” said Jason Matherne, member of Iraq Veterans Against The War (IVAW) and Resident Organizer at Under The Hood, a GI outreach center and café in Killeen through which the Operation Recovery campaign is conducted. Matherne deployed to Qatar in 2008 in support of Operation Enduring Freedom.

Neglect of soldier care has led to a host of appalling consequences over the course of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. General Chiarelli, who compiled a report on the effects of the wars on military personnel entitled Generating Health and Discipline In The Force, told the New York Times in January that 164 active duty service members took their lives in 2011. This sets a record high and can be credited to multiple deployments and a general lack of treatment for conditions like Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Traumatic Brain Injury and Military Sexual Trauma.

In spite of these costs, education about MECEN01 and SURG1 has not been a priority on Fort Hood. Operation Recovery is determined to change that. Not only are they working to get these policies into the hands of active duty service members, but they are also pressuring General Campbell to hold a post-wide Safety Stand-down in lieu of these policies.

Post-wide enforcement and knowledge of MEDCEN01 and SURG1 could conceivably force a change in the culture at Fort Hood, giving service members’ a basic dignity which has already been denied to too many in the military: that of seeking care for themselves when they are most in need of it.

Overall, the message seemed to resonate with the passing motorists. Matherne said, “There was a little bit of negativity, as there always will be. There was some indifference, but there were a lot of thank-you’s from soldiers when we gave them flyers. There was a lot of horn-honking, and there was some genuine interest in it. So, yeah, it was really positive.”

Under The Hood is carrying on the legacy of Vietnam-era war resistance coffee houses like The Oleo Strut, whose doors were open in Killeen from 1968 to 1972. The café is run by members of IVAW, active duty service members, and the Civilian-Soldier Alliance (a group of civilian activists working closely with IVAW). As well as being a hub of war resistance culture and action, Under The Hood is a place that champions the rights of service members and their families.

You can send General Campbell an e-mail telling him to hold a Safety Stand-down around MEDCEN01 and SURG1 by clicking here. To find out more about Under The Hood and how to get involved, check out the website.

If you are an active duty soldier and need counseling, medical or legal referral, or just want to know what your rights as a service member are, call the GI Rights Hotline at 877-447-4487.

Via: http://mltoday.com/subject-areas/social-and-economic-conditions/the-va-as-a-health-care-system-model-1394-2.html

Written by James Thompson

Best Care Anywhere: Why VA Health Care Is Better Thans Yours by Phillip Longman (2nd edition, 2010)

It is a daunting task to critically evaluate the delivery of health care in the United States.

Some try to masquerade U.S. health care delivery as a “system”, but this is entirely false. Health care delivery in the United States is based on capitalism, which is the basis for all social organization in this country.

Health care delivery is not immune from the disease of capitalism. Capitalism dictates the mode of production and this is true of the delivery of health care as well as any other social relationship in this country. This translates into a built-in profit motive that drives U.S. health care delivery in the private sector.

Longman has written a very interesting advocacy paper, which proposes that the current anarchy and chaos of American health care delivery be replaced by a model based on the Veterans’ Administration health care system (usually referred to as the VA).

It is remarkable that there exists an organized health care delivery system in the USA, which stands apart from the crazed, profit-driven health care delivery in the private sector. The VA is not based on profits, but rather based on providing quality health care to a special sector of the population, namely veterans. They do this very well and with great efficiency.

The VA is also already union-organized. Every employee including doctors and attorneys can join the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE).

There is no doubt that the VA system of care offers many advances over the current state of health care delivery in the USA. I know this well on a personal basis. I worked as a VA psychologist for eight years in Houston.

I was impressed by the ability of the VA to provide services to veterans unmatched in the private sector. The VA’s Vocational Rehabilitation Services, for example, are far superior to anything available for civilians.

Longman lauds the virtues of electronic medical records in the VA system. I used that medical records system as well as the MUMPS system to which he refers repeatedly. There are immeasurable advantages to these systems. They facilitate health care as well as research. I used these data in studies of homeless veterans as well as provision of psychological assessment and treatment while I worked at the Houston VA Medical Center.

It is invaluable for a doctor in Minneapolis to be able to access the medical records of somebody in Walla Walla, Washington with the click of a mouse. The reduction in duplication of services, elimination of unnecessary medical services to malingerers and drug seekers is a great advantage for the VA system.

It should be noted that the Michael E. DeBakey VA Medical Center in Houston, Texas is ranked as the 11th best hospital in the country.
Longman advocates replacing health care delivery in the USA with a system he calls the VistA system (named after the VA computerized records system).

He notes that current health care delivery is reimbursed according to treatment provided. This means that providers are paid only according to the treatment they deliver to the individual patient. Therefore, if a patient presents complaining of “feeling bad”, the doctor gets paid if they provide treatment. So, even if the patient has no blood pressure problem, the doctor gets paid if they write a prescription for blood pressure medicine.

Similarly, the doctor gets reimbursed if they prescribe antidepressants even if the patient’s malady can be treated by psychotherapy. The dark unknown is what sort of kickback or privilege the doctor in the private sector receives from the drug company for prescribing the newest, most expensive blood pressure medicine, antidepressant or antipsychotic medication. I have treated patients who have been victimized by such unnecessary treatment.

He maintains that implementing a Single Payer health care system would only perpetuate the problems of current health care delivery. In other words, doctors would still be reimbursed according to the treatment provided.

Longman discusses the health care threat that diabetes poses to the general population. He points out that diabetes is an illness that cannot be contracted from other people. He implies that diabetes is a function of lifestyle. Many of the newer, more expensive medications have adverse side effects, which include diabetes. These medications include the atypical antipsychotics. These medications also can result in many other adverse side effects such as obesity and cardiac problems.

It is clear that rewarding doctors for the treatment they provide is not a good model. It would be better to provide treatment with a view to prevention within a system that would ensure ethical, reasonable, medically necessary treatment accessible to all. Such a system would be a tall order, to be sure.

Could such a health care delivery system be built on a “VA for all” model? Mr. Longman makes a strong case that it can.

Some would argue that the VA health care system is more advanced than a “Medicare for all” health care delivery system and emulates the British national health care system.

Currently the federal government is able to regulate unscrupulous practitioners to some extent. There have been many arrests of Medicare providers in Houston recently for fraudulent activity. With an organized health care system, presumably such regulations could be policed more efficiently and could put an end to the graft and corruption in private health care delivery.
Kickbacks would become a thing of the past in an organized health care delivery system.

Longman notes that the Bush Administration, during its execution of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, attacked accessibility of the VA to veterans. Now, non-service-connected veterans who do not meet the means test (in other words, whose incomes are too high) are not eligible for VA care.

This restriction is unfair to those who have served their country, and Longman calls for these restrictions to be removed. He makes the case that opening up the VA to all veterans would be a step in the right direction towards a universal health care system. One could argue that the VA should be opened up to veterans as well as their family members and this would also be a positive development.
By restricting VA health care to veterans with service connected disabilities and low income non-service-connected veterans, the right wing has reduced the political punch of veterans and their organizations by splitting them up. By eliminating the higher income veterans from eligibility, they have diminished the political strength of a sector of veterans. Such splitting tactics should be exposed and thereby used in the fight against the rise of the ultra-right wing.

Prior to the Bush administration, the right wing considered the VA to be an “untouchable” since it was an earned benefit for those who fought the bloody imperialist wars that furthered the interests of the 1%. However, the Bush administration did not support universal health care for veterans. President Obama has been more vocal in speaking about and advocating for veterans benefits.

In conclusion, Longman opens a discussion about health care delivery in the USA. The most important point is that we don’t have a health care delivery system, but only an anarchic, disorganized health care delivery that benefits those providers who provide the most and most expensive treatments.

Health care delivery in the USA also benefits the insurance companies, drug companies, hospital corporations and their shareholders. Many people talk about the administrative costs in the delivery of health care.

It would be interesting to see a study evaluating the cost of stocks and dividends paid out to stockholders as part of health care cost. Of course, the wealthy can buy the services of the most distinguished providers, but they are subject to the delivery of unnecessary health care services as much as the poorer classes of people.

Longman’s conclusion is that the answer to our health care problems is the VA system which he maintains could be implemented universally.

Longman reports that health care in the US is ranked 36th in the world. This is a sad commentary about the world’s wealthiest capitalist country. It might be useful to examine other health care systems as this country develops a new model. This would make it possible to fashion a comprehensive system of health care that incorporates the best elements of many diverse systems into a system which meets the needs of the working people of this country.

May 22, 2012

PHill1917@comcast.net

May 29, 2012

The NYT’s Love Letter to Death Squads

by CHRIS FLOYD

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/05/29/the-nyts-love-letter-to-death-squads/

I must, at last, admit defeat. I simply have no words, no rhetorical ammunition, no conceptual frameworks that could adequately address the total moral nullity exposed in Monday’s New York Times article on the death squad that Barack Obama is personally directing from the White House. (“Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will.”)

It is not so much a newspaper story as a love letter — a love letter to death, to the awe-inspiring and fear-inducing power of death, as personified by Barack Obama in his temporary role as the manager of a ruthless, lawless imperial state. In the cringing obsequiousness of the multitude of insiders and sycophants who march in goose-step through the story, we can see the awe and fear — indeed, the worship — of death-dealing power. This enthrallment permeates the story, both in the words of the cringers and in the giddy thrill the writers display in gaining such delicious access to the inner sanctum.

In any other age — including the last administration — this story would have been presented as a scandalous exposé. The genuinely creepy scenes of the “nominating process” alone would have been seen as horrific revelations. Imagine the revulsion at the sight of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld sifting through PowerPoint slides on “suspected terrorists” all over the world, and giving their Neronic thumbs up or down as each swarthy face pops up on a screen in front of them. Imagine the tidal wave of moral outrage from the “Netroots Nation” and other progressive champions directed at Bush not only for operating a death squad (which he did), but then trotting out Condi and Colin and Bob Gates to brag about it openly, and to paint Bush as some kind of moral avatar for the careful consideration and philosophical rigor he applied to blowing human beings to bits in sneak attacks on faraway villages.

But the NYT piece is billed as just another “process story” about an interesting aspect of Obama’s presidency, part of an election-year series assessing his record. It is based entirely on the viewpoints of Beltway insiders. The very few dollops of mild criticism of the murder program are voiced by figures from deep within the imperial machine. And even these caveats are mostly tactical in nature, based on one question: “Does the program work, is it effective?” There is not a single line that ever suggests, even slightly, that the program might be morally wrong. There is not a single line in the story suggesting that such a program should up for debate or even examination by Congress. Nor is there even a perfunctory quote from mainstream organizations such as the ACLU or Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch — or from anyone in Pakistan or Yemen or the other main targets of Obama’s proudly proclaimed and personally approved death squad.

In other words, this portrait of an American president signing off — week after week after week after week — on the extrajudicial murder of people all over the world is presented as something completely uncontroversial. Indeed, the main thrust of the story is not the fact that human beings — including many women, children and men who have no connection whatsoever to “terrorism,” alleged or otherwise — are being regularly killed by the United States government; no, the main focus is how this program illustrates Barack Obama’s “evolving” style of leadership during the course of his presidency. That’s what’s really important. The murders — the eviscerated bodies, the children with their skulls bashed in, the pregnant women burned alive in their own homes — are just background. Unimportant. Non-controversial.

II.

Here’s how it works:

“Every week or so, more than 100 members of the government’s sprawling national security apparatus gather, by secure video teleconference, to pore over terrorist suspects’ biographies and recommend to the president who should be the next to die.

“This secret “nominations” process is an invention of the Obama administration, a grim debating society that vets the PowerPoint slides bearing the names, aliases and life stories of suspected members of Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen or its allies in Somalia’s Shabab militia. … A parallel, more cloistered selection process at the C.I.A. focuses largely on Pakistan, where that agency conducts strikes.

“The nominations go to the White House, where by his own insistence and guided by Mr. Brennan, Mr. Obama must approve any name. He signs off on every strike in Yemen and Somalia and also on the more complex and risky strikes in Pakistan — about a third of the total.

“Aides say Mr. Obama has several reasons for becoming so immersed in lethal counterterrorism operations. A student of writings on war by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, he believes that he should take moral responsibility for such actions.

“He realizes this isn’t science, this is judgments made off of, most of the time, human intelligence,” said Mr. Daley, the former chief of staff. “The president accepts as a fact that a certain amount of screw-ups are going to happen, and to him, that calls for a more judicious process.”

Again, words fail. Aides pumping reporters with stories about the wise, judicious philosopher-king consulting Aquinas and Augustine before sending a drone missile on a “signature strike” on a group of picnickers in Yemen or farmers in Pakistan. The philosopher-king himself nobly taking on the “moral responsibility” for mass murder. And the cavalier assertion that “a certain amount of screw-ups are going to happen” — a bland, blithe acceptance that you are in fact going to slaughter innocent human beings on a regular basis — precisely as if you walked up to an innocent man on the street, put a gun to his head and blew his brains out all over the sidewalk …. then walked away, absolved, unconcerned, and free to kill again. And again. And again. This psychopathic serial killing is, evidently, what Augustine meant by “moral responsibility.” Who knew?

Obama’s deep concern for “moral responsibility” is also reflected in his decision to kill according to “signature strikes” — that is, to kill people you don’t know, who haven’t even popped up on your PowerPoint slides, if you think they might possibly look or act like alleged potential “terrorists.” (Or if you receive some “human intelligence” from an agent or an informer or someone with a grudge or someone seeking payment that a group of people doing something somewhere might be terrorists.) This “moral responsibility” is also seen in Obama’s decision to count “all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants … unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.”

Guilty until proven posthumously innocent! How’s that for “moral responsibility”? Here Obama has surpassed Augustine and Aquinas — yea, even great Aristotle himself — in this bold extension of the parameters of moral responsibility.

It is, I confess, beyond all my imagining that a national leader so deeply immersed in murdering people would trumpet his atrocity so openly, so gleefully — and so deliberately, sending his top aides out to collude in a major story in the nation’s leading newspaper, to ensure maximum exposure of his killing spree. Although many leaders have wielded such powers, they almost always seek to hide or obscure the reality of the operation. Even the Nazis took enormous pains to hide the true nature of their murder programs from the public. And one can scarcely conceive of Stalin inviting reporters from Pravda into the Politburo meetings where he and Molotov and Beria debated the lists of counterrevolutionary “terrorists” given to them by the KGB and ticked off those who would live and those who would die. Of course, those lists too were based on “intelligence reports,” often gathered through “strenuous interrogation techniques” or the reports of informers. No doubt these reports were every bit as credible as the PowerPoint presentations reviewed each week by Obama and his team.

And no doubt Stalin and his team were just as sincerely concerned about “national security” as the Aquinas acolyte in the White House today — and just as determined to do “whatever it takes” to preserve that security. As Stalin liked to say of the innocent people caught up in his national security efforts: “When wood is chopped, chips fly.”

Of course, he was an evil man without any sense of moral responsibility at all. In our much more enlightened times, under the guidance of a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate in the White House, we are so much wiser, so much better. We say: “A certain amount of screw-ups are going to happen.” Isn’t that more nuanced? Isn’t that more moral?

There is more, much more of this nullity — and rotting hypocrisy and vapid sycophancy — in the story. But I don’t have the strength or the stomach to wade any further through this swamp. It stinks of death. It taints and stains us all.

Chris Floyd is an American writer and frequent contributor to CounterPunch. His blog, Empire Burlesque, can be found at www.chris-floyd.com.

Alice Slater

Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, NY

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W. T. Whitney Jr.

On May 11 in Honduras’ Mosquito region, helicopter gunfire killed two women, two men, and seriously wounded four more, including children. They were targeted as drug traffickers. The helicopters belonged to the U.S. State Department. On board were agents of the U. S. Drug Enforcement Administration in military uniforms, plus Honduran soldiers. Many Hondurans say agents did the shooting.

Drug war is used to justify U.S. military intervention in Honduras, now a way station for drug transfer from South America to U.S. consumers. The United States has posted 600 soldiers to Honduras and operates an Air Force base and three new so-called forward operating bases there. Meanwhile, political and social deterioration has brought calamity. U.S. military build-up is non-stop.

Intervention is hardly new in Honduras. U.S. troops invaded in 1903, 1907, 1911, 1912, 1919, 1924, and 1925, usually at times of political turmoil. They were “protecting U.S. interests” like banana plantations, banks, and railroads. In the 1980’s Honduras was a U.S. staging area for Contra troops fighting Nicaragua’s leftist government.

The United States backed the Honduran government formed by plotters who had arranged the military coup overthrowing President Jose Manuel Zelaya in June, 2009. Now the U.S. government supports a successor regime headed by President Porfirio Lobo, elected under dubious circumstances. Lobo’s visit to Washington in October, 2011 got red carpet treatment.

Zelaya tinkered with land reform and called for a minimum wage, thereby enraging local political bosses. The U.S. government was offended by his having led Honduras into the anti-imperialist ALBA alliance of Latin American countries.

The wealthy elite behind the coup are prospering. The family of Miguel Facussé is emblematic of ten families which “control everything, telecommunications, electrical generation, marketing of petroleum products, the financial market, construction, food, etc.” (Rebelion.org, May 23, 2012) Facussé’s 42, 500 acres in Lower Aguan grow African palms, the oil of which Facussé’s Dinant Corporation converts into biodiesel.

Deadly struggle is playing out in Lower Aguan and may soon intensify. Dinant Corporation announced that if by June 1 Facussé has not received government payment for land small farmers are occupying, Dinant will evict farm families. Already private security forces have murdered 48 land reform activists there since September, 2009. The occupations are in fulfillment of land reform measures revived during the Zelaya era.

The United States overlooks landowner repression even though Facussé properties are dotted with traffickers’ landing strips. Social catastrophe – 70 percent poverty and 40 percent unemployed – and terror likewise seem to be acceptable. Honduras’ is the highest murder rate in the world – 6723 murders in 2011. Political repression has taken the lives of 25 journalists during the Lobo presidency. The body of popular broadcaster Alfredo Villatoro was found on May 15, that of LGBT activist Erick Martinez, two days earlier
U.S. interventionists tolerate governmental corruption. California academician Dana Frank maintains, “[D]rug trafficking is interlaced with the post-coup government…even the Minister of Defense has talked about the so-called Narco Congress people, the Narco judges…The police regularly kill people… None of these people have been prosecuted.”

Trafficking bolsters wealth and power. A local Chamber of Commerce official reported drug lords “have bought tremendous tracts, ranches, farms (and) coastlands.” The McClatchy story suggests, “Drug profits have filtered into sectors such as banking, construction, sports teams, restaurants, auto sales and private security.”

So there’s more to U.S. military intervention than just war on drugs. According to an Argentinean analyst, “The Southern Command of the Pentagon throughout Central America is backing ‘failed states’ in order to justify interventions in the name of national security.” Col. Ross Brown, a U.S. commander in Honduras, told a reporter that the U.S. military mission is expanding because of “the potential nexus between transnational organized criminals and terrorists who would do harm to our country.”

Uruguayan solidarity activists demand President Lobo take steps “to avoid new bloodshed.” They seek United Nations and European Union intervention to protect human rights in Honduras. Representatives of 12 Latin American and European countries joined United Nations officials in Lower Aguan in late May to deal with conflict there.

Popular forces are mobilizing. Formed after the 2009 coup, the National Front for Popular Resistance established the Broad Front of Popular Resistance, which looks toward a constituent assembly and is preparing for presidential elections in 2013. The Front’s “social struggle” entails agrarian reform, popular organizing, defending human rights, and opposition to privatization and foreign control of natural resources.

Given the experience of the Chile’s socialist government with U.S. intervention in 1973, this is perilous business. Yet the promise is real.
Seven years ago social and economic indicators for Bolivia and Honduras were similar. Each GDP was $10 billion, the average per capita annual income for both was $700 – $800, international financial reserves were $1.5 billion apiece, their rates of extreme poverty were 40-50 percent, and unemployment rates were 10-14 percent. Honduras’ GDP today is still $10 billion. For Bolivia, moving toward socialism, the current GDP is $20 billion. Honduras’ average per capita annual income is $700; Bolivia’s was $1833 in 2010. Honduras’ current foreign financial reserves are now less than $1.5 billion; those for Bolivia exceed $12 billion. Today, Honduras’ unemployment rate is 40 percent; Bolivia’s rate for 2011 was 5.9 percent. Finally, extreme poverty in Honduras in 2010 was 50 percent. The rate that year for Bolivia was 25 percent (Rebelion.org, May 25, 2012

Please go to Change.org to sign our petition to overturn the Texas anti-communist law. The link is http://www.change.org/petitions/texas-legislature-overturn-the-anti-communist-law?share_id=RjqwOgUTkUpe=pce  . The petition is entitled “Texas legislature: Overturn the anti-communist law”. You can also suggest that others sign the on-line petition. For more information, go to http://houstoncommunistparty.com/repost-there-is-a-dirty-little-secret-in-texas/

Thanks for your support.

See  http://www.pslweb.org/liberationnews/news/revolutionary-memorial-day-hijacked.html

A day celebrating Black liberation utilized for white supremacy
By Ben Becker
MAY 26, 2012

The way the Civil War became officially remembered — through Memorial Day celebrations— was based on the erasure of the Black veteran and the liberated slave.What we now know as Memorial Day began as “Decoration Day” in the immediate aftermath of the U.S. Civil War. It was a tradition initiated by former slaves to celebrate emancipation and commemorate those who died for that cause.
These days, Memorial Day is arranged as a day “without politics”—a general patriotic celebration of all soldiers and veterans, regardless of the nature of the wars in which they participated. This is the opposite of how the day emerged, with explicitly partisan motivations, to celebrate those who fought for justice and liberation.

The concept that the population must “remember the sacrifice” of U.S. service members, without a critical reflection on the wars themselves, did not emerge by accident. It came about in the Jim Crow period as the Northern and Southern ruling classes sought to reunite the country around apolitical mourning, which required erasing the “divisive” issues of slavery and Black citizenship. These issues had been at the heart of the struggles of the Civil War and Reconstruction.

To truly honor Memorial Day means putting the politics back in. It means reviving the visions of emancipation and liberation that animated the first Decoration Days. It means celebrating those who have fought for justice, while exposing the cruel manipulation of hundreds of thousands of U.S. service members who have been sent to fight and die in wars for conquest and empire.

The first Decoration Day

As the U.S. Civil War came to a close in April 1865, Union troops entered the city of Charleston, S.C., where four years prior the war had begun. While white residents had largely fled the city, Black residents of Charleston remained to celebrate and welcome the troops, who included the TwentyFirst Colored Infantry. Their celebration on May 1, 1865, the first “Decoration Day,” later became Memorial Day.

Historian David Blight retold the story:

During the final year of the war, the Confederates had converted the planters’ horse track, the Washington Race Course and Jockey Club, into an outdoor prison. Union soldiers were kept in horrible conditions in the interior of the track; at least 257 died of exposure and disease and were hastily buried in a mass grave behind the grandstand. Some 28 black workmen went to the site, re-buried the Union dead properly, and built a high fence around the cemetery. They whitewashed the fence and built an archway over an entrance on which they inscribed the words, “Martyrs of the Race Course.”

Then, black Charlestonians in cooperation with white missionaries and teachers, staged an unforgettable parade of 10,000 people on the slaveholders’ race course. The symbolic power of the low-country planter aristocracy’s horse track (where they had displayed their wealth, leisure, and influence) was not lost on the freed people. A New York Tribune correspondent witnessed the event, describing “a procession of friends and mourners as South Carolina and the United States never saw before.”

At 9 a.m. on May 1, the procession stepped off led by 3,000 black schoolchildren carrying armloads of roses and singing “John Brown’s Body.” The children were followed by several hundred black women with baskets of flowers, wreaths and crosses.

Then came black men marching in cadence, followed by contingents of Union infantry and other black and white citizens. As many as possible gathered in the cemetery enclosure; a childrens’ choir sang “We’ll Rally around the Flag,” the “Star-Spangled Banner,” and several spirituals before several black ministers read from scripture. (“The First Decoration Day,” Newark Star Ledger)

The battle over the ‘memory’ of the Civil War

Blight’s award-winning “Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory” (2001) explained how three “overall visions of Civil War memory collided” in the decades after the war.

The first was the emancipationist vision, embodied in African Americans’ remembrances and the politics of Radical Reconstruction, in which the Civil War was understood principally as a war for the destruction of slavery and the liberation of African Americans to achieve full citizenship.

The second was the reconciliationist vision, ostensibly less political, which focused on honoring the dead on both sides, respecting their sacrifice, and the reunion of the country.

The third was the white supremacist vision, which was either openly pro-Confederate or at least despising of Reconstruction as “Black rule” in the South.

Over the late 1800s and the early 1900s, in the context of Jim Crow and the complete subordination of Black political participation, the second and third visions largely combined. The emancipationist version of the Civil War, and the heroic participation of African Americans in their own liberation, was erased from popular culture, the history books and official commemoration.

In 1877, the Northern capitalist establishment decisively turned their backs on Reconstruction, striking a deal with the old slavocracy to return the South to white supremacist rule in exchange for the South’s acceptance of capitalist expansion. This political and economic deal was reflected in how the war was commemorated. Just as the reunion of the Northern and Southern ruling classes was based on the elimination of Black political participation, the way the Civil War became officially remembered—through the invention of Memorial Day—was based on the elimination of the Black veteran and the liberated slave.

The spirit of the first Decoration Day—the struggle for Black liberation and the fight against racism—has unfortunately been whitewashed from the modern Memorial Day.As Blight explains, “With time, in the North, the war’s two great results—black freedom and the preservation of the Union—were rarely accorded equal space. In the South, a uniquely Confederate version of the war’s meaning, rooted in resistance to Reconstruction, coalesced around Memorial Day practice.” (“Race and Reunion,” p. 65)

The Civil War whitewashed

In the statues, anniversary parades and popular magazines, the Civil War was portrayed as an all-white affair, a tragic conflict between brothers. To the extent the role of slavery was allowed in these remembrances, Lincoln was typically portrayed as the beneficent liberator standing above the kneeling slave.

The mere image of the fighting Black soldier pierced through this particular “memory,” which in reality was a collective and forced “forgetting” of the real past. Portraying the rebellious slave or Black soldier would unmask the Civil War as a life-and-death struggle against slavery, a true social revolution, and a reminder of the political promises that had been betrayed.

While African Americans and white radicals continued to uphold the emancipationist remembrance of the Civil War during the following decades—as exemplified by W.E.B. DuBois’ landmark “Black Reconstruction”—this interpretation was effectively silenced in the “respectable” circles of academia, mainstream politics and popular culture. The white supremacist and reconciliationist retelling of the war and Reconstruction was only overthrown in official academic circles in the 1950s and 1960s as the Civil Rights movement shook the country to its core, and more African Americans fought their way into the country’s universities.

While historians have gone a long way to expose the white supremacist history of the Civil War and uncover its revolutionary content, the spirit of the first Decoration Day—the struggle for Black liberation and the fight against racism—has unfortunately been whitewashed from the modern Memorial Day.

So let’s use Memorial Day weekend to honor the fallen fighters for justice worldwide, to speak plainly about this country’s historic crimes, and rededicate ourselves to take on those of the present.