Topics
Mumia Abu-Jamal: No Thanks for Thanksgiving
[podcast]https://www.prisonradio.org/sites/default/files/audio/uploads/NoThanksforThanksgiving11-25-2013.mp3[/podcast]
Every November, when Thanksgiving is scheduled, I think of the People of the First Nations (so-called Native Americans), and wonder about their mixed feelings for a holiday that celebrates their enormous generosity as well as their near-total destruction.
What do they have to be thankful of?
U.S. President Abraham Lincoln declared the first such holiday in 1863, and American popular culture has tied it to a meal between Aboriginal people and Europeans upon their arrival on this continent.
In fact, when the Spanish reached South America, and the English reached North America, they soon embarked on dual extermination campaigns, which led to holocausts of Indian nations, both north and south.
Their arrivals spelled the doom of hundreds of millions of people, hunted, starved, diseased and enslaved.
To them, hell had a white face.
They made treaty after treaty with the Indians, but the palefaces broke every one.
For the Conquistadors, Native peoples served as enslaved workers who worked themselves to death to mine silver and gold. To the Anglos, they were superfluous – it was Indian land they hungered for – and they got it – by hook or crook.
Caught between these two great, ravenous forces, there was little they could do, but fight, but Europe flooded the Americas with immigrants, and sheer numbers told the tale of woe.
When first they arrived, European settlements were places of disease, hunger and pitiless death. First Nations folk fed them, taught them planting and healed the, with herbal treatments. The colonists repaid them with unremitting war, smallpox used as biological weapons, land theft and slaughter.
Thanksgiving may be a holiday, but it ain’t a holy day.
It should be a day to be remembered, in remembrance of the First Nations that peopled this land, for tens of thousands of years.
Invitation to the 25th Anniversary Celebration of the Zapatista Uprising, and to a Gathering of Networks
Invitation to the 25th Anniversary Celebration of the Zapatista Uprising, and to a Gathering of Networks
ZAPATISTA ARMY FOR NATIONAL LIBERATION
MEXICO
November 17, 2018
To all of the individuals, groups, collectives, and organizations of the CIG Support Networks:
To the Networks of Resistance and Rebellion or whatever you call them:
To the National and International Sixth:
Given that:
It’s the middle of the night.
And that:
It’s cold out.
And that:
At this crux in time—when it is neither day nor night, neither inside nor outside, neither shadow nor light—you find yourself unable to sleep, in that uncomfortable state of insomnia that makes you vulnerable to memories: the piercing memories of all the things you did and didn’t do, the long list of your failures and the much shorter list of successes.
Given that:
You ask yourself, not without cause, what this is all about…
You’re still trying to grasp the meaning of that phrase, “Everything is impossible right up until it isn’t,” which you heard-read in that disconcerting nano-mini-micro short film at the so-called “cinema for reading.” That film (?) was kept tightly lidded for the last 30 years (literally, it was in a sardine can) and was presented at the impossible cinema by an equally disconcerting beetle dressed as a knight-errant. Its title (of the film, that is), “The 69th Law of the Dialectic,” is hardly rational either. It’s a film consisting of a single phrase, without images or sounds, leaving everything else to the imagination of whoever attends its…showing?
In any case, everything is absurd here. Here? Where the hell are you? You don’t really have time to ponder that because somebody rushes you along: (Continuar leyendo…)
