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Showing posts with label History. Show all posts
Showing posts with label History. Show all posts
Saturday, May 4, 2013
Monday, August 13, 2012
Howard Zinn On The Meaning Of Historical Research
My viewpoint, in telling the history of the United States, is different: that we must not accept the memory of states as our own. Nations are not communities and never have been.
The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest (sometimes exploding, most often repressed) between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex.
And in such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners. ~~Howard Zinn, Columbus, The Indians, and Human Progress [@ History Is A Weapon] or PDF [HERE]
Thursday, January 14, 2010
Gee, I wonder how that happened? "Haiti is the poorest country in the Western hemisphere..."
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For more details, see Historycommons:
"History of US Interventions US-Haiti (1804-2005)"
January 14, 2010
Haitian Earthquake: Made in the USA
Why the Blood Is on Our Hands
by Ted Rall
(Ted Rall is the author of the new book "Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia the New Middle East?," an in-depth prose and graphic novel analysis of America's next big foreign policy challenge. He is also a cartoonist of the political persuasion)As grim accounts of the earthquake in Haiti came in, the accounts in U.S.-controlled state media all carried the same descriptive sentence: "Haiti is the poorest country in the Western hemisphere..."
Gee, I wonder how that happened?
You'd think Haiti would be loaded. After all, it made a lot of people rich.
How did Haiti get so poor?
Despite a century of American colonialism, occupation, and propping up corrupt dictators? Even though the CIA staged coups d'état against every democratically elected president they ever had?
It's an important question. An earthquake isn't just an earthquake. The same
7.0 tremor hitting San Francisco wouldn't kill nearly as many people as in Port-au-Prince.
"Looking at the pictures, essentially it looks as if (the buildings are of) breezeblock or cinderblock construction, and what you need in an earthquake zone is metal bars that connect the blocks so that they stay together when they get shaken," notes Sandy Steacey, director of the Environmental Science Research Institute at the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland. "In a wealthy country with good seismic building codes that are enforced, you would have some damage, but not very much."
When a pile of cinderblocks falls on you, your odds of survival are long. Even if you miraculously survive, a poor country like Haiti doesn't have the equipment, communications infrastructure or emergency service personnel to pull you out of the rubble in time. And if your neighbors get you out, there's no ambulance to take you to the hospital--or doctor to treat you once you get there.
Earthquakes are random events. How many people they kill is predetermined. In Haiti this week, don't blame tectonic plates. Ninety-nine percent of the death toll is attributable to poverty.
So the question is relevant. How'd Haiti become so poor?
The story begins in 1910, when a U.S. State Department-National City Bank of New York (now called Citibank) consortium bought the Banque National d'Haïti--Haiti's only commercial bank and its national treasury--in effect transferring Haiti's debts to the Americans.
Five years later, President Woodrow Wilson ordered troops to occupy the country in order to keep tabs on "our" investment.
From 1915 to 1934, the U.S. Marines imposed harsh military occupation, murdered Haitians patriots and diverted 40 percent of Haiti's gross domestic product to U.S. bankers. Haitians were banned from government jobs. Ambitious Haitians were shunted into the puppet military, setting the stage for a half-century of U.S.-backed military dictatorship.
The U.S. kept control of Haiti's finances until 1947.
Still--why should Haitians complain? Sure, we stole 40 percent of Haiti's national wealth for 32 years. But we let them keep 60 percent.
Whiners.
Monday, December 21, 2009
Have A Clusterfuck (Nation) Christmas - Blue Christmas, James Howard Kunstler
Blue Christmas
By James Howard Kunstler
December 21, 2009As the end-credits rolled for James Cameron's new movie, Avatar, the audience burst into rowdy applause. It seemed to me that they were applauding the sheer computerized dazzlement of the show -- but in the story itself they had just watched the US suffer a humiliating defeat on a distant planet. In the final frames, American soldiers and the corporate executives they had failed to protect were shown lined up as prisoners-of-war about to embark on a death march.
More to the point, the depiction of our national character through the whole course of the film was of a thuggish, cruel, cynical, stupid, detestable, and totally corrupt people bent on the complete destruction of nature. Nice.
And the final irony was that Cameron had used theatrical technology of the latest and greatest kind to depict America's broader techno-grandiosity -- as the army's brute robotic warriors fell to the spears and arrows of the simple blue space aliens.
Altogether, it was a weird moment in entertainment history, and perhaps in the American experience per se. No doubt audiences overseas will go wild with delight, too, but perhaps with a clearer notion of what they are clapping for than the enthralled masses of zombie Americans.
The infatuation with technology, and the disgusting cockiness that goes with it (so well-captured in Avatar), is but one facet of the psychosis gripping the nation -- and by that I mean the profound detachment from reality.
We have no idea what is happening to us and, naturally, no idea of what we are going to do.
I sat in a bar Friday evening with a financial reporter from a national newspaper, trying to explain the peak oil situation and what it implied for our economy.
He had never heard it before. The relationship between energy resources and massive debt was new to him. (It also came up in conversation that he could not tell me what the Monroe Doctrine was about, despite a history degree from Yale.)
There you have a nice snapshot of the mainstream media in this land...
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Saturday, November 7, 2009
A recommended reading list for the 'too cool', the 'tragically hip' and the 'historically blank'
Containing the full text of such classics as:
The American Revolution: Pages From a Negro Worker's Notebook by James Boggs
Die Nigger Die: A Political Autobiography by H. Rap Brown
From The Narrative Of The Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass
From A People's History of The United States by Howard Zinn
The Mis-Education of the Negro by Carter Godwin Woodson
From Understanding Power by Noam Chomsky
From The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Black History by Gil Scott-Heron
Malcolm X on Afro-American History
Worse Than Slavery by David M. Oshinsky
An Open Letter to My Sister, Angela Y. Davis by James Baldwin
Political Prisoners, Prisons, and Black Liberation by Angela Y. Davis
The Convict Lease System by Frederick Douglass
Slavery and Prison — Understanding the Connections by Kim Gilmore
Lynch Law By Ida B. Wells
The Demand For Order And The Birth Of Modern Policing by Kristian Williams
Social Insecurity: The Transformation of American Criminal Justice, 1965-2000 by Anthony Platt
Remembering the Real Dragon: An Interview with George Jackson, An interview by Karen Wald
Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson NEW
Prison Nation by Sasha Abramsky
...and more...
[HERE]
Sunday, April 6, 2008
Battle Rattle - John McCain thinks he's Harry Truman and it's August 1, 1950 in Korea
Informed CommentGlad to see Frank Rich @ the NY Times agrees...
Iraq - Basra Police Mutiny, Refuse to attack Sadrists, Clashes continue in Basra, Sadrists open New fronts throughout Shiite South
Two Words: Tet Offensive
Also see, Stan Goff, Feral Scholar, for a strategic/tactical perspective: Good Morning, Vietnam!
Juan Cole's Informed Comment
Sunday, April 06, 2008
Rich, McCain, and the Coming Heartbreak Ridge
Frank Rich's "Tet Happened . . . and No One Cared" is an elegantly written and argued examination of the current situation in Iraq that seems to me to pretty much nail it.
Rich demolishes so many of the myths put out by McCain and the American Right generally. The Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq and the Da'wa Party, which back Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, are closer to Iran than the Sadr Movement. It was al-Maliki's parliamentary coalition that sought the cease fire by asking their Iranian patrons to broker it. The main motivation for the attack on Sadrist neighborhoods in Basra was to ensure that ISCI wins the elections in that key oil province in October.
It is so refreshing to see an American commentator who clearly has the facts at hand and a sense of proportion in interpreting them.
Rich begins and ends provocatively in arguing that the charge that Sen. John McCain has advocated a hundred-years war in Iraq is a canard, and takes the focus off much more substantive errors that McCain does make.
The only thing I would say is that McCain's analogy to South Korea, which comes from rightwing imperialist historian John Gaddis of Yale, has two implications. The first is that Bush is Harry Truman and it is July 23, 1950 (just after the US lost the Battle of Taejon and had to retreat) and there is a danger of the Communists overwhelming the South.
In McCain's mind, 'staying the course' and supporting the surge is akin to Truman committing large numbers of troops to make sure that we fight to a stalemate, containing America's enemies in Iraq.
The second implication is that once a stalemate is achieved and acknowledged, as in Korea from 1953, there can be an enduring US military presence in Iraq...
In Full @ Informed Comment
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