Original Peoples

Millions of people over the US will be gathering on Thanksgiving to share a meal together and to give thanks for the people and the blessings in their lives.  As you gather, it’s important to think about the meaning of this celebration, and to challenge the received myths about this problematic holiday.
While some form of harvest celebration is found in most cultures, the historical circumstances of Thanksgiving in the US are deeply intertwined with the oppression and genocide of the indigenous peoples by the settlers.

The thesis of anthropologist David Vine’s latest book, Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World, is taboo in American political discourse. It is a radical notion to suggest that foreign bases don’t protect American interests but actively harm them. Candidates who fail to reflexively support U.S. militarism face a political land mine.

Canada and Israel equally practice occupiers’ justice. Both occupy land in contravention of their constitutions. When Israel was constitutionally established by international law fiat it was on condition that its land base would be counterbalanced by the complementary land base of the Palestinian State.

This week we look at the anti IMF-TPP-WORLD Banks protest in Peru, Kahnawake Mohawks warning to Montreal’s mayor. On the music break, Shadia Mansour and M1 with “Al Kufiyyeh 3arabeyyeh” Our featured interview is with Budour Hassan, a Palestinian anarchist based in Jerusalem, who breaks the current uprising in the occupied territories.

Canadian voters have voted resoundingly to toss out Stephen Harper – the arch control freak, corporate stooge, denier of colonialism, xenophobe, toadying chickenhawk for the crumbling hyperempire, another ego illiterate to the political tea leaves – and a bevy of his Conservative Party followers. That is the silver lining in the 2015 Canadian federal election!

The confluence of Columbus Day Weekend and the Kunduz hospital bombing has us thinking about the deep levels of cultural violence in the United States and what can be done to change it. How does the US move from a country dominated by war culture to one dominated by a humanitarian culture? And, how do we do it in time to avoid war with China and Russia, which both advanced closer this week.
What does Celebrating Columbus say About the Character of the United States?

“And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness:  and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”

Falsehood and delusion are allowed in no case whatever: But, as in the exercise of all the virtues, there is an œconomy of truth. It is a sort of temperance, by which a man speaks truth with measure that he may speak it the longer.
— Edmund Burke, Letters on a Regicide Peace (1796)
Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it.
— Mark Twain, Following the Equator (1897)

Resistance is the cure for Indigenous suicides. There is nothing “wrong” with Indigenous individuals that was not caused by the relentless violence of ongoing colonization, and therefore the treatment of the fatal condition of dispossession and oppression is to right that basic wrong. That, and an anti-capitalist campaign that will set the humanistic balance of pre-capitalist, or pre-Columbian, economics back in place.

Amidst all the handwringing across the political spectrum, commentators of every type decry the deplorable conditions that prevail in the parts of the world that have been under attack by the US, NATO, and the historic colonial powers of Europe: Britain and France. That is to say jointly and severally the wealthiest countries on Earth concentrated in the North Atlantic region of the world. However, the vast majority of the text generated on this subject is truly tiresome.