Bush's Nemesis: The Other Americans
By subhash Gatade
13 April, 2006
Countercurrents.org
My viewpoint, in telling the history of the United States, is 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. 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.- Excerpted from ‘ A People's History of the United States’ by Howard Zinn. A book which has sold more than a million copies
It was a five thousand strong crowd which had gathered at the gates of San Quentin prison in the San Francisco Bay area on December 12 night last year. Black youth from San Francisco, college students, religious figures opposed to death penalty, people from human right groups and celebrities like Mike Farell, Joan Baez, Sean Penn and several others were there. In fact they had gathered there to declare solidarity with the man who would be executed by the state next morning. At 12.30 a.m. the gathering got the message. Stanley ‘Tookie’ Williams had been pronounced dead.
Who was this Stanley ‘Tookie’ Williams whose saga of life had become a rallying point for thousands of people ?
The metamorphosis of African-American Stanley Williams from being a cofounder of a street gang to a passionate voice against gang violence can marvel any other fairy tale. Nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize five times, today his series of eighth books ‘Tookie Williams Speaks Out Against Gang violence’ are part of reading material available across schools, libraries and juvenile correctional facilities. Ofcourse that did not stop him from becoming the 1001 th victim of capital punishment since the Supreme Court relegalised it in 1976, thanks to the questionable evidence against him supposedly for committing a crime.
A question naturally arises why despite the continuous bombardment of the mainstream US media into our very own bedrooms we did not get to hear the story of Tookie. Ofcourse it does not look surprising. It is same everywhere. People like Tookie, who are no celebrities, always remain beyond the purview of the corporatised media.
That does not mean they are just obliterated out of existence. A very vibrant alternative media within US which is committed to "the silenced majority’ does not only keep reminding people about them but at times is ready to go the extra mile so that they are heard till the last breath of their existence. In fact the Pacifia radio network station, the oldest listener-supported, non-profit broadcaster in the United States, who had sent its representatives to San Quentin, in the final hour of the execution, relayed a message from ‘Tookie’ to the outside world.
Amy Goodman, co-host of Democracy Now! (DN) a news and current affairs programme on radio and also on TV, which is broadcast on 140 stations, happens to be a leading figure of this alternate media movement. It cannot be denied that for the outside world, the widespread criticism of the U.S. media during the invasion of Iraq, obscured the work done by such networks in that country to provide citizens with the other side of the story. During one of her interviews taken in the period leading up to the invasion of Iraq when "more than half the people in the country were opposed to the war even if half the media were for it," she had pointed out her philosophy. "The media can either shore up a democracy or subvert it. Our role is to make dissent commonplace — that makes everyone safer."
Talk of invasion of Iraq and the smiling face of Rachel Corrie suddenly appears before the mind’s eye. Rachel, this young peace activist from US, became a martyr inside Gaza strip, Israel just a few days before the actual attack started. Twenty three year old Rachel, a resident of Olympia, Washington, was part of the International Solidarity Movement which has been protesting Israeli military strikes in the West Bank and Gaza strikes. When the Israeli defence forces came marching in with bulldozers and tanks with helicopters covering their ‘routine operation’ supposedly to look for weapons and arms smuggling tunnels, Rachel sat down in front of a bulldozer to stop them demolishing a building in the Nusserat refugee camp. And she was literally crushed to death by the bulldozer. (16 th March 2003). While the Israeli government formally expressed its grief for this unintentional death but people who are well accustomed to the targeted killings of the regime know the real picture. In a vigil organized on the Olympia campus on the evening of 16 th March more than a thousand people gathered not only to protest the impending attack on Iraq but also to mourn the death of one of their very own.
While news of Rachel's death could at least find some space in the media the historic anti war strike by students of more than three thousand schools and colleges in USA which was organized in the first week of March 2003 was completely blacked out. In the aftermath of 9/11 also when Bush had undertaken his mission to deliver ‘infinite justice’ then also one was witness to numerous large scale and small scale demonstrations and protest sit-ins inside USA. People unequivocally stated that the death of 4000 people in the attack on WTC should not be avenged by a attack on an already impoverished country like Afghanistan. They questioned the rationale for an attack on a country, which was already ravaged by a civil war, which had continued for more than two decades.
In a well researched book "Students against Sweatshops" jointly authored by Liza Featherstone and the United Students Against Sweatshops (Verso 2002) one gets to know the face of similar such other Americans who are not visible in the media. This book documents the emergence of a "new student movement, one with great promise for promoting radical change" which has emerged in the 90s wherein the students are engaged in or rather leading the antisweatshop movement.
Definitely many a factors have contributed to the emergence of this new type of "student-labour alliance" (to quote USAS) but with hindsight it can be said that the growing corporatization of the colleges and universities has played a key role in the radicalization of students. Students could easily note the discrepancy between the sermonizing by the colleges over the "purity of their academic mission" and the highly questionable ways in which they themselves were practising the unabashed pursuit of money and power. The impact of this initiative which included campaigns to “ force the schools to stop buying sweatshop produced clothing" or "to stop selling themselves to corporations” has been so intense that one of the major financiers of higher education the sports equipment company Nike literally stopped giving grants to few institutions.
The unsung and yet unheard saga of the ‘other Americans’ who value life and who seek justice and progress for everyone on the face of the earth does not end here. There are countless names. The list seems endless.Who can forget the March 17, 2003 action on St. Patrick’s Day, just two days before U.S. bombs began raining down on Baghdad, by a group of Catholic Workers from Ithaca, New York. This group known as the “St. Patrick’s Four,” entered an Army-Marine Recruiting Center and poured their blood on the walls, in an act of non-violent civil resistance to the impending war. End of January saw the US courts awarding punishment to this group who will spend six months in a federal prison for a non-violent symbolic action to protest an illegal war.
Abuse of detainees in the historic Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq could not have come to light if army specialist Joseph Darby of the 372 military police company had not dared to report on his fellow soldiers who were torturing prisoners.
The attempts to substitute Darwin’s theory of evolution with the biblical concept of ‘Creationism’ couched in the language of ‘intelligent design’ had gone on unheeded if ordinary parents had not decided to seek judicial intervention. It is true that works by great scientists like Stephen Jay Gould or Ernst Mayr, laid the groundwork for exposing the hoax of ‘intelligent design’.
The issue of inadequate toilet facilities in public places as a form of sexual discrimination had not come on the agenda if Yvette D. Clarke, an African American representative of the New York City Council had not taken it up. Titled the “Women’s Restroom Equity Bill”, the legislation would now require all new specified public facilities in New York City to build two women’s toilet units for each men’s urinal on the premises.
And it would be height of indecency if one forgets to mention Cindy Sheehan, mother of Casey, a soldier in US army, who died fighting an unjust war in Iraq. And this mother transformed her tremendous her grief at the loss of her dear son, into such a resolute resolve that she, could with her unique intervention, reinvigorate the fledgling anti war movement inside US.
To be very frank, one can just go on discussing the saga of life and struggles, of people, groups, organisations – the other Americans - who have refused to buy the sermonising by their rulers whose own hands are dipped in blood. They are inhabitants of the ‘other America’ which jostles for a life of justice, peace and freedom, amidst the warmongering voices of the Bushes, the Cheneys and the Rumsfelds.
These are people, to quote Howard Zinn, who are “[h]opeful about the future of this country based on the idea that people have a certain common decency and that when they learn the truth, the truth has a power that can overcome even the most sophisticated of propaganda machines that the government has and the media collaborate with.” (Zinn's Speech at The Progressive's 95th Anniversary Party , May 8, 2004
http://www.progressive.org/95/mailzinn95.html)These are people who still remember one of the last speeches of the black leaders like Malcom X, who was assassinated exactly 41 years ago, wherein he told them :
We’re all in the same bag, in the same boat. We suffer political oppression, economic exploitation, and social degradation, all of them from the same enemy. The government has failed us; you can’t deny that...
