|
FOCUS | Lynching and Jeff Davis Highway |
 |
|
Friday, 13 February 2015 13:56 |
|
Parry writes: "A new study of Southern lynching of blacks, sharply raising the total to nearly 4,000 victims, adds some context to the decision in 1920 to attach the name of Confederate President Jefferson Davis to parts of Route One, including stretches near and through African-American neighborhoods."
A 1920 public lynching in Texas. (photo: Wikimedia Commons)
Lynching and Jeff Davis Highway
By Robert Parry, Consortium News
13 February 15
Many parts of the South, including Arlington, Virginia, just outside the U.S. capital, still honor Confederate President Jefferson Davis by attaching his name to important roadways. But a recent study on lynching puts the motive for honoring that white supremacist in a sickening new light, writes Robert Parry.
 new study of Southern lynching of blacks, sharply raising the total to nearly 4,000 victims, adds some context to the decision in 1920 to attach the name of Confederate President Jefferson Davis to parts of Route One, including stretches near and through African-American neighborhoods. That period was a time when the number of lynchings surged across the South and whites were reasserting their impunity.
According to the study by the Equal Justice Initiative, the use of lynching – mob killings and mutilations of blacks by hanging, burning alive, castration, torture and other means – was nearly as high around 1920 as it was in the latter part of the Nineteenth Century. There was a gradual decline in lynchings in the early Twentieth Century, but the pattern reversed and the use of lynching surged to about 500 during a five-year period heading into 1920.
That period also marked a determination by many Southern whites to reaffirm the rightness of the Confederate cause and to reassert white supremacy. Thus, in 1920, to drive home the point of who was in charge, the Daughters of the Confederacy had Southern states name portions of Route One after Jefferson Davis, who was hailed as the “champion of a slave society” when he was chosen to lead the Confederacy in 1861.
Besides honoring a dyed-in-the-wool white supremacist who favored keeping African-Americans in chains forever, the Daughters of the Confederacy saw these designations of Route One as a counterpoint to plans in the North for a Lincoln Highway in honor of assassinated President Abraham Lincoln.
But bestowing this honor on Jefferson Davis was also a political message of pro-Confederate defiance that was not limited to the brutal era of 1920. The Jefferson Davis designation was extended to parts of Route 110 near the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, in 1964 as Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement were pressing for landmark civil rights legislation to end segregation and as white Virginian politicians were vowing to resist integration at all costs.
A year or so ago, I wrote to the five members of the Arlington County Board and urged them to seek an end to this grotesque honor bestowed on a notorious white racist. When my letter went public, it was treated with some amusement by the local paper, the Sun-Gazette, which described me as “rankled,” and prompted some hate mail.
One letter from an Arlington resident declared that it was now her turn to be “RANKLED by outsiders like Mr. Parry who want to change history because it is not to his liking. … I am very proud of my Commonwealth’s history, but not of the current times, as I’m sure many others are.”
I was also confronted by a senior Democratic county official at a meeting about a different topic and urged to desist in my proposal to give the highway a new name because the idea would alienate state politicians in Richmond who would think that Arlington County was crazy.
But the new study on the terrorism of lynching reminds us that attaching Jefferson Davis’s name to roadways wasn’t just some romantic gesture to honor an historical figure beloved by Southern whites who in 1920 still pined for the ante-bellum days when they could own black people and do to them whatever they wished.
The years around 1920 marked a violent revival of the carnival-like scenes in which whites treated the lynching of blacks as a moment for community hilarity and celebration, often posing with their children for photographs next to the mutilated corpses. Stamping Jefferson Davis’s name on a highway that passed near and through black neighborhoods was another way to send a chilling message to African-Americans.
In my 37 years living in Virginia, I have always been struck by the curious victimhood of many Southern whites. Because of the Civil War, which some still call “the War of Northern Aggression,” and the Civil Rights Movement, which finally ended segregation, they have been nursing grievances, seeing themselves as the real victims here.
Not the African-Americans who were held in the unspeakable conditions of bondage until slavery was finally ended in the 1860s and who then suffered the cruelties of white terrorism and the humiliation of segregation for another century. No, the whites who lorded over them were the real “victims” because the federal government finally intervened to stop these practices.
Yet, while some white Virginians remain “very proud” of that history, there has been a studied neglect of other more honorable aspects of Arlington’s history, including the role played by Columbia Pike as an African-American Freedom Trail where thousands of former slaves, freed by Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, traveled north to escape slavery.
Many were given refuge in Freedman’s Village, a semi-permanent refugee camp along Columbia Pike on land that now includes the Pentagon and the Air Force Memorial. Some of the men joined the U.S. Colored Troops training at nearby Camp Casey before returning to the South to fight for freedom, to end the scourge of slavery once and for all.
As blacks joined the Union Army, Confederate President Jefferson Davis ratified a policy that refused to treat black men as soldiers but rather as slaves in a state of insurrection, so they could be executed upon capture or sold into slavery.
In accordance with this Confederate policy, U.S. Colored Troops faced summary executions when captured in battle. For instance, when a Union garrison at Fort Pillow, Tennessee, was overrun by Confederate forces on April 12, 1864, black soldiers were shot down as they surrendered. Similar atrocities occurred at the Battle of Poison Springs, Arkansas, in April 1864, and the Battle of the Crater in Virginia. Scores of black prisoners were executed in Saltville, Virginia, on Oct. 2, 1864.
Yet, while Jefferson Davis’s name remains on roadways through Arlington — and as the Confederate president is effectively honored whenever people have to use his name — there is still no commemoration of Freedman’s Village (though something is supposedly being planned) and no one apparently even knows the precise location of Camp Casey, arguably one of Arlington’s most significant and noble historical sites. (Camp Casey is believed to have been located close to where today’s Pentagon now is, an area that in the 1860s was called Alexandria County before being renamed Arlington County in the Twentieth Century.)
Apparently, recognizing the place where free African-Americans were trained and armed to defeat the Confederacy and end slavery might “rankle” some white Arlington residents.
 |
|
FOCUS | US Drops to 49th in World Press Freedom Rankings |
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=29455"><span class="small">Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept</span></a>
|
|
Friday, 13 February 2015 13:18 |
|
Greenwald writes: "Some of the U.S.'s closest allies fared even worse, including Saudi Arabia (164), Bahrain (163), Egypt (158), the UAE (120), and Israel."
The Intercept's Glenn Greenwald. (photo: AP)
US Drops to 49th in World Press Freedom Rankings
By Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept
13 February 15
 ach year, Reporters Without Borders issues a worldwide ranking of nations based on the extent to which they protect or abridge press freedom. The group’s 2015 ranking was released this morning, and the United States is ranked 49th.
That is the lowest ranking ever during the Obama presidency, and the second-lowest ranking for the U.S. since the rankings began in 2002 (in 2006, under Bush, the U.S. was ranked 53rd). The countries immediately ahead of the U.S. are Malta, Niger, Burkino Faso, El Salvador, Tonga, Chile and Botswana.
Some of the U.S.’s closest allies fared even worse, including Saudi Arabia (164), Bahrain (163), Egypt (158), the UAE (120), and Israel (101: “In the West Bank, the Israeli security forces deliberately fired rubber bullets and teargas at Palestinian journalists”; 15 journalists were killed during Israeli attack on Gaza; and “the authorities also stepped up control of programme content on their own TV stations during the offensive, banning a spot made by the Israeli NGO B’Tselem that cited the names of 150 children who had been killed in the Gaza Strip”).
To explain the latest drop for the U.S., the press group cited the U.S. government’s persecution of New York Times reporter Jim Risen, as well as the fact that the U.S. “continues its war on information in others, such as WikiLeaks.” Also cited were the numerous arrests of journalists covering the police protests in Ferguson, Missouri (which included The Intercept‘s Ryan Devereaux, who was tear-gassed and shot with a rubber bullet prior to his arrest).
It should come as no surprise that the U.S. continues to plummet in press freedoms under Obama. In October, 2013, the Committee to Protect Freedom issued a scathing denunciation of the U.S. government’s attacks on press freedoms, the first time the U.S. was ever the subject of one of its reports. Written by former Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie, Jr., it detailed the multiple ways the Obama administration has eroded press freedoms, and concluded:
The administration’s war on leaks and other efforts to control information are the most aggressive I’ve seen since the Nixon administration, when I was one of the editors involved in The Washington Post’s investigation of Watergate. The 30 experienced Washington journalists at a variety of news organizations whom I interviewed for this report could not remember any precedent.
That warning echoed the one previously issued by James Goodale, the General Counsel of the New York Times during the Pentagon Papers battle, who said: “President Obama wants to criminalize the reporting of national security information” and “President Obama will surely pass President Richard Nixon as the worst president ever on issues of national security and press freedom.”
|
|
|
When You've Lost Bernie Sanders: How Netanyahu Destroyed the Israel Lobby |
|
|
Friday, 13 February 2015 09:45 |
|
Cole writes: "Senator Bernie Sanders, the most consistent and prominent progressive in the US Senate, has decided to skip the speech of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to Congress on March 3, which was orchestrated by Israel's ambassador to the US Ron Dermer and Speaker of the House John Boehner in an attempt to derail President Obama's negotiations with Iran over its civilian nuclear enrichment program. It is Bibi's Kanye West moment."
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. (photo: Israelnewsagency.com)
When You've Lost Bernie Sanders: How Netanyahu Destroyed the Israel Lobby
By Juan Cole, Informed Comment
13 February 15
 enator Bernie Sanders, the most consistent and prominent progressive in the US Senate, has decided to skip the speech of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to Congress on March 3, which was orchestrated by Israel’s ambassador to the US Ron Dermer and Speaker of the House John Boehner in an attempt to derail President Obama’s negotiations with Iran over its civilian nuclear enrichment program. It is Bibi’s Kanye West moment.
Sanders’s announcement may well signal a turning point in the domestic politics of Mideast policy. Sanders runs as a Socialist but might well announce his candidacy within the Democratic Party for president in the 2016 race. He can’t win, of course, but could push the electoral issues to the left. He in any case caucuses with the Democrats. Despite his strong progressive vision, Sanders has in the past been reluctant to criticize Israel. He, like many on the American left, held up Israel in general as a progressive cause, regardless of the country’s colonial actions in the Palestinian West Bank or its illegal blockade of Gaza.
Obama believes that a deal can be had whereby Iran is allowed to enrich uranium for reactor fuel but through restrictions and inspections can be kept from ever militarizing the program. Boehner and Netanyahu believe that Iran’s enrichment program must be closed down to forestall the development of a bomb by Tehran. Israel is currently the only nuclear power in the region, which makes it a regional hegemon, a position it might lose if it were one of many nuclear powers.
The Israel lobbies as a project of Jewish nationalism have long depended primarily on three tactics for their success. 1) They brutally punish those critical of Israeli policy (no matter how justified the criticism) with boycotts, smears and blackballing; 2) They marshal American Jewish groups into unanimity in support of Israel regardless of the latter’s feelings about certain policies, and 3) they use political donations to shape Congressional and general political discourse on Israel in official circles.
The Israel lobbies are not by any means unique, since there are Cuban, Armenian and other ethnic lobbies. And of course there are many ideological lobbies, including that of the Koch brothers for a peculiar kind of conservatism (they say they are Libertarians but seek government policies favorable to their Oil businesses).
But the Israel lobbies are, while sometimes dealt defeat, remarkably successful among lobbies. And, whereas many wealthy conservatives might have objected to the views of Native Americans specialist Steven Salaita at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, none of them pressured the chancellor with withdrawal of donations on the basis of conservatism. A Jewish nationalist donor did get Salaita fired over his private tweets, done on his own time and unconnected to his position in Native American studies, about the brutality of the Gaza War. Jewish nationalist legislators or those beholden to the Israel lobbies also routinely shoot down government appointments of officials insufficiently obsequious to Israel as a cause.
Rep. Steven Cohen (D-Tenn.) is also said to be leaning toward a boycott of Netanyahu’s speech. So are a number of other Jewish Congressmen on the Democratic side. And, Vice President Joe Biden’s own decision to boycott may sway many Democrats in Congress.
This stampede of Democratic legislators away from Netanyahu’s speech disrupts principles 2) and 3) above, and makes it difficult for the Israel lobbies to implement 1) consistently. Biden has been close for his entire career to the positions of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a coordinating body for 16,000 smaller lobbies that throw millions into congressional races. He may not have another race to run, and for the lobbies to try to smear or punish him would surely backfire on them. It would also signal to younger politicians that it is dangerous to take their money because they are fickle and intolerant of the slightest dissent. I have argued that for many reasons, Israel is becoming more a Republican Party project than a Democratic one. Many in the GOP agree and hope this development will bring US Jews, who vote overwhelmingly Democratic, over to the Republicans. But another development is possible, which is that Jewish Democrats may become less supportive of an increasingly far rightwing Israel.
By overreaching, Netanyahu may be shattering the hammer his partisans in the US have used to destroy critics of his policies in America. And Mideast policy in the US may never be quite the same.
|
|
The Barrett Brown Review of Arts and Letters and Prison: I Tried to Eat a Mouse But it Didn't Work |
|
|
Thursday, 12 February 2015 16:31 |
|
Brown writes: "Three weeks ago, I was sentenced to prison, which in some ways was a great relief, as federal prison is said to be much nicer than the jail holding units and temporary detention centers where I have spent the last two and a half years of my life."
Barrett Brown (photo: Nikki Loeher/Daily Beast)
The Barrett Brown Review of Arts and Letters and Prison: I Tried to Eat a Mouse But it Didn't Work
By Barrett Brown, D Magazine
12 February 15
 hree weeks ago, I was sentenced to prison, which in some ways was a great relief, as federal prison is said to be much nicer than the jail holding units and temporary detention centers where I have spent the last two and a half years of my life. And, really, I feel like I’ve done the whole “jail thing” by this point and can thus sort of cross that off my list. Now I’m jotting down all the touristy activities I hope to accomplish during my “real” prison sentence:
BEFRIEND A MOUSE: I actually refrained from going to see The Green Mile, as I believe that too much power is already concentrated in the hands of Tom Hanks as it is, but I am well aware from my past habit of reading the plots of films off of their Wikipedia pages that one of the prisoner characters is a large magical black man who had made a pet of a little mouse that comes into his cell and which he called Mr. Bojangles. I actually already had my obligatory mouse encounter back at the Seagoville jail unit, which had a considerable mouse infestation. At the time, I was still cellmates with Tom, who, as noted in a previous column, has the words “Game Over” tattooed on his knuckles and doesn’t like it when I read out loud from Henry Kissinger’s memoirs in a fake German accent — a pretty uptight fellow, you understand.
One morning, he remarked that he’d been kept awake all night by a mouse that had made it into our cell despite the rolled-up newspaper he’d used to block the gap under the door, and which had proceeded to get into his locker and rummage through his commissary snacks, forcing Tom to stay up and try to get rid of him. So I gave Tom a lecture to the effect that he, like most people, is a fucking nut job, and that his inability to deal emotionally with the fact that a mouse had entered his locker and is maybe going to eat one of his special little crackers or whatever really indicates the larger problem. As for me, I explained, I had slept like a Taoist baby the previous night, even though I, too, had heard the mouse and even though I, too, had a bunch of snacks and candy and bullshit in my locker that — oh noes — the fucking mouse might have gotten into. What if the mouse got one of my crackers, Tom? What if he got two crackers? How am I going to pick up the pieces and move on with my life knowing that I have two fewer Brand X Ritz-style crackers today than I had yesterday? These are some of the questions that did not pass through my mind last night, because last night I was asleep like a reasonable person, dreaming that I was an adviser to Charlemagne. But not you, Tom; you were up all night on mouse patrol, defending your snack crack Lebensraum from the Bolshevik unter mice or whatever the fuck it was you think you were doing. You’re a Nazi, Tom. You’re a sick Nazi war criminal.
Anyway, that’s how I explained it to Tom, and then, when my mention of Nazis prompted him to note that he actually had never been clear on what World War II was all about, I gave him another lecture on his duty as a citizen of a republic to familiarize himself with modern history. Then I regaled him with a summary of World War II, although much of what I told him was lies.
A week or so later, I opened my locker to get some more paper so that I could finish writing out a list of reasons why Thomas Friedman should be thrown out of the country, and there before me on the top shelf was the mouse, rustling through my package of peanut-butter crackers. He immediately froze in place — and so did I, because I didn’t know what else to do, not having ever before encountered a mouse and having read very little on the subject. I needed to buy some time and run through my options.
First, I thought, “Should I … eat him?” Then it struck me that this was kind of a bizarre thing to come up with right off the bat, and so I put it out of my mind. Then it occurred to me that this mouse actually thought I couldn’t see it just because it was standing perfectly still. What a fool this mouse must be, I thought. Then I wondered whether the mouse might not be thinking the same about me — that it was I who wrongly believed myself to be invisible by virtue of my own stillness. In fact, I was only being still because my opponent had started being still first, which is just basic game theory. Surely the mouse knew this perfectly well but was nonetheless choosing to pretend otherwise in order to discredit me. Having come to this conclusion — which now that I write it out in plain English doesn’t seem to make any sense — I resolved to eat this disingenuous little mouse after all. But I was still held back by that last barricade of doubt: might not the eating of this mouse violate some sort of unspoken jailhouse convention about not eating live mice? Come to think of it, hadn’t this been a social convention for tens of thousands of years? Maybe not, maybe so; without internet access, it’s hard to determine these things on short notice. But had not society cast me away? Was it not society that had placed me in chains? A pox on society, then! And so I reached out to grab the mouse that I might feast upon it to the greater glory of my vague anarchistic sentiments, but it hopped down to the floor and scurried out of the cell.
“Guards! Seize him!” I called out through the doorway, to no visible effect. Then I grabbed the stack of paper out of my locker and spent a pleasant afternoon writing down a few more of my grievances against Thomas Friedman, including his failed prediction from 15 years ago that China would soon become a net importer of wheat, whereas in fact just the opposite happened, or his turn-of-the-century proclamation that people’s refrigerators would be ordering fresh milk over the internet by 2005, or for all of his nonsense about how Putin would restore democracy and the rule of law to Russia. Frankly, I wouldn’t mind being locked up at all if only Thomas Friedman were locked up, too.
COMPOSE RADICAL POLITICAL TREATISE ON PARCHMENT MADE FROM TORN-UP SHEETS WITH INK COMPRISED OF SOOT MIXED WITH THE WINE WE PRISONERS RECEIVE ON SUNDAYS AND A STYLUS I CARVED FROM A FISH BONE: The revolutionary priest from The Count of Monte Cristo does this, and I’ve always wanted to do something similar. As I recall, though, the treatise he wrote was on the viability of a unified Italy. With the advantage of hindsight, we now know that the unification of Italy was a terrible mistake, as modern Italians are ungovernable in large numbers. I suppose I could write a treatise on how Italy may be reduced back into a peninsula of warring city-states and ever-tottering proxy kingdoms. (Spoiler Alert: my plan consists of sitting back and letting nature take its course.) Also, we are not allowed to have fish bones in Texas jails because they can be made into shanks.
ENGAGE IN A FIGHT TO THE DEATH WITH A FELLOW PRISONER KNOWN ONLY AS “THE SANDMAN”: Does anyone remember what this movie was called? I know it came out in the ’80s, and I am about 30 percent sure that it starred Sylvester Stallone.
SECRETLY DIG AN ESCAPE TUNNEL OVER THE COURSE OF 10 YEARS USING A ROCK HAMMER I BOUGHT FROM MORGAN FREEMAN WHILE IN THE MEANTIME TAKING ADVANTAGE OF MY POSITION AS THE PRISON’S ACCOUNTANT TO COMPILE EVIDENCE OF CORRUPT PRACTICES ON THE PART OF THE WARDEN THAT I’LL PLACE IN THE OUTGOING MAIL ADDRESSED TO A LOCAL NEWSPAPER RIGHT BEFORE I FLEE TO ZIHUATANEJO WITH MY BEST FRIEND, MORGAN FREEMAN: Well, this actually sounds like a lot of work. It’s also predicated on the assumption that major press outlets are necessarily capable of understanding and reporting on evidence of government wrongdoing even when it’s compiled and handed to them on a silver platter. This has not always been my experience.
|
|
et’s try to imagine that Craig Stephen Hicks, who massacred three of his neighbors in a Chapel Hill condominium on Tuesday, really did it for no other reason than to settle a difference of opinion about parking-lot etiquette.
