Internet News Items

Torture

Susie Day (mrzine.monthlyreview.org) emailed an article titled “Zero Dark Thirty: The Woman’s Guide to Success Through Torture.”

I. Globe

See the Globe. More than half the 7 billion people on the Globe are women. Women are different from men. Why are women different from men? Because, according to international humanitarian agencies, women have special percentages that stick out. See women’s percentages:

Women make up 70% of the world’s poor

Women do 66% of the world’s work yet receive 11% of the world’s income

Of the 130,000,000 children who currently do not go to school, 2/3 are girls

Gender-based violence kills 1 in 3 women
 

These are bad percentages. Why are these bad percentages? Because they reflect global sexism. What is sexism? It is the belief that women are inferior to men. How can women triumph over sexism? Who cares? Let’s watch TV.

II. The Golden Globes

See the awards ceremony. The Golden Globes recognizes artistic achievement in television and film. This year’s ceremony was touted as a woman’s event, where “Strong Women Dominate.” See women triumph over sexism by winning awards. See the two funny women MCs hand out prizes. See a delicate blonde woman win “Best Actress in a TV Drama” for playing a CIA agent who fights evil Muslims.

Now, see a delicate strawberry-blonde woman win “Best Actress in a Film Drama” for playing a CIA agent who helps torture evil Muslims. Win, win, win.

See these two women winners combine the “feminine” virtues of being delicate and blonde with the “masculine” virtue of being on top. They have discovered that all you have to do to triumph over sexism is to (a) be a legal resident of the United States; (b) possess breathtaking Western beauty with the symmetrical cheekbones reminiscent of a female cyborg; (c) wear a low-cut, $2,000,000 gown; and (d) act the female lead in stories about how torture renders men inferior.

III. Zero Dark Thirty

See the first high-tech, big-budget feature film about finding and killing Osama Bin-Laden. On second thought, don’t. Instead, see the film’s director. The film’s director is a woman. She may not have a Golden Globe, but she does have big balls. Why does she have big balls? An important male film critic has called this woman “in a nice way, Hollywood’s ballsiest director.” Thank you, Mr. Film Critic. We women know we are doing something right when you ascribe to us “balls” that are “nice.”

The director’s ballsiness has allowed her to take cinematic risks. What is one of those risks? The director has spliced a state-of- the-art, you-are-there, documentary-style film with scenes resembling cutting-room footage from a Saw movie. She has elevated B-movie torture to the level of fine American infotainment.

IV. The Only Good Muslim Is an Interrogated Muslim

See the 3,000 human beings who tragically perished in the World Trade Center attacks on September 11. Do not see the hundreds upon thousands of human beings who tragically perished in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, due to subsequent U.S. invasions, bombings, and drone attacks. Do not see flashbacks of the United States creating and supporting dictatorial regimes to facilitate oil drilling in the region. Do not see Western sanctions imposed on Iraq, years before September 11, 2001, which killed an estimated 500,000 Iraqi children. Also do not see people having qualms about the wisdom of killing Bin-Laden in the first place or the ethics of assassinating anyone, based on a president’s secret “kill list.”

See the pale strawberry-blonde woman help U.S. agents starve Muslims, strip Muslims naked, drag Muslims around on dog leashes, waterboard Muslims, kick and punch Muslims, scream in Muslim’s faces, hang Muslims from the ceiling, and cram Muslims into tiny wooden boxes—all without losing an ounce of her femininity.

These interrogations are hard to watch. Why are these interrogations hard to watch? Because they are hard on the Muslims? No, because they are hard on the CIA interrogators.

V. No Justice; Blonde Peace

Onward. The pale, strawberry- blonde woman will lead her team onward. The torture-derived information will lead to Osama Bin-Laden. And once the evil Bin-Laden is killed (along with a few evil nameless bystanders), the entire U.S. Department of Defense will never be sexist again.

Soon American women of all hair colors and coiffures will be allowed in front-line combat. Why, look. The Pentagon has just announced that it will allow women in front-line combat. Yay. With friends like the U.S. military, who needs feminism?

Thank you, pale, strawberry-blonde woman. You have blazed our women’s trail. When we were staggering around in the dark of Dark Thirty with bad percentages, you delivered us into the light of supreme vengeance.

For the full text of Day’s article: mrzine.monthlyreview.org

Second Amendment

Truthout.org emailed “The Second Amendment was Ratified to Preserve Slavery” by Thom Hartmann in which he details the real reason the Second Amendment was ratified and why it says “State” instead of “Country” (the Framers knew the difference). The reason, writes Hartmann, was to preserve the slave patrol militias in the southern states, which was necessary to get Virginia’s vote.

In the beginning, there were the militias. In the South, they were also called the “slave patrols” and they were regulated by the states. In Georgia, for example, laws were passed in 1755 and 1757 that required all plantation owners or their male white employees to be members of the Georgia Militia and for those armed militia members to make monthly inspections of the quarters of all slaves in the state and to watch out for slaves who may be planning uprisings.

And slave rebellions were keeping the slave patrols busy. By the time the Constitution was ratified, hundreds of slave uprisings had occurred across the South.

If the anti-slavery folks in the North had figured out a way to disband—or even move out of the state—those southern militias, the police state of the South, would collapse. And, similarly, if the North were to invite into military service the slaves of the South, then they could be emancipated, which would collapse the institution of slavery and the southern economic and social systems altogether. These two possibilities worried southerners like James Monroe, George Mason, and the southern Christian evangelical, Patrick Henry—who opposed slavery on principle—but also opposed freeing slaves.

The main concern was Article 1, Section 8 of the newly-proposed Constitution. At the ratifying convention in Virginia in 1788, Henry laid it out: “Let me here call your attention to that part [Article 1, Section 8 of the proposed Constitution].... By this, sir, you see that their control over our last and best defense is unlimited. If they neglect or refuse to discipline or arm our militia, they will be useless: the states can do neither...this power being exclusively given to Congress.... If the country be invaded, a state may go to war, but cannot suppress [slave] insurrections under this new Constitution. If there should happen an insurrection of slaves, the country cannot be said to be invaded. They cannot, therefore, suppress it without the interposition of Congress and Congress only under this new Constitution can call forth the militia.”

Why was that such a concern for Patrick Henry? “In this state,” he said, “there are two hundred and thirty-six thousand blacks and there are many in several other states. But there are few or none in the Northern States…. Patrick Henry was also convinced that the power over the various state militias given the federal government in the new Constitution could be used to strip the slave states of their slave-patrol militias. His first draft for what became the Second Amendment had said: “The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; a well armed, and well regulated militia being the best security of a free country.” But Henry, Mason, and others wanted southern states to preserve their slave-patrol militias independent of the federal government. So Madison changed the word “country” to the word “state,” and redrafted the Second Amendment into today’s form.
 

Crackdown on Occupy

From moderator@portside.org we received a Naomi Wolf article “How the FBI Coordinated the Crackdown on Occupy.” The crackdown—which involved violent arrests, group disruption, canister missiles to the skulls of protesters, people held in handcuffs so tight they were injured, people held in bondage till they were forced to wet or soil themselves—was coordinated with the big banks.

The document shows a network of coordinated DHS, FBI, police, regional fusion centers, and private-sector activity merged into one another—in some cases, bearing a single name, the Domestic Security Alliance Council. The documents show the cops and DHS working for and with banks to target, arrest, and politically disable peaceful citizens.

The documents, released after a long delay in the week between Christmas and New Years, show six American universities as sites where campus police funneled information about students involved with OWS to the FBI, with the Administrations knowledge and banks sat down with FBI officials to pool information about OWS protesters harvested by private security. There were even threats of the assassination of OWS leaders by sniper fire, which remain redacted and undisclosed to those American citizens in danger, contrary to standard FBI practice to inform the person concerned when there is a threat against a political leader.

FBI documents obtained by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund reveal that from its inception, the FBI treated the Occupy movement as a potential criminal and terrorist  threat.  The documents show that in Denver, Colorado, a branch of the FBI and a “Bank Fraud Working Group” met in November 2011 during the Occupy protests to surveil the group.

The fusion of the tracking of money and the suppression of dissent means that a huge area of vulnerability in civil society—people’s income streams and financial records—is firmly in the hands of the banks, which are now in the business of tracking our dissent.