since Sunday Afternoon I was unable to log into my blogger account to update this blog from my laptop due to a malware problem.that problem is now fixed. I decided to move to wordpress
my new blog is
http://angloamerica101.wordpress.com/
This blog will remain online as an archive of posts from July, 2011-March 1, 2012
Monday, March 5, 2012
Thursday, March 1, 2012
Chief U.S. District Judge sends racially charged email about president
Link
HELENA — Chief U.S. District Judge Richard Cebull on Wednesday admitted to sending a racially charged email about President Barack Obama from his courthouse chambers.
Cebull, of Billings, was nominated by former President George W. Bush and received his commission in 2001 and has served as chief judge for the District of Montana since 2008.
The subject line of the email, which Cebull sent from his official courthouse email address on Feb. 20 at 3:42 p.m., reads: "A MOM'S MEMORY."
The forwarded text reads as follow:
"Normally I don't send or forward a lot of these, but even by my standards, it was a bit touching. I want all of my friends to feel what I felt when I read this. Hope it touches your heart like it did mine.
"A little boy said to his mother; 'Mommy, how come I'm black and you're white?'" the email joke reads. "His mother replied, 'Don't even go there Barack! From what I can remember about that party, you're lucky you don't bark!'"
Cebull admitted Wednesday to sending the email to seven recipients, including his personal email address.
The judge acknowledged that the content of the email was racist, but said he does not consider himself racist. He said the email was intended to be a private communication.
"It was not intended by me in any way to become public," Cebull said. "I apologize to anybody who is offended by it, and I can obviously understand why people would be offended."
Cebull said his brother initially sent him the email, which he forwarded to six of his "old buddies" and acquaintances.
He admitted that he read the email and intended to send it to his friends.
"The only reason I can explain it to you is I am not a fan of our president, but this goes beyond not being a fan," Cebull said. "I didn't send it as racist, although that's what it is. I sent it out because it's anti-Obama."
Travis McAdam, executive director for the Montana Human Rights Network , said the email contained highly racist rhetoric unbecoming of a federal judge.
"It's one thing if the judge is not a fan of President Barack Obama, but you would think someone in his position would articulate that in a way that criticizes his policy decisions or his position on issues," McAdam said. "We have a hard time believing that a legitimate criticism of the president involves distributing a joke that basically compares African Americans with animals."
Cebull said he does not consider himself prejudice against people of other races or ethnic backgrounds, and that his actions in his courtroom have demonstrated that.
"I have never considered myself that way," Cebull said. "All I can emphasize is I've treated people in my courtroom all these years fairly. I don't think I've ever demonstrated racism. Nobody has ever even implied it."
Montana immigration attorney Shahid Haque-Hausrath was on the receiving end of a racially charged email sent by a top Immigrations and Customs Enforcement official last fall. That official was suspended after sending Haque-Hausrath an email implying that Muslim Americans must prove their allegiance to the United State.
Haque-Hausrath, who is in an interracial marriage and recently fathered a child with his wife, said Cebull's e-mail was "deeply troubling."
"Another federal official who is entrusted to do his duties fairly and impartially has yet again sent an email from his work account during work hours that espouses deeply racist and bigoted views," Haque-Hausrath said. "The reason why I think it's so troubling, is it espouses the deeply racist view that interracial sex is equivalent to bestiality. For a federal judge to be equating the two, and say since Barack Obama is of mixed racial background, that his mother was somehow committing acts of bestiality is incredibly racist and troubling.
One of the recipients of the email Cebull sent forwarded it to another person, who in turn forwarded it to another person. The email was eventually pass along to the Great Falls Tribune, who contacted Cebull. Cebull said he was surprised the recipients of the e-mail passed it along with his name on it.
"This is a private thing that was, to say the least, very poor judgment on my part," Cebull said. "I did not forward it because of the racist nature of it. Although it is racist, I'm not that way, never have been."
Monday, February 27, 2012
Saturday, February 25, 2012
Al Jazeera English: Empire: Hollywood and the war machine
Al Jazeera network explore how Hollywood working with the pentagon and the U.S military to create war propaganda movies
the white supremacist kommando camp that turns boys' doubts to hate
link
Thick clouds of diesel smoke fill the air outside a run-down guest farm outside the town of Carolina in Mpumalanga. As the stench dissipates, a group of boys, aged between 13 and 19, spill from the bed of a rusty truck. The trip from the city to the country was long and hypnotic in the old jalopy.
It is after midnight when the boys heft bags full of military clothing. "There are old blood stains on my uniform," one of them says, as he trades his sneakers for army boots.
Shouted orders ring out. The harsh intimidation begins immediately. Groaning, the boys raise 4m tent poles among the cowpats dotting the grassland. The large army tent will be their home for the next nine days.
Thirteen-year-old Jano, the youngest at the camp, spreads his sleeping bag on the bumpy floor. He is at the camp because he wants to prove to his father that he isn't a sissy but a real man, he says with a shy smile.
At 18, Riaan is already a little more self-assured. His lily-white skin is recovering from acne. "I want to learn how to camouflage myself in the veld." He, too, seems excited to be camping out and playing soldier, as if he's living an adventure out of a boyhood novel.
But soon they will realise this survival camp is different to others held in the veld.
The boys run from the tent to the mess hall. Before them, under the glare of fluorescent lighting, stands 57-year-old Franz Jooste. Old army decorations gleam on his apartheid-era uniform. The uniforms of the boys also come from that era.
"We're going to make men of you all," he tells them in Afrikaans.
'Protecting its own people'
Jooste is the head of the Kommando-korps, a small, little-known right-wing group bent on breeding hate and banking on some young Afrikaners' sense of not belonging in the new South Africa to get there.
On its website, the Kommandokorps describes itself as an elite organisation "protecting its own people" in the event of an attack, it writes, necessary "because the police and the military cannot provide help quickly enough".
Last year, it signed a saamstaanverdrag (a unity pact) with the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB) and the Suidlanders -- a small whites-only group that is awaiting the racial apocalypse -- to coordinate their security strategy together.
The organisation claims to have trained more than 1 500 Boere-Afrikaner jongmanne in defence skills over the past 11 years. Jooste, who spreads his message by e-mail and in newsletters, says that 40% of boys sign up themselves. The rest are volunteered by their parents.
The teenagers at the camp all know crime horror stories and feel responsible for protecting their families. "We always have to lock our doors at night," 18-year-old Nicolas says. "This camp will teach me how to protect my father and mother, and little brother and sister."
At 4.30am on the first morning of camp, the boys are sent out on a 2km run in their heavy army boots, down a rocky country road filled with potholes. The organisation aspires to instil discipline through sweat. The war of attrition has begun. Indoctrination takes root best in exhausted ground.
Sixteen-year-old EC is in the middle of the panting troop. He is one of the smallest boys here, a childlike teenager who is thrilled at being able to shoot his paintball gun.
'I don't like racism'
"I want to be able to defend myself. And I am also doing this for my paintball career," he says with a smile. His mother is a single mom and sent him to the camp because she feels it will be good for her boy to be surrounded by men.
After they catch their breath, we talk about their country. The teenagers say they believe in the idea of the rainbow nation but the contradictions soon emerge.
"People generally get along pretty well," Riaan says. "We have to fight racism." EC has two black friends, Thabang and Tshepo. "I don't like racism."
"I don't know what apartheid is," Jano says. "But a long time ago, Nelson Mandela made it so everyone has the same rights." Then EC adds he would never marry a black woman and Jano says he is afraid when he walks past black people.
The group is called to a small field next to the community hall. They line up in military formation while a camp leader unfolds the old South African flag. They fill their lungs with air and start singing: "Uit die blou van onse hemel, Uit die diepte van ons see, Oor ons ewige gebergtes waar die kranse antwoord gee."
Some struggle with the words of the apartheid national anthem.
Meanwhile, Jooste sits in the mess hall. Kitsch paintings of buffalos, elephants and rhinos hang on the walls, and the wicker furniture is covered in zebra print. He looks through the glasses on his nose at the camp's schedule. It is written down in military style and every minute seems accounted for.
Proud veteran
There are slots for self-defence techniques, radio communication and how to patrol, as well as lectures on patriotism and the history of the border wars.
Jooste is a proud veteran. He fought on South Africa's borders with Zimbabwe and Mozambique and in Angola. He is scarred, he says, by what he calls treason; while
he was fighting for the white regime, his leaders were making peace with Nelson Mandela. After his army service, he was active in the AWB.
Before his most important lecture, "Die vyand en bedreiging" (The enemy and the threat), Jooste boasts that it will take him just an hour to change the boys' minds. "Then they'll know they aren't part of the rainbow nation but part of another nation with an important history."
His cadets sit cross-legged on the ground in the mess hall. When he speaks the teens listen quietly. "Aside from the Aborigines in Australia, the African black is the most underdeveloped, barbaric member of the human race on Earth," he says. He tells the boys that black people have a smaller cerebral cortex than whites and thus cannot take initiative or govern effectively.
"Who is my enemy in South Africa? Who murders, robs and rapes?" "Who are these creatures?" he asks. "The blacks," he answers.
He picks up the current South African flag and lays it before the entrance to the mess hall like a doormat. He orders the boys to wipe their filthy army boots on it. They laugh uncertainly, then they do as they are told. Only Nicolas stands back.
Jooste tells them that they should love the old South African flag and the old national anthem.
Fear and superiority
An extreme form of patriotism runs through groups like this one; the cadets at this camp are taught that the country should not return to apartheid but, rather, they must work to acquire their own independent nation. Jooste last year got elected on to the Volksraad Verkiesing Kommissie (People's Council Electoral Commission), a group that fights for Afrikaner nationalism.
Hermann Gilomee, a renowned writer on Afrikaners and an extraordinary professor in history at the University of Stellenbosch, says apartheid stemmed from two sources: fear and a sense of superiority. You can still see them in Jooste. The primary fear is for the loss of Afrikaner identity -- their culture, language and symbols -- as a separate people. Jooste is desperate to conserve this sense of separateness and create a new generation of Afrikaners who carry his ideas. It is his mission to indoctrinate young Afrikaners like Nicolas, Riaan, Jano and EC, who are struggling to determine their position in the country.
Born after the end of apartheid, they feel unwanted, says Unisa associate professor Eliria Bornman of the department of communication science who did research on Afrikaner identity. "They know they're different from the rest of the population. Any leader can take their frustration and channel it in a negative way."
Outside the tent, the cadets are made to crawl across the ground, army-style, gripping a wooden beam they call liefie in their arms, their knuckles bleeding. "Persevere! You've got to learn to persevere," Jooste shouts. The sound of crying rises from the rearmost ranks. Jooste's assistants, older members of the Kommandokorps, grin as they take photos of the boys with their cellphones.
EC is struggling. The beam weighs almost a third as much as he does. The nights, too, are hitting him hard. "We sleep on the ground and our sleeping bags get wet. In three nights, I've slept six hours. Every day I think about giving up." But his paintball career seems to keep him going.
'You should hate black people'
The next night they move from the army tent to a nearby forest where they set up two camps. They each get one small tin of canned beans or vegetables to eat and warm themselves near the fire. At first light, one of the groups launches an attack. With the sleep still in their eyes they point and shoot their paintballs.
The young faces are increasingly marked by exhaustion as the days pass, yet the boys seem to grow more and more confident. "The training has taught me that you should hate black people," EC says. "They kill everyone who crosses their path. I don't think I can be friends with Thabang and Tshepo anymore."
Riaan repeats what he has learned in nine days almost word for word. "There's a war going on between blacks and whites. A lot of blood will flow in the future. I definitely feel more like an Afrikaner now. I feel the Afrikaner blood in my veins."
Jooste insists his job is to teach them to defend themselves. He doesn't want to force the boys into any particular direction. "All we want to do is channel the feeling they already carry within them. We don't want them to hate."
But in nine days, boys who once carried a budding belief in South African unity have become toughened men with racist ideas.
At the end of the camp the two boys who performed best are selected. They will get the next course, the gevorderde weerbaarheids kursus (advanced preparedness course), for free. There the paintball guns will be traded in for the real deal.
Thick clouds of diesel smoke fill the air outside a run-down guest farm outside the town of Carolina in Mpumalanga. As the stench dissipates, a group of boys, aged between 13 and 19, spill from the bed of a rusty truck. The trip from the city to the country was long and hypnotic in the old jalopy.
It is after midnight when the boys heft bags full of military clothing. "There are old blood stains on my uniform," one of them says, as he trades his sneakers for army boots.
Shouted orders ring out. The harsh intimidation begins immediately. Groaning, the boys raise 4m tent poles among the cowpats dotting the grassland. The large army tent will be their home for the next nine days.
Thirteen-year-old Jano, the youngest at the camp, spreads his sleeping bag on the bumpy floor. He is at the camp because he wants to prove to his father that he isn't a sissy but a real man, he says with a shy smile.
At 18, Riaan is already a little more self-assured. His lily-white skin is recovering from acne. "I want to learn how to camouflage myself in the veld." He, too, seems excited to be camping out and playing soldier, as if he's living an adventure out of a boyhood novel.
But soon they will realise this survival camp is different to others held in the veld.
The boys run from the tent to the mess hall. Before them, under the glare of fluorescent lighting, stands 57-year-old Franz Jooste. Old army decorations gleam on his apartheid-era uniform. The uniforms of the boys also come from that era.
"We're going to make men of you all," he tells them in Afrikaans.
'Protecting its own people'
Jooste is the head of the Kommando-korps, a small, little-known right-wing group bent on breeding hate and banking on some young Afrikaners' sense of not belonging in the new South Africa to get there.
On its website, the Kommandokorps describes itself as an elite organisation "protecting its own people" in the event of an attack, it writes, necessary "because the police and the military cannot provide help quickly enough".
Last year, it signed a saamstaanverdrag (a unity pact) with the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB) and the Suidlanders -- a small whites-only group that is awaiting the racial apocalypse -- to coordinate their security strategy together.
The organisation claims to have trained more than 1 500 Boere-Afrikaner jongmanne in defence skills over the past 11 years. Jooste, who spreads his message by e-mail and in newsletters, says that 40% of boys sign up themselves. The rest are volunteered by their parents.
The teenagers at the camp all know crime horror stories and feel responsible for protecting their families. "We always have to lock our doors at night," 18-year-old Nicolas says. "This camp will teach me how to protect my father and mother, and little brother and sister."
At 4.30am on the first morning of camp, the boys are sent out on a 2km run in their heavy army boots, down a rocky country road filled with potholes. The organisation aspires to instil discipline through sweat. The war of attrition has begun. Indoctrination takes root best in exhausted ground.
Sixteen-year-old EC is in the middle of the panting troop. He is one of the smallest boys here, a childlike teenager who is thrilled at being able to shoot his paintball gun.
'I don't like racism'
"I want to be able to defend myself. And I am also doing this for my paintball career," he says with a smile. His mother is a single mom and sent him to the camp because she feels it will be good for her boy to be surrounded by men.
After they catch their breath, we talk about their country. The teenagers say they believe in the idea of the rainbow nation but the contradictions soon emerge.
"People generally get along pretty well," Riaan says. "We have to fight racism." EC has two black friends, Thabang and Tshepo. "I don't like racism."
"I don't know what apartheid is," Jano says. "But a long time ago, Nelson Mandela made it so everyone has the same rights." Then EC adds he would never marry a black woman and Jano says he is afraid when he walks past black people.
The group is called to a small field next to the community hall. They line up in military formation while a camp leader unfolds the old South African flag. They fill their lungs with air and start singing: "Uit die blou van onse hemel, Uit die diepte van ons see, Oor ons ewige gebergtes waar die kranse antwoord gee."
Some struggle with the words of the apartheid national anthem.
Meanwhile, Jooste sits in the mess hall. Kitsch paintings of buffalos, elephants and rhinos hang on the walls, and the wicker furniture is covered in zebra print. He looks through the glasses on his nose at the camp's schedule. It is written down in military style and every minute seems accounted for.
Proud veteran
There are slots for self-defence techniques, radio communication and how to patrol, as well as lectures on patriotism and the history of the border wars.
Jooste is a proud veteran. He fought on South Africa's borders with Zimbabwe and Mozambique and in Angola. He is scarred, he says, by what he calls treason; while
he was fighting for the white regime, his leaders were making peace with Nelson Mandela. After his army service, he was active in the AWB.
Before his most important lecture, "Die vyand en bedreiging" (The enemy and the threat), Jooste boasts that it will take him just an hour to change the boys' minds. "Then they'll know they aren't part of the rainbow nation but part of another nation with an important history."
His cadets sit cross-legged on the ground in the mess hall. When he speaks the teens listen quietly. "Aside from the Aborigines in Australia, the African black is the most underdeveloped, barbaric member of the human race on Earth," he says. He tells the boys that black people have a smaller cerebral cortex than whites and thus cannot take initiative or govern effectively.
"Who is my enemy in South Africa? Who murders, robs and rapes?" "Who are these creatures?" he asks. "The blacks," he answers.
He picks up the current South African flag and lays it before the entrance to the mess hall like a doormat. He orders the boys to wipe their filthy army boots on it. They laugh uncertainly, then they do as they are told. Only Nicolas stands back.
Jooste tells them that they should love the old South African flag and the old national anthem.
Fear and superiority
An extreme form of patriotism runs through groups like this one; the cadets at this camp are taught that the country should not return to apartheid but, rather, they must work to acquire their own independent nation. Jooste last year got elected on to the Volksraad Verkiesing Kommissie (People's Council Electoral Commission), a group that fights for Afrikaner nationalism.
Hermann Gilomee, a renowned writer on Afrikaners and an extraordinary professor in history at the University of Stellenbosch, says apartheid stemmed from two sources: fear and a sense of superiority. You can still see them in Jooste. The primary fear is for the loss of Afrikaner identity -- their culture, language and symbols -- as a separate people. Jooste is desperate to conserve this sense of separateness and create a new generation of Afrikaners who carry his ideas. It is his mission to indoctrinate young Afrikaners like Nicolas, Riaan, Jano and EC, who are struggling to determine their position in the country.
Born after the end of apartheid, they feel unwanted, says Unisa associate professor Eliria Bornman of the department of communication science who did research on Afrikaner identity. "They know they're different from the rest of the population. Any leader can take their frustration and channel it in a negative way."
Outside the tent, the cadets are made to crawl across the ground, army-style, gripping a wooden beam they call liefie in their arms, their knuckles bleeding. "Persevere! You've got to learn to persevere," Jooste shouts. The sound of crying rises from the rearmost ranks. Jooste's assistants, older members of the Kommandokorps, grin as they take photos of the boys with their cellphones.
EC is struggling. The beam weighs almost a third as much as he does. The nights, too, are hitting him hard. "We sleep on the ground and our sleeping bags get wet. In three nights, I've slept six hours. Every day I think about giving up." But his paintball career seems to keep him going.
'You should hate black people'
The next night they move from the army tent to a nearby forest where they set up two camps. They each get one small tin of canned beans or vegetables to eat and warm themselves near the fire. At first light, one of the groups launches an attack. With the sleep still in their eyes they point and shoot their paintballs.
The young faces are increasingly marked by exhaustion as the days pass, yet the boys seem to grow more and more confident. "The training has taught me that you should hate black people," EC says. "They kill everyone who crosses their path. I don't think I can be friends with Thabang and Tshepo anymore."
Riaan repeats what he has learned in nine days almost word for word. "There's a war going on between blacks and whites. A lot of blood will flow in the future. I definitely feel more like an Afrikaner now. I feel the Afrikaner blood in my veins."
Jooste insists his job is to teach them to defend themselves. He doesn't want to force the boys into any particular direction. "All we want to do is channel the feeling they already carry within them. We don't want them to hate."
But in nine days, boys who once carried a budding belief in South African unity have become toughened men with racist ideas.
At the end of the camp the two boys who performed best are selected. They will get the next course, the gevorderde weerbaarheids kursus (advanced preparedness course), for free. There the paintball guns will be traded in for the real deal.
Thursday, February 23, 2012
Madonna to face lawsuit over 'Give Me All Your Luvin''?
link
Madonna may face a lawsuit over her latest single 'Give Me All Your Luvin''.
Brazilian singer Joao Brasil claims that the track's chorus contains elements from his song 'L.O.V.E. Banana'.
Brasil's record company are contemplating a possible lawsuit over the track, however Brasil himself has revealed he would rather not face off against the singer.
"I still don't understand what happened. I'm a huge fan of hers. If it's plagiarism, then even better. She is always at the cutting edge of music, so it's a good sign about what I do," he told Brazilian newspaper Folha da Sao Pauolo.
"It's in [the record label's] hands, they're looking at how to proceed and what they can do. But personally I don't want to do anything. The last thing I need in my life is a fight with Madonna."
'Give Me All Your Luvin'' will feature on Madonna's upcoming LP MDNA, which will be released on March 26.
Madonna recently denied rumors that Britney Spears will feature on MDNA.
Joao Brasil's song
Madonna's plagiarized version
Madonna may face a lawsuit over her latest single 'Give Me All Your Luvin''.
Brazilian singer Joao Brasil claims that the track's chorus contains elements from his song 'L.O.V.E. Banana'.
Brasil's record company are contemplating a possible lawsuit over the track, however Brasil himself has revealed he would rather not face off against the singer.
"I still don't understand what happened. I'm a huge fan of hers. If it's plagiarism, then even better. She is always at the cutting edge of music, so it's a good sign about what I do," he told Brazilian newspaper Folha da Sao Pauolo.
"It's in [the record label's] hands, they're looking at how to proceed and what they can do. But personally I don't want to do anything. The last thing I need in my life is a fight with Madonna."
'Give Me All Your Luvin'' will feature on Madonna's upcoming LP MDNA, which will be released on March 26.
Madonna recently denied rumors that Britney Spears will feature on MDNA.
Joao Brasil's song
Madonna's plagiarized version
Monday, February 20, 2012
Sunday, February 19, 2012
A racist flag in a racist war
link
The author is a former Staff Sergeant in the U.S. Army infantry who served 28 months in Iraq.
The U.S. Marine Corps is in hot water once again over leaked images that give a glimpse into its inner workings.
Just like the recent release of a video showing Marines in Afghanistan urinating on the corpses of Afghan men, the new photo of Marines posing with a Nazi SS flag doesn’t shock me at all, either.
These two situations emerged in different times and locations in the country, but are completely bound together. They are bound with the racism, sense of superiority and sense of nationalism that the military itself embraces and promotes.
Racism is embraced, coddled and on full display by the top leaders of the U.S. military. We see it everywhere, in plain sight. In my time in the U.S. Army, I wore a patch on my shoulder of the 2nd Infantry Division, bearing the image of an “Indian head,” a racist image that Native Americans have fought for decades to have removed as an icon from sports teams, commercial products, and so forth. An image, ironically, once used to dehumanize the people who were being killed and colonized.
But the racism is far more brazen than that. Anyone who has served in the U.S. military knows that, despite the official line of its “Equal Opportunity Program” and official rules and regulations against racism, use of racist terms to dehumanize Muslims and the peoples of the Middle East and South Asia are so common they are part of the everyday vernacular.
Nazi paraphernalia is not uncommon
Many were shocked to see U.S. troops flying a Nazi flag, and there was the immediate excuse that “they didn’t know what it meant.” They must have only meant “Scout Snipers,” with no knowledge that it was a Nazi flag, or that it could be interpreted as such.
That is an absolute joke. In my time as an infantryman, I saw Nazi paraphernalia regularly. Soldiers complained to me that in the barracks of Ranger Regiment on Fort Lewis, Nazi flags being hung in soldiers’ rooms without repercussion. My first tour in Iraq was the first time I remember seeing the “Deaths Head” pin, a symbol of the Nazi SS, placed on the front of soldiers’ vests. It was not the last.
Especially in Special Operations units—such as the Marine snipers in the photo—Nazi symbolism is revered. Why? Quite simply because the Nazis are famous for mercilessly killing and terrorizing millions of people. It fits right in to the mentality expected of Spec Ops.
In fact, when the U.S. military was experiencing a recruiting shortfall in 2005, the Department of Defense changed its supposedly strict policy against allowing self-avowed Nazis to join, and adopted an official “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy regarding members of neo-Nazi and white-supremacist organizations. They could get “moral waivers,” as long as they could “perform satisfactorily” in combat.
The Pentagon needs racism
As the Marine Corps denounced the leaked photo, they announced that there would be no disciplinary action for the Marines flying the Nazi flag, which is not surprising at all. Why would a military so reliant on racism punish racist behavior?
The reality is that U.S. troops have far more in common with the people we are sent to fight than the millionaire politicians who send us. We are told to fight people who also just want a decent life for their families; people who also needlessly suffer under bogus policies of corrupt governments; people who are doing the same thing we would be doing if we were in their shoes. The last thing the Pentagon wants is for rank-and-file troops to identify with the people we are sent to fight, relate to them as human beings, and correctly identify that they are not our enemies.
So in order for the Pentagon to continue sending poor people in the United States to kill and die fighting poor people in Afghanistan, all for the super-profits of a handful of billionaires, they need to wrap the mission in racism, national chauvinism and a sense of superiority.
This is why service members must take a strong stand against racism: it’s a barrier to unity within the ranks of the military, hindering our ability to collectively advocate for our interests, and it distorts who our real enemies are in the world.
A racist war
The rationale for the war rests on several racist assertions. On one hand, there are the assumptions that the people of Afghanistan are too backward or inferior to determine their own destiny; that they’re too helpless to survive without the U.S. occupation; that they need saviors from the West to teach them about democracy, human rights and modernity. On the other hand, there are the assumptions that the people of Afghanistan are somehow responsible for the 9/11 attacks and will launch more attacks; that it is a country of “terrorists” or people who “harbor terrorists”; that they are somehow the aggressors, motivated to fight by anti-American extremism and not by the daily misery and humiliation of life under foreign occupation.
The result is that the lives of the people of Afghanistan are seen as inferior. When Afghan civilians are killed—like the eight children massacred by a NATO aircraft revealed this week—it is supposed to be acceptable collateral damage, barely a footnote in the media. The tens of thousands of innocent people who have been buried, and the hundreds of thousands wounded and displaced, is considered acceptable. It is “acceptable” because we are told it is to somehow save American lives, which by implication are more valuable than Afghan lives.
Without racism and Islamophobia, the reality of the war in Afghanistan would be on full display: An unpopular war waged by millionaire politicians and incompetent generals, who tell us flat-out lies, aimed at nothing other than expanding the reach of Big Business in yet another resource-rich region of the world. Because people in the United States would never want to send their loved ones to die for such an absurd cause, and troops would never want to die for it either, racism becomes an indispensable tool for those who say we must continue to fight.
Those wanting a “kinder, gentler” war, where the troops do not urinate on dead bodies, kill innocent civilians or fly Nazi flags, will continue to be shocked and disappointed. This is an imperialist war. It does not get any “kinder and gentler” than this.
Similar leaks will continue to show—not examples of a few “bad apples”—but the real and inevitable manifestations of the core nature of U.S. foreign policy.
A racist flag in a racist war
Racism an essential tool for the 1%
February 14, 2012
By Kevin Baker
The U.S. Marine Corps is in hot water once again over leaked images that give a glimpse into its inner workings.
Just like the recent release of a video showing Marines in Afghanistan urinating on the corpses of Afghan men, the new photo of Marines posing with a Nazi SS flag doesn’t shock me at all, either.
These two situations emerged in different times and locations in the country, but are completely bound together. They are bound with the racism, sense of superiority and sense of nationalism that the military itself embraces and promotes.
Racism is embraced, coddled and on full display by the top leaders of the U.S. military. We see it everywhere, in plain sight. In my time in the U.S. Army, I wore a patch on my shoulder of the 2nd Infantry Division, bearing the image of an “Indian head,” a racist image that Native Americans have fought for decades to have removed as an icon from sports teams, commercial products, and so forth. An image, ironically, once used to dehumanize the people who were being killed and colonized.
But the racism is far more brazen than that. Anyone who has served in the U.S. military knows that, despite the official line of its “Equal Opportunity Program” and official rules and regulations against racism, use of racist terms to dehumanize Muslims and the peoples of the Middle East and South Asia are so common they are part of the everyday vernacular.
Nazi paraphernalia is not uncommon
Many were shocked to see U.S. troops flying a Nazi flag, and there was the immediate excuse that “they didn’t know what it meant.” They must have only meant “Scout Snipers,” with no knowledge that it was a Nazi flag, or that it could be interpreted as such.
That is an absolute joke. In my time as an infantryman, I saw Nazi paraphernalia regularly. Soldiers complained to me that in the barracks of Ranger Regiment on Fort Lewis, Nazi flags being hung in soldiers’ rooms without repercussion. My first tour in Iraq was the first time I remember seeing the “Deaths Head” pin, a symbol of the Nazi SS, placed on the front of soldiers’ vests. It was not the last.
Especially in Special Operations units—such as the Marine snipers in the photo—Nazi symbolism is revered. Why? Quite simply because the Nazis are famous for mercilessly killing and terrorizing millions of people. It fits right in to the mentality expected of Spec Ops.
In fact, when the U.S. military was experiencing a recruiting shortfall in 2005, the Department of Defense changed its supposedly strict policy against allowing self-avowed Nazis to join, and adopted an official “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy regarding members of neo-Nazi and white-supremacist organizations. They could get “moral waivers,” as long as they could “perform satisfactorily” in combat.
The Pentagon needs racism
As the Marine Corps denounced the leaked photo, they announced that there would be no disciplinary action for the Marines flying the Nazi flag, which is not surprising at all. Why would a military so reliant on racism punish racist behavior?
The reality is that U.S. troops have far more in common with the people we are sent to fight than the millionaire politicians who send us. We are told to fight people who also just want a decent life for their families; people who also needlessly suffer under bogus policies of corrupt governments; people who are doing the same thing we would be doing if we were in their shoes. The last thing the Pentagon wants is for rank-and-file troops to identify with the people we are sent to fight, relate to them as human beings, and correctly identify that they are not our enemies.
So in order for the Pentagon to continue sending poor people in the United States to kill and die fighting poor people in Afghanistan, all for the super-profits of a handful of billionaires, they need to wrap the mission in racism, national chauvinism and a sense of superiority.
This is why service members must take a strong stand against racism: it’s a barrier to unity within the ranks of the military, hindering our ability to collectively advocate for our interests, and it distorts who our real enemies are in the world.
A racist war
The rationale for the war rests on several racist assertions. On one hand, there are the assumptions that the people of Afghanistan are too backward or inferior to determine their own destiny; that they’re too helpless to survive without the U.S. occupation; that they need saviors from the West to teach them about democracy, human rights and modernity. On the other hand, there are the assumptions that the people of Afghanistan are somehow responsible for the 9/11 attacks and will launch more attacks; that it is a country of “terrorists” or people who “harbor terrorists”; that they are somehow the aggressors, motivated to fight by anti-American extremism and not by the daily misery and humiliation of life under foreign occupation.
The result is that the lives of the people of Afghanistan are seen as inferior. When Afghan civilians are killed—like the eight children massacred by a NATO aircraft revealed this week—it is supposed to be acceptable collateral damage, barely a footnote in the media. The tens of thousands of innocent people who have been buried, and the hundreds of thousands wounded and displaced, is considered acceptable. It is “acceptable” because we are told it is to somehow save American lives, which by implication are more valuable than Afghan lives.
Without racism and Islamophobia, the reality of the war in Afghanistan would be on full display: An unpopular war waged by millionaire politicians and incompetent generals, who tell us flat-out lies, aimed at nothing other than expanding the reach of Big Business in yet another resource-rich region of the world. Because people in the United States would never want to send their loved ones to die for such an absurd cause, and troops would never want to die for it either, racism becomes an indispensable tool for those who say we must continue to fight.
Those wanting a “kinder, gentler” war, where the troops do not urinate on dead bodies, kill innocent civilians or fly Nazi flags, will continue to be shocked and disappointed. This is an imperialist war. It does not get any “kinder and gentler” than this.
Similar leaks will continue to show—not examples of a few “bad apples”—but the real and inevitable manifestations of the core nature of U.S. foreign policy.
Saturday, February 18, 2012
Actress in Pete Hoekstra ad accused of racism and stereotypes issues an apology
link
The actress who starred in a political attack ad accused of promoting racial stereotypes has apologized.
Lisa Chan called her participation in the commercial “a mistake” on her Facebook page.
“I am deeply sorry for any pain that the character I portrayed brought to my communities,” Chan wrote.
In the 30-second spot, which aired during the Super Bowl and served as a campaign ad for GOP Senate hopeful Pete Hoekstra, Chan was seen riding a bicycle through a field of rice paddies, as ancient Chinese music played in the background.
The actress who starred in a political attack ad accused of promoting racial stereotypes has apologized.
Lisa Chan called her participation in the commercial “a mistake” on her Facebook page.
“I am deeply sorry for any pain that the character I portrayed brought to my communities,” Chan wrote.
In the 30-second spot, which aired during the Super Bowl and served as a campaign ad for GOP Senate hopeful Pete Hoekstra, Chan was seen riding a bicycle through a field of rice paddies, as ancient Chinese music played in the background.
Shock Jocks Suspended For Calling Whitney A “Crack Hoe”
link
On Thursday, popular radio shock jocks John Kobylt and Ken Chiampou (pictured) of station KFI AM 640 in Los Angeles were suspended and forced to apologize for making insensitive and callous remarks about the late iconic songstress Whitney Houston, reports the Los Angeles Times.
The controversial tag team referred to Houston as a “crack h*” and then went on to say that she had been “cracked out for 20 years.” They also asked, “Really, it [Whitney's death]took this long?”
For their disrespectful remarks, Kobylt and Chiampou, who broadcast their show on weekday afternoons, were suspended by KFI station heads until February 27.
In a statement on the KFI website, the following apology was made to the listeners:
This is not the first incident for Kobylt and Chiampou. Just last year, they raised the ire of the Hispanic population, when they gave out the phone number of Jorge-Mario Cabrera, a local immigration rights advocate, on the air. In no time, Cabrera, a staff member with the Coalition of Humane Immigration Rights of L.A., reportedly received hundreds of hate-filled calls. The inappropriate move by the foul-mouthed pair was met with a major protest outside of their offices and also resulted in Verizon and AT&T Wireless pulling their advertising revenue from the station.
On Thursday, popular radio shock jocks John Kobylt and Ken Chiampou (pictured) of station KFI AM 640 in Los Angeles were suspended and forced to apologize for making insensitive and callous remarks about the late iconic songstress Whitney Houston, reports the Los Angeles Times.
The controversial tag team referred to Houston as a “crack h*” and then went on to say that she had been “cracked out for 20 years.” They also asked, “Really, it [Whitney's death]took this long?”
For their disrespectful remarks, Kobylt and Chiampou, who broadcast their show on weekday afternoons, were suspended by KFI station heads until February 27.
In a statement on the KFI website, the following apology was made to the listeners:
Effective immediately, KFI AM 640 hosts John Kobylt and Ken Chiampou have been suspended for making insensitive and inappropriate comments about the late Whitney Houston.
KFI AM 640 Management does not condone, support or tolerate statements of this kind.”John Kobylt also released a statement:
We made a mistake, and we accept the station’s decision. We used language that was inappropriate, and we sincerely apologize to our listeners and to the family of Ms. Houston.
This is not the first incident for Kobylt and Chiampou. Just last year, they raised the ire of the Hispanic population, when they gave out the phone number of Jorge-Mario Cabrera, a local immigration rights advocate, on the air. In no time, Cabrera, a staff member with the Coalition of Humane Immigration Rights of L.A., reportedly received hundreds of hate-filled calls. The inappropriate move by the foul-mouthed pair was met with a major protest outside of their offices and also resulted in Verizon and AT&T Wireless pulling their advertising revenue from the station.
Asian stereotypes appearing in coverage of Knicks' Jeremy Lin
link
The feel-good story of the year is taking a bit of nasty turn with Asian stereotyping beginning to appear in media coverage of New York Knicks star guard Jeremy Lin, the NBA's first American-born player of Chinese or Taiwanese descent.
The feel-good story of the year is taking a bit of nasty turn with Asian stereotyping beginning to appear in media coverage of New York Knicks star guard Jeremy Lin, the NBA's first American-born player of Chinese or Taiwanese descent.
CNBC's Darren Rovell got the ball rolling Wednesday night by questioning why MSG Network showed Lin's face above a fortune cookie during coverage of the Knicks' victory against the Sacramento Kings, with the words, "The Knicks good fortune."
Tweeted Rovell: "MSG walking a fine line with this Lin fortune cookie graphic tonight."
MSG put out a statement Thursday saying it had
nothing to do with the image: "What appeared briefly last night was not
an MSG graphic, it was one of many fan signs in the arena."
The network declined to comment on why it telecast the image.
Rovell corrected himself on Twitter on Thursday.
It's
a "tough call" whether MSG should, or could, be faulted for showing a
fortune cookie sign created by a fan to TV viewers, says Andrew Kang,
senior staff attorney at the Asian-American Institute in Chicago.
"I
would prefer maybe they didn't show that — although I could imagine
people finding it humorous. But I think it does go to what people think
when they think of Asians. They think of food. Because that is really
their only point of contact, or awareness, with the Asian-American
community."
The New York Post
also took criticism for using the headline, "Amasian," after Lin
drilled a game-clinching three-pointer for the win against the Toronto
Raptors on Tuesday.
During CBS' The Late Show with David Letterman on Wednesday, Jon Stewart of Comedy Central mocked the headline, according to SportsBusiness Daily.
Stewart told Letterman: "It'd be like when Sandy Koufax threw a perfect game, you just wrote on there 'JEWTIFUL!' … I feel like it's very 'Lin-sensitive.'"
Boxer
Floyd Mayweather caused headlines earlier in the week by saying Lin is
only getting a lot of attention "because he's Asian."
Columnist Jason Whitlock embarrassed Fox Sports
with a tweet about Lin playing off Asian stereotypes. On that, the
Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA) sent a letter to Whitlock
that read, in part:
"The attempt at humor —
and we hope that is all it was — fell flat. It also exposed how some
media companies fail to adequately monitor the antics of their
high-profile representatives. Standards need to be applied — by you and
by Fox Sports.
"The offensive tweet debased
one of sports' feel-good moments, not just among Asian Americans but for
so many others who are part of your audience.
"Where do we go from here? How about an apology, Mr. Whitlock."
Whitlock apologized, and the AAJA thanked him for that.
The
sophomoric, sexual stereotype was "completely out-of-line," Kang says.
It was also "misogynistic" — so he's not sure who the columnist offended
more: Asians or women.
"There's this idea
that it's OK to stereotype Asians — just don't with African-Americans or
Latinos because you'll get in trouble and you'll get an aggressive
response," Kang says. "But somehow it's OK to do that to the
Asian-American community. …
"In some ways, I'm
grateful that it is coming out so we can talk about it and people can
really start to challenge what are their pre-conceived notions about the
Asian-American community or Asian-American athletes."
But
Kang also sees "soft" racism in media debates about why Lin went
unnoticed for so long by the basketball establishment and why he's
setting the NBA on fire now.
"You hear endless debates about: 'How can this be happening? How can he be doing so well?'" Kang says.
"The
very simple answer is he's very talented, he was overlooked by scouts
or they missed that one. What they really mean is: 'How can an
Asian-American be doing so well in the NBA?'
"I
think they're looking for answers other than he's athletically gifted,"
Kang says. "They're trying to attribute it to (Knicks coach) Mike D'Antoni's system, (All-Star forward) Carmelo Anthony's
not around. So somebody has to put up the shots. They're trying to
figure out how can this Asian-American be such a playmaker — and why
didn't anyone else notice him earlier."
Friday, February 17, 2012
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)