Bulletin #187
SUBJECT: ON SEARCHING FOR THE "LOST
GENERATION": FROM THE CENTER FOR THE ADVANCED STUDY OF AMERICAN
INSTITUTIONS AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS,
29 May 2005
Dear Colleagues and
Friends of CEIMSA,
The casualties of disinformation
and neo-liberal opportunism are growing in numbers, but by many reports a
burgeoning international intelligentsia is also busy bringing reliable
information and common sense to center stage, for serious global discussions on
the Commonweal.
In the past days we have
received several articles which again call our attention to the vital need for
a free flow of information and criticism in order to counter the disorienting
effects of post-modern journalism, which repeatedly displaces the
advocacy for rational, well-informed discussions with glorifications of rapport
de force politics --in the realm of linguistics, as in the field of
diplomacy.
"Think Globally! Act
Locally!" --this has been the international slogan of social movements
since the start of our 21st Century. Below are five short essays sent to us by
our research associates who continue to generously work with us to improve the
quality of discussions at CEIMSA and of the presentations on our web site :
http://dimension.ucsd.edu/CEIMSA-IN-EXILE/
Item A. is an article sent to us
by Professor Richard Du Boff,
offering new, detailed information from the "forbidden city" of
FALLUJAH, following the massacre by the
Item B. is a text by Howard Zinn, in which he is encouraging youth to engage creatively
against the practico-inert of social
reality, to dare to enter into the arena of history by influencing the policies
of their times, and to live a full life against the sophisticated tactics of
"killing hope" which are being deployed by the "powers that
be" against those who would support progressive social change.
Item C. is an article from
Michael Albert on the murder of Rachel Correi, the
24-year-old activist killed in Rafah by Israeli
military forces as she stood in the line of defense against the destruction of
Palestinian homes in 2003.
Item D. is a message from the Baghdad
Student Congress which takes place next month and represents an important
effort to distribute local information despite the military occupation of
Finally, item E. is information from
CEIMSA research associate, Professor Fred Lonidier,
which describes (in English and Spanish) the virulent nationalism now
growing on the U.S.-Mexican border and the creative responses by artists,
academics and youth across the Southwestern United States against this
"brainwash" .
Sincerely,
Francis McCollum Feeley
Professor of American
Studies
Director of Research
Université Stendhal
_______________________
A.
from Richard Du
Boff
28 May 2005
Subject: Fallujah:
an unnatural disaster
http://www.lovinrevolution.org/
Fallujah: An Unnatural Disaster
by Joe Carr
Today, I did what few internationals
have dared to do, I went to Fallujah.
Fallujah is completely surrounded by US
Forces, the only way in or out is through one of four very restrictive
checkpoints. People normally have to wait hours, but since we had our magic
Fallujah is devastating to drive through.
There is more destruction and rubble than I've ever seen in my life; even more
than in Rafah,
There are horror stories everywhere.
We visited a family's home in a neighborhood where every structure is damaged
or destroyed. Their home was full of holes and completely black inside from
fire. They said that they'd left during the fighting with their home in tact,
and returned to find all of their possessions had burned. Three families are
now living in this 3-room house because their homes were completely destroyed.
Over 25 people live in this burn-out shell of a home, including four infants.
Some of them tried to get compensation from the
There is the hopeful site of
rebuilding. Around 25% of families who suffered damaged property have gotten a
little bit of compensation from the
Food prices have also dramatically
increased because of the checkpoints. We talked with one shop-keeper who said
that farmers from around Fallujah can no longer
deliver their produce unless they have a US-issued Fallujah
ID. The shopkeepers now have to go out and pick up the produce each day. He
said it takes him around four hours because of the checkpoint delays.
"They mistreat us," he said, "they
point guns at us and insult us, even the women". He said that both US and Iraqi troops search through the vegetables roughly,
even dumping them on the ground and sometimes smashing them. As soon as he's
finished with one checkpoint and cleaned up the mess, another will ransack his
load all over again. This can happen as many as four times he said. Sometimes,
much of the produce rots from sitting in the hot sun. For all these reasons,
the prices have gone up and more Fallujans are going
hungry.
Fallujah has only one hospital with
inpatient care. Other clinics and treatment centers were bombed by US troops,
and soldiers prevented many people from getting to the hospital during the
attacks. Even after the fighting, the
Meeting a Sunni cleric was the
highlight of the trip. He was a young, passionate man and a quite eloquent
speaker. He told us about some horror stories he'd witnessed. During the first
invasion, several families near his Mosque took cover in a home. US troops used
megaphones to order all them out into the street and told them to carry a white
flag. They did this, but when they all got out, the soldiers opened fire into
the group, killing five. He said one boy had run to his mother who'd been shot,
and Americans shot him in the head. He said he saw a
While meeting with the cleric, a man
told us some of his horror stories. "The Americans shot and killed my
15-year-old daughter" he said, "was she a
terrorist?" He said the
I felt incredibly safe in Fallujah; the people I spoke with were kind and gentle.
They are rightfully angry and indignant at what the
Fallujah is the face of
_______________________
B.
from Howard Zinn
24 May 2005
Against
Discouragement
by Howard Zinn
[In 1963, historian Howard Zinn was fired from
I am deeply honored to be invited
back to Spelman after forty-two years. I would like
to thank the faculty and trustees who voted to invite me, and especially your
president, Dr. Beverly Tatum. And it is a special privilege to be here with Diahann Carroll and Virginia Davis Floyd.
But this is your day -- the students
graduating today. It's a happy day for you and your families. I know you have
your own hopes for the future, so it may be a little presumptuous for me to
tell you what hopes I have for you, but they are exactly the same ones that I
have for my grandchildren.
My first hope is that you will not
be too discouraged by the way the world looks at this moment. It is easy to be
discouraged, because our nation is at war -- still another war, war after war
-- and our government seems determined to expand its empire even if it costs
the lives of tens of thousands of human beings. There is poverty in this
country, and homelessness, and people without health care,
and crowded classrooms, but our government, which has trillions of dollars to
spend, is spending its wealth on war. There are a billion people in
But let me tell you why, in spite of
what I have just described, you must not be discouraged.
I want to remind you that, fifty
years ago, racial segregation here in the South was entrenched as tightly as
was apartheid in
I want to remind you also that when
the war in
The lesson of that history is that
you must not despair, that if you are right, and you persist, things will
change. The government may try to deceive the people, and the newspapers and
television may do the same, but the truth has a way of coming out. The truth
has a power greater than a hundred lies. I know you have practical things to do
-- to get jobs and get married and have children. You may become prosperous and
be considered a success in the way our society defines success, by wealth and
standing and prestige. But that is not enough for a good life.
Remember Tolstoy's story, "The
Death of Ivan Illych." A man on his deathbed
reflects on his life, how he has done everything right, obeyed the rules,
become a judge, married, had children, and is looked upon as a success. Yet, in
his last hours, he wonders why he feels a failure. After becoming a famous
novelist, Tolstoy himself had decided that this was not enough, that he must
speak out against the treatment of the Russian peasants, that
he must write against war and militarism.
My hope is that whatever you do to
make a good life for yourself -- whether you become a teacher, or social
worker, or business person, or lawyer, or poet, or scientist -- you will devote
part of your life to making this a better world for your children, for all
children. My hope is that your generation will demand an end to war, that your
generation will do something that has not yet been done in history and wipe out
the national boundaries that separate us from other human beings on this earth.
Recently I saw a photo on the front
page of the New York Times which I cannot get out of my mind. It showed
ordinary Americans sitting on chairs on the southern border of
Is not nationalism -- that devotion
to a flag, an anthem, a boundary, so fierce it leads to murder -- one of the
great evils of our time, along with racism, along with religious hatred? These
ways of thinking, cultivated, nurtured, indoctrinated from childhood on, have
been useful to those in power, deadly for those out of power.
Here in the
The poets and artists among us seem
to have a clearer understanding of the disease of nationalism. Perhaps the
black poets especially are less enthralled with the virtues of American
"liberty" and "democracy," their people having enjoyed so
little of it. The great African-American poet Langston Hughes addressed his
country as follows:
You
really haven't been a virgin for so long.
It's
ludicrous to keep up the pretext...
You've
slept with all the big powers
In
military uniforms,
And
you've taken the sweet life
Of all the little brown fellows...
Being
one of the world's big vampires,
Why
don't you come on out and say so
Like
And all the other nymphomaniacs of power.
I am a veteran of the Second World
War. That was considered a "good war," but I have come to the
conclusion that war solves no fundamental problems and only leads to more wars.
War poisons the minds of soldiers, leads them to kill and torture, and poisons
the soul of the nation.
My hope is that your generation will
demand that your children be brought up in a world without war. If we want a
world in which the people of all countries are brothers and sisters, if the
children all over the world are considered as our children, then war -- in
which children are always the greatest casualties -- cannot be accepted as a
way of solving problems.
I was on the faculty of
Those years at Spelman
were the most exciting of my life, the most educational certainly. I learned
more from my students than they learned from me. Those were the years of the
great movement in the South against racial segregation, and I became involved
in that in
I was lucky to be at Spelman at a time when I could watch a marvelous
transformation in my students, who were so polite, so quiet, and then suddenly
they were leaving the campus and going into town, and sitting in, and being
arrested, and then coming out of jail full of fire and rebellion. You can read
all about that in Harry Lefever's book Undaunted by
the Fight. One day Marian Wright (now Marian Wright Edelman), who was my
student at Spelman, and was one of the first arrested
in the
My hope is that you will not be
content just to be successful in the way that our society measures success;
that you will not obey the rules, when the rules are unjust; that you will act
out the courage that I know is in you. There are wonderful people, black and
white, who are models. I don't mean African- Americans like Condoleezza Rice,
or Colin Powell, or Clarence Thomas, who have become servants of the rich and
powerful. I mean W.E.B. DuBois and Martin Luther King
and Malcolm X and Marian Wright Edelman, and James Baldwin and Josephine Baker
and good white folk, too, who defied the Establishment to work for peace and
justice.
Another of my students at Spelman, Alice Walker, who, like Marian, has remained our
friend all these years, came from a tenant farmer's family in
It is true--
I've always loved
the daring
ones
Like the black young
man
Who tried
to crash
All barriers
at once,
wanted to
swim
At a white
beach (in
Nude.
I am not suggesting you go that far,
but you can help to break down barriers, of race certainly, but also of
nationalism; that you do what you can -- you don't have to do something heroic,
just something, to join with millions of others who will just do something,
because all of those somethings, at certain points in
history, come together, and make the world better.
That marvelous African-American
writer Zora Neale Hurston, who wouldn't do what white people wanted her to
do, who wouldn't do what black people wanted her to do, who insisted on being
herself, said that her mother advised her: Leap for the sun -- you may not
reach it, but at least you will get off the ground.
By being here today, you are already
standing on your toes, ready to leap. My hope for you is a good life.
[This article first appeared on
Tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute,
which offers a steady flow of alternate sources, news, and opinion from Tom Engelhardt, long time editor in publishing and author of
The End of Victory Culture and The Last Days of Publishing.]
_______________________
C.
from Michael Albert
http://www.zmag.org/weluser.htm
Rachel
Corrie: An American Conscience
by Sonia Nettnin
The late Rachel Corrie (1979 - 2003) was articulate,
straightforward and resolute. Her castigation of
The documentary, "Rachel Corrie: An
American Conscience," chronicles her humanitarian work with the
International Solidarity Movement in Rafah, Gaza
Strip, just prior to her murder in March 2003. While Corrie
stood in front of a Palestinian home to prevent its demolition, an Israeli
soldier in a Caterpillar D-9 bulldozer crushed her.
Director Yahya Barakat,
a professor in the Mass Media and TV Department at
In Rafah, a walk to school is a life or death
situation for Palestinian children when they encounter Israeli soldiers who
shoot at them. Even though 100 international, nonviolent demonstrators, who
carried posters and a draping banner, walked alongside the children, soldiers
responded with gun shots and tear gas. People ran for their lives.
In April 2003 the late British peace activist Tom Hurndall
(1981-2004) was in Rafah where he escorted several
children to school. Gunfire pervaded the streets. Out of fear some of the
children stood immobile. Hurndall rescued them. While
he guided a girl to safety, Israeli Sergeant Wahid Taysir
shot Hurndall in the head. Nine months later, he
died. Immediately after the incident his mother, Jocelyn, traveled to Rafah to find out the truth. On
Corrie
made a conscious decision to travel to Rafah and
assess the root-causes of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Through interviews
with her parents, viewers learn about Rachel.
When Rachel was ten, she made a list of her future professions. One of
them was a humanitarian activist. Her parents, Cindy and Craig, read her
stories about the Holocaust. She composed poems and she constructed crafts for
her mother. She loved the
Her parents' perception of the conflict changed when they read Rachel's
writings because they did not see this information in
Cindy Corrie said her daughter had a gift for
acute observations. In front of the camera, Rachel talked off the cuff
succinctly. Her command of language and analysis of the conflict resounded with
intelligence. She not only had a sharp mind but she had a deep heart. She was a
woman of character and valor.
Barakat uses photo stills to reenact what
happened the day she died. The bulldozer treaded the ground and Corrie, in an orange, flack jacket, stood her ground. She
would not allow the destruction of a family's home, people she lived with for
several weeks. If they no longer had a house, where would they live?
The Israeli soldier crushed her. Eyewitness accounts concurred that the
soldier saw Corrie.
After the incident, the unknown Israeli soldier smiled and waved to
witnesses from the cab of his bulldozer. Yet, he would not step out of the
bulldozer and face his unarmed victim.
The soldier's behavior in front of the camera showed his humanity fell
to the wayside. The first, Israeli fact-finding report about Corrie's death was not mealy-mouthed but an outright lie
because it stated the bulldozer never touched her. The film shows footage from
the cab of the bulldozer and the soldier says: "Dobby to two, I hit an
object," (military terminology for a person). The fact the soldier never
came forward publicly demonstrated he learned nothing from his crime because he
did not take onus for his actions. While his family, friends and military
comrades remain silent, they share the responsibility of this unresolved,
heinous crime.
Activists mourned Corrie's death and they
brought carnations to the site. Many speakers emphasized the thousands of
Palestinians who died at the hands of Israeli soldiers. While in
Subsequent to the footage are interviews with peace activists, including
Hedy Epstein, a Holocaust survivor who believes the
persecuted became the persecutors. She recalled a soldier at the Qalandiya checkpoint who told her if she traveled to Ramallah the Palestinians would cut her in half. One
settler said he wants peace, so the Palestinians throughout the
American actor Richard Gere expressed that
Although the film gives voice to Palestinian doctors and counselors, it
lacks the voice of the average Palestinian. Perhaps the director's vision was
to gain international support and attention through international speakers, but
hearing from the victim's families would illustrate the effects of the
occupation's oppression.
Through these tragedies, Barakat explores the
meaning of conscience and how people apply it to their lives. The film has the
philosophy that some people commit wrong and some people respond to it with
nonviolent resistance. In the end, the viewer is left to decide whether s/he
stands by idly with indifference, or s/he stands for the Palestinians' human
rights. It encourages people to think about the soldiers and the settlers who
kill Palestinians in cold bold and then live freely. How many Palestinian
families lost a loved one and then live with the injustice that the murderer
remains unpunished? When will the world show they value Palestinian life just
as much as Israeli life? Before there can be peace, these inequalities need
resolution.
These questions demonstrate that the film has several interpretations
and it addresses the conflict from different perspectives. Moreover, it struck
different chords with several audience members. During the screening, some
people walked out mumbling comments and it sounded like their beliefs did not
concur with what they saw and the views expressed in the film.
For the people who stayed they found out that Barakat's
film was the first documentary screened at the United Nations. His film is
under the UN's consideration as the 2005 Peace Film. If selected, it will have
European screenings on November 29, the International Day of Solidarity with
the Palestinian People. Someone dubbed his film the Palestinian Fahrenheit 911.
Overall, it ignites an array of feelings from people who stand on all sides of
the conflict.
When I asked Barakat why he chose Corrie as the focal point for his film, he said there were
three reasons: one, eyewitnesses say it was not an accident; two, when he
followed the story in the U.S. they did not talk about Corrie;
and three, the American media did not cover her to the extent they cover
missing, American children and murders.
"It make me feel inside I must do something for this girl," he
said.
Rachel Corrie's memory lives on.
_______________________
D.
from Jo Wilding
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/052905Z.shtml
by Houzan Mahmoud
I thought this message below might
interest some people, even if you're not able to contribute. I wouldn't advise
trying to go to
From
a student uprising in
to a student congress in
to create a progressive student
organization in
Appeal to all organizations and individuals
for financial and political support
for the first student congress in
Dear friends and supporters of the student movement in
The first student congress since the US-led invasion will be held in
The March student uprising against repression by Moqtada
al-Sadr's
Students across
The congress agenda will include students' role in
Above all, the congress needs financial support. We face a bill of
something like £12,000 for hall rental, accommodation, transport of students
from outside Baghdad, food, literature and of course security provision. Your
financial support is crucial to making this student congress happen.
Please send donations to:
DAR ES SALAAM INVESTMENT BANK
The transfer can be done through
Yours in solidarity,
Houzan Mahmoud
On behalf of
the campaign to support students in
For more information: (0044) 7956
883 001 or houzan73@yahoo.co.uk
_______________________
E.
from Fred Lonidier
25 May 2005
SWARM the Minutemen - May 27th to May 29th (2005)
[English] followed by
[Spanish]
We invite people from all over the world
who oppose racist violence to
join the Electronic Disturbance Theatre
action on May 27th, 28th and
29th, 2005 to engage in a virtual
sit-in on the MinuteMen website during
their "Unite to Fight"
Read on for the Electronic
Disturbance Theatre call to action.
"Give me your
tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to
breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming
shore.
Send these, the homeless,
tempest-tossed to me.
I lift my lamp beside the golden
door."
-
"The New Colossus," by the nineteenth-century American poet
Emma
Lazarus inscribed on a plaque at the
base of the Statue of Liberty.
Dear sisters and brothers,
Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT)
in solidarity with Swarm The
MinuteMen action will hold a 3 Day Virtual
Sit-In starting on May 27th
to May 29th (2005) on the MinuteMen Project. We call on all you to join
us and let the MinuteMen
Project know that hard borders are alien in an
age of global interdependence and to
the ideals of liberty as a ìgolden
doorî that is open to all. An ideal that so many have died trying to reach.
To Join The Virtual Sit-In On
Starting on May 27th Click:
http://www.thing.net/~rdom/ecd/ecd.html
Why we must swarm the MinuteMen:
For Víctor
Nicolás Sánchez, Adolfo Pérez Hernández, Daniel Barrientos,
Medina Contreras, Edgar Venegas
Brambila, José Gutiérrez, Melquíades
Gómez Baca, Martha Rivera
García...
Myth Number 1: Immigrants take jobs
away from Americans.
Myth Number 2: Most immigrants are a
drain on the
Myth Number 3:
Myth Number 4: Immigrants arenít really interested in becoming part of
American society.
Myth Number 5: Immigrants contribute
little to American society.
Facts to dispel to these myths from
the American Immigration Lawyers
Association:
http://www.aila.org/contentViewer.aspx?bc=17,142
We call on you sisters and brothers
from all over the world who oppose
the MinuteMen
Project and in the name of the 3,500 women, men and
children who have died crossing into ìThe Land of Libertyî since 1994
to
join the Electronic Disturbance Theatre
action on May 27th, 28th and
29th, 2005 to engage in a Virtual
Sit-In on the MinuteMen website during
their "Unite to Fight"
Who are the MinuteMen:
The MinuteMen
are a non-governmental group of people vowing to patrol
the US/Mexico border with guns in order
to stop migrant people from
crossing the border. They represent an
intensification of the trend of
violence towards migrant people and people
of color that has increased
since
use and display of deadly weapons is a
violent act in itself. How can
guns be used to detain people without
being violent? Already there have
been numerous reports of people being
forced to lie on the ground by the
MinuteMen and being forced to have their
pictures taken with MinuteMen
volunteers, recalling Abu Ghraib
style dehumanization.
SWARM the MinuteMen Group Statement:
While the MinuteMen
publicly claim to be non-violent, we here at SWARM
know a different face of the MinuteMen. We've received numerous death
threats and threats of violence filled with
racial slurs. We plan to
publicly release these soon to let everyone
know the exact kind of
hatred the MinuteMen
are acting as a lightning rod for, attracting it
and focusing it towards migrant people.
Just as important though, the MinuteMen are a clear result of the
violent, us-versus-them mentality promoted
by the Bush administration.
We are intervening into and dancing
with the communication systems of
the MinuteMen
because along with the physical violence they are
creating, they are extremely conscious of
the violent power their
messages have and they had any measure of
success thanks to the
complicity the corporate media. Their
communications are a critical part
of their mission to send a message to
legislators that more
militarization of the border is necessary. Their
images and words can't
be separated from the violence of
their guns, and both must be stopped.
We refuse to support the
scapegoat to blame this country's problems on
while it bankrupts our
social services, wages wars on the world,
sends our brothers, sisters,
friends and neighbors to die and profits
off of the whole plan. Who
stands to profit from a more militarized
border? Will the same
corporations that made billions in government
contracts off of the war
in
war on the border?
We must stand together now to say
that this country is made up of
millions of people of many different
ethnicities and cultures and that
is due to migration. Migrant people
have human rights, regardless of the
government's and the racist's attempts to deny
that fact. Until the
as freely as capital and goods do, we
will continue to struggle.
Why should you join the Virtual
Sit-In On
For Benito González
Cruz, Benito González Serrano, Javier Rojas
Bracamonte, Juan José Romo
Zetina, José Luis Garza,
Roberto Acegueda
López, Román
Robles Rojas, Reynaldo González Corona and the
thousands of
other people who have been murdered for
simply trying to cross the
border into what is now the
Contact:
For any questions on the Electronic
Disturbance Theaterís action in
solidarity with SWARM the MinuteMen
contact
Ricardo Dominguez (co-founder of the
Electronic Disturbance Theater) at
rdom@thing.net
Electronic Disturbance Theater
http://www.thing.net/~rdom/ecd/ecd.html
See our site for more info:
or our mirror:
http://www.autistici.org/swarmtheminutemen/
See our mirror sites to read our
original content which our domain
registrar forced us to remove:
http://www.thing.net/~rdom/ecd/swarm/index.php
[espanol]
Invitamos gente desde
todo el mundo quien estan contra la violencia
racista a una el accion de Electronic Disturbance Theatre en el 27, 28 y
29 de
Mayo, 2005 para un "virtual sit-in" el el sitio de web
de los
MinuteMen durante
sus conferencia de "Unate
para Pelear".
Leer la llamada
de accion de Electronic Disturbance Theatre:
Dadme vuestros exhaustos, vuestros pobres,
Vuestras muchedumbres
que ansían respirar en libertad,
Los miserables deshechos de vuestras rebosantes orillas.
Mandadlos a todos,
a los desamparados, encomendédmelos a mí.
Que yo levanto mi antorcha
junto a la puerta dorada
"The New Colossus," de Emma Lazarus, poetisa norteamericana
XIX, inscrito en una placa en la base de la Estatua de
la Libertad.
Queridos hermanas
y hermanos,
Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT), en solidaridad con la acción
Swarm The MinuteMen,
realizar· una sentada virtual de 3 días los
próximos 27 al
29 de mayo (2005) contra el sitio de MinuteMen Project.
Convocamos a todos
los interesados a unirse a nosotros para hacer saber
al MinuteMen Project que las fronteras infranqueables no pertenecen a la
era de la interdependencia global, ni a los
ideales de libertad vista
como "puerta dorada" que esté abierta a todos. Un ideal por cuya
consecución muchos han muerto.
Para unirse a
la sentada virtual que comienza el 27 de mayo, clicar aquÌ:
http://www.thing.net/~rdom/ecd/ecd.html
Por qué debemos bloquear MinuteMen:
Por Víctor Nicolás Sánchez, Adolfo Pérez Hernández,
Daniel Barrientos,
Santos
Orozco Aguilar, Raúl
Hernández Soria, Sandra Edna Durán,
Jesús Medina
Contreras, Edgar Venegas Brambila, Josße Gutiérrez, Melquíades Gómez
Baca, Martha
Rivera García...
Mito N†1:
Los inmigrantes quitan los puestos
de trabajo a los
estadounidenses
Mito
N†2: Tantos inmigrantes
consumen la economía de los Estados Unidos
Mito
N†3: Estados Unidos esté saturado de inmigrantes
Mito
N†4: Los inmigrantes
no están interesados de verdad en formar parte
de la sociedad estadounidense
Mito
N†5: Los inmigrantes apenas contribuyen a la sociedad estadounidense
-American
Immigration Lawyers Association, leí
aqui para ver porque
esos Mitos no estan verdad:
http://www.aila.org/contentViewer.aspx?bc=17,142
Convocamos a todos
los hermanos y hermanas del mundo
que se oponen al
Proyecto MinuteMen,
y en nombre de los 3500 hombres, mujeres
y niños que
han muerto, desde
1994, tratando de alcanzar
"La Tierra de la Libertad",
a que os un·is a la acción del Electronic
Disturbance Theatre los días
27, 28
y 29 de mayo de 2005, realizando una
sentada virtual al web site
del proyecto MinuteMen durante la convocatoria "Unite to Fight"
QuiÈnes son MinuteMen:
MinuteMen es un grupo no gubernamental cuyos miembros patrullan armados
la frontera México/Estados Unidos impidiendo el paso de inmigrantes.
Representan la intensificación
de reacciones violentas contra los
inmigrantes y la
gente de color que se ha producido
despuís del 11 de
septiembre de
2001. Aunque proclaman no ser violentos, el mero hecho de
llevar y exhibir armas es un acto violento en sí mismo. Cómo no va a ser
violento detener a la gente a punta de pistola? De hecho se han
reportado numerosos casos de personas obligadas por los miembros
de
MinuteMen a tumbarse
en el suelo y
a ser fotografiadas por los
voluntarios de MinuteMen, en el m·s puro estilo deshumanizante de Abu
Ghraib.
Informe
de SWARM:
Mientras MinuteMen proclama públicamente
no ser violentos, nosotros en
SWARM conocemos su otra cara. Hemos recibido
numerosas amenazas de
muerte y amenazas de violencia llenas de insultos racistas. Pensamos
publicar en breve estas amenazas
para que todo el mundo sepa exactamente
cunto odio est·n generando, atrayendo y difundiendo en MinuteMen
contra los inmigrantes.
Aunque sÛlo sea por eso,
MinuteMen son el claro resultado de la
mentalidad
violenta, de "nosotros -contra-ellos",
que promueve la
administraciÛn Bush.
Vamos a intervenir en los sistemas de comunicación de MinuteMen porque
además de la violencia fúsica que realizan, son extremadamente
conscientes del violento
poder de sus mensajes, y saben hasta qué
punto
tienen éxito gracias a la complicidad de
los medios corporativos. Sus
comunicaciones son una parte crítica de su misión, el mensaje que envían
a los legisladores
reclamando la necesidad de militarizar las fronteras.
No se pueden separar sus imágenes y sus palabras de la violencia
de sus
armas de fuego, y ambas deben detenerse.
Nos negamos a apoyar los intentos del
gobierno de los Estados Unidos de
encontrar un chivo expiatorio al que culpar de los problemas
de este
país mientras lleva a la bancarrota nuestros servicios sociales,
emprende guerras por el mundo, envía a nuestros hermanos, hermanas,
amigos y vecinos a morir y se beneficia del plan al completo. ¿Quián
obtiene provecho de militarizar las fronteras? ¿Serán las mismas
corporaciones que obtienen billones en contratos con el gobierno gracias
a la guerra en Irak, como Halliburton y CACI.
Ahora debemos permanecer unidos para proclamar que este país se compone
de millones de personas de distintas etnias y culturas y que ello es
gracias a la inmigración. Los inmigrantes tienen derechos humanos, sean
cuales sean los del
gobierno y los intentos racistas por negarlo. Hasta
que los Estados
Unidos tengan una política de inmigración sana que
permita la movilidad de las personas igual que permite el libre
movimiento de bienes y capital, continuaremos luchando.
Por quÈ deberÌas unirte a la sentada virtual del 27 de mayo de 2005?
Por Benito Gonz·lez Cruz, Benito González Serrano,
Javier Rojas
Bracamonte, Juan José Romo
Zetina, José Luis Garza,
Roberto Acegueda LÛpez,
Rom·n Robles Rojas, Reynaldo González Coronav y los miles de personas
que han
sido asesinados por intentar cruzar
la frontera de lo que ahora son los
Estados Unidos, pero que antes fue México.
Contacto:
Theatre en solidaridad
con SWARM the MinuteMen contacta
con:
Ricardo Dominguez (cofundador
travÈs del e-amil: rdom@thing.net <mailto:rdom@thing.net>
Electronic Disturbance Theater
http://www.thing.net/~rdom/ecd/ecd.html
Ve nos sitio
para mas informacÌon:
o nos espejo:
http://www.autistici.org/swarmtheminutemen/
Ve nos espejos
para leer nos palabras originales cual
nuestra compania
de DNS forzÛnos quitar:
http://www.thing.net/~rdom/ecd/swarm/index.php
*******************************
Francis McCollum Feeley
Professor of American Studies/
Director of Research at
CEIMSA-IN-EXILE
http://dimension.ucsd.edu/CEIMSA-IN-EXILE/