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samatedeansbroccoli · 3 years ago

Note

For the character headcanon ask thingy- Menendez and/or Mason!! (Alex OR David honestly if you do both feel free to take your pick) [:

I might as well do all 3 because why the Hell not

All of it's under the cut, because I apparently love to talk/type and this got really long XD

Warnings: PTSD, mentioned child death, mentioned divorce?, probably lowkey softening up a terrorist with some of these

Raúl Menéndez:

1. Russian was Menéndez’s second language, not English

During the Cold War, South America and LATAM were basically hotspots for U.S./Soviet struggle as they fought to overthrow leaders and replace them with their own, as well as get the people on their side. You know. The stuff they did with pretty much every other country too. The U.S. had been backing the dictating family of Nicaragua, the Somoza family, since the 1930s. This sparked a competing party called Sandinista National Liberation Force (FSLN) to form. In the 1960s, the FSLN caught the eye of the Soviet Union, who were willing to offer aide out of spite of Democracy. In 1979, the FSLN overthrew the Somoza family. Shortly after they broke ties to the Soviets after disagreeing with their policies and realizing the future for Nicaragua was elsewhere.

In BO2, Menéndez is heard talking to Kravchenko in Russian. Considering he was born in 1963, and his father was canonly killed by Contras for disagreeing with them, Menéndez likely grew up around an influenced Soviet place. He acquired the Russian language pretty much through language osmosis (I forget the actual term, and I'm studying for my bio test so this is the best I can come up with). English came later.

2. Menéndez’s spoken language changes as he reads more

I think this is more of an observation than a headcanon, but it's one I like to bring up. One of Menéndez’s many characteristics is his flowery language. His most famous line ("Opulence is sinful, and we all pay for it") sounds straight out of the old classics, and it's no surprise he's well-read when he says to David (if he lives), "Study Ulysses...and be ready." Although he's always had a way of using his words to play mind games, his first contact with Alex Mason in Angola has him speaking quite differently from when he talks to David in prison. If I remember correctly, he's 23 when Mason shoots him in the eye. And he's 62 when he dies/goes to prison. In that ~40 years, Menéndez’s speech goes from a more straightforward yet sneering method of talking to a calmer and riddle style of talking. The way he talks emulates some of what is considered the greatest works of all times (Homer's poems, Ulysses, Animal Farm, yada yada), showing that not only did the books influence his political views, but also how he thinks and speaks. Even between Angola/Josefina's death to 1989 when he killed Hudson, he takes more time with word games, though the change is subtler than when he's with David.

Ultimately, he likes to read, and he reads a lot. And probably takes a few too many books too close to his heart but hey. Same, dude.

3. Once upon a time, Menéndez had a girlfriend

Shocker, I know, because he doesn't seem like the type. And honestly, that's why he's still single in his 60s: the relationship didn't work out. However, what attracted him to her in the first place was her ability to challenge him in a good way. Menéndez is a dictator, and from studying the psychology of multiple dictators of the 19th and 20th century, a few of the common themes among dictators are loneliness, and inability to feel as though people can think and communicate on their level.

And that's where the girlfriend excelled: despite having less of an education than him and never having travelled the world, she was quick to the punch and could have a full discussion with him about anything he brought up. Their topics ranged from books, to politics, to just life in general. Simply having her around made him feel less lonely.

They broke up, Menéndez’s egotistical behaviour getting to be too much, but they kept their friendship when they learned they could maintain that better than a romantic relationship. She remarried and raised two daughters, whom Menéndez would let play on the Cartel villa's lawn where he could keep an eye on the kids if the ex-gf needed a break.

I named the girlfriend María, but that's because I have a pretty elaborate AU about Menéndez fostering David out of spite, and she's part of it.

Alex Mason

I thought I didn't have any on this guy but my fanfic drafts say otherwise so here we go.

1. Fear of touch and learning through music

After Vorkuta, Mason was absolutely terrified of anyone that touched him. Once upon a time it used to trigger violent outbursts and he would often get into fights with Hudson or Woods if they accidentally brushed up against him or forgot to warn him where their hands were. But as time went on, he became less violent, opting to sometimes just curl up or recoil instead.

Raising David was Hell because the boy would want to crawl all over Mason with no concept of where Mason's boundaries were. Woods would live with him for a time to help raise David, and would sometimes see Mason winding up to act violently or break down in tears as he held David.

Listening to music turned out to be the best helper for this, Mason able to calm down quickly when he realized all he needed to do was focus on the beat. Hudson and Woods bought dozens of records which could be played all day should Mason ever have an outburst for any reason. While most of this played around Mason's house, occasionally Hudson started playing it around any base they operated out of, partially to entertain the people there, but mainly because the close quarters living left Mason in multiple areas where he would accidentally make contact with another person.

Only Woods can get away with more than a shoulder touch outside of operation purposes.

2. Mason is a storyteller

Woods started this one, but Mason quickly learned and perfected it: he is an absolute godsend of a storyteller. He will often elaborate on his rifle competitions he did as a kid, and especially liked to elaborate and exaggerate certain missions that were mundane or had no real weight to them, according to his perspective (Vadim Rudnik and Operation Red Circus from BOCW being one of them). Woods finds them endearing, Hudson finds them also endearing annoying.

There is a deeper application to his storytelling, however. Canonly, after Vorkuta, Mason is known to get trapped in speech loops, zoning out and saying the same things over and over again until he can ground himself and come back to reality. By picking up storytelling, it helps him work through his trauma and find ways to vary his vocabulary, giving him access to coping tools needed to escape his mind through teaching his brain to constantly search for and create new phrases to make his stories exciting.

3. He went temporarily blind

This is actually based off a fanfic I wrote (and mildly regret 😅) where Mason fell at Yamantau platform and hit his head, going permanently blind. While we can’t have that exactly happen since Mason still has a lot of campaign left, it’s now been moved back to temporarily blind.

When the Yamantau zipline snapped in BOCW, Mason was far unluckier than the campaign and hit the back of his head, knocking him out. Woods rescued him, then Belikov rescued them both and the console they took, however when Mason awoke he was unable to see anything but a blur. At most, he could see bright colors that were close to him. It’s why they weren’t back in Berlin when Adler and Bell went to Lubyanka.

For the next few days, Woods would wear the brightest colored shirts he could find and put neon rings or bands on his hands so Mason always knew where he and his hands were when they were close. That way Mason wouldn’t freak out if Woods needed to touch him for whatever reason.

Mason recovered in a few days and was back on his feet shortly.

David Mason

I honestly don't like this guy a lot, but I have some deep HCs for him. So let me dig them up...

1. David passively got the Hudson family killed

Yes, I like angst. Yes, I like torturing David more than he already has been by his own canon.

Mason and Hudson’s death was on Dec. 19th, 1989, which is a Tuesday. That doesn’t sound important until you remember that most American schools are still in session around that time. Tuesday is also the second day of the week, meaning that David’s capture could have happened Monday and left plenty of time for Menéndez’s men (or Menéndez himself) to bring David down to Panama.

I like to think David is a similar age to Hudson’s kids, and they would l to the same school together. Jenny Hudson would then pick them up from school. While on their way back from school, they were grabbed by Menéndez’s men. Seeing Hudson’s personality, it’s likely Jenny would fight to try and protect the children the best she could, which would prompt Menéndez’s men to kill the Hudson family and take David.

Hudson realizes this in the middle of Menéndez’s countdown. As he’s begging Woods to die because he has a family at home, he realizes that if David is here, Jenny is dead. And likely his children. Therefore, he has no one to go home to and no reason to be around anymore, hence why he agrees so suddenly to Menéndez killing him, not Woods.

2. David had two marriages

David's marriage is never once mentioned in canon, but he has two daughters. Probably the most obvious difference between them is their appearance. His oldest, Savannah, has a very thin face with blonde hair and a skinny stature, while his youngest Jessica basically gets all the Mason genes. But genetics are funky, so the other notable thing is that his daughters have two last names: Mason-Meyers and Mason-Green. While Jessica Mason-Green married and may have taken the last name of her husband, Savannah Mason-Meyers is unmarried, and her last name remains in question.

Jessica is "dead" for BO4 so we never hear her side of the story. So instead, we have Savannah, who prefers to focus on Alex Mason and call him a hero (and she shows deep respect for Woods... maybe a little too much) rather than her father who stopped the biggest terrorist in the world (Menéndez) present in her lifetime. Menéndez’s voice haunts Savannah at night sometimes.

Keep in mind, Jessica is canonly born in 2013 (she's 9 years old in 2022 holy shit she's an actual human) and Savannah is the older sibling (I like to say Savannah was born 2008 but you can choose whatever). That means that up until David retires (depends on the ending) in 2025, he was in the military for much of their lives. David is SEAL Team 6/J-SOC, which puts him as a very busy man with multiple oversea tours. Given Savannah's vague resentment towards David, it may be in part that David's second marriage ruined her perception on him, especially as Jessica followed into the Mason military bloodline while Savannah didn't.

3. David is a terrible cook

There is absolutely no evidence supporting this. This is just from one of the first BO2 fanfics I wrote and never published where David tried to cook Mike Harper a cheeseburger and it turned out so bad Mike ended up getting sick. But that's about it. Just a sweet little headcanon to follow up the darker previous one.

#thebroccoliresponds #thanks Rose!#call of duty #black ops cold war #black ops 2 #Alex Mason #david mason #Raul Menendez

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otnesse · 4 years ago

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Commentary on Peace Walker’s lionization of Che Guevara

Well, guys, as I promised earlier, I’m going to do coverage on a particularly infamous aspect of Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, and quite frankly if you ask me, one of its worst elements. Sorry for the delay, didn’t realize that Peace Walker was actually released on April 29 in Japan and not the 30th. I’m basically going to cover the game’s lionization of Che Guevara in the various briefing files, and in particular Big Boss and Kazuhira Miller’s lionizing of that monster. For a bit of background, Peace Walker was the second canon PSP entry into the Metal Gear series, after Portable Ops (yes, Portable Ops is in fact canon, and if you ask me was a superior game to Peace Walker in terms of story and characterizations at least, but I digress…). The game has some controversial elements, namely it being very overtly anti-American even by its usual standards, not to mention pushing left-wing values to a far greater degree. One of these values is in the blatant promotion of Che Guevara in the briefing files (in the main story itself, ie, strictly going by the actual missions you undergo, the Che love was at least limited to the Sandinistas and to Vladimir Zadornov, with it being left ambiguous as to whether Snake and Miller actually were fond of him, and while you could argue that the Sandinistas’ sympathetic portrayal could point toward a promotion, Zadornov’s promotion was definitely meant to be a negative since he was planning on having Big Boss reenact Che’s well deserved execution after successfully changing Peace Walker’s target to Cuba in a disinformation op. The Briefing Files, however, aside from obviously Amanda and Chico, members of the Sandinistas, they also had Big Boss and Miller singing praises for that jerk.).

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My commentary is on how Big Boss and Miller’s promotion of the guy was a complete and total betrayal of their characters, and also a betrayal of the explicit themes of the game, and also how it’s just one sign of Kojima just being a hack writer, not to mention was extremely poorly done even if we were to assume Kojima intended for Big Boss and Miller to be seen as the villains.

Out of character

For the first part, I’ll cover how the gushing for Che Guevara was completely out of character for Big Boss, and especially for Kazuhira Miller, aka, Master Miller from MG2 and MGS, not just going by past entries, but even when taking into account Peace Walker itself and any supplementary materials. I’ll give separate sections for the two of them, since it’s going to be lengthy.

Big Boss

For Big Boss, I’ll acknowledge that he was meant to be the main villain in the MSX2 games, or at least the main antagonist. However, his singing praises for Che Guevara even knowing that tidbit still didn’t make any sense at all, for a variety of reasons. First off, the games, namely Metal Gear Solid 2, strongly implied that Big Boss adhered to a more, for lack of a better term, right wing outlook. For starters, the New York Mirror review for Nastasha Romanenko’s book gave brief coverage on the official reports of what went down on Shadow Moses. In particular, as you can see with the screencaps down below, they specifically called the Sons of Big Boss a “radical right-wing group”, and the group itself for all intents and purposes, was modeled after Big Boss (even Liquid, despite hating his father, nevertheless was influenced by his ideology).

And then we get into the character Solidus, who unlike Liquid, or even Solid Snake, practically idolized his “father” (I put it in quotes since Solidus is a clone of Big Boss, as are Liquid and Solid), to the extent that he was practically ecstatic that Raiden shot out his eye and made him look even MORE like his dad. Aside from that, as you can see below with these screencaps, he was also depicted as a proto-Tea Party type, heck, a proto-MAGA type even, basically wanting America to return to the way the Founding Fathers envisioned it. There’s definitely no way Solidus would have been the type to sing praises for a scumbag like Che Guevara, knowing that, and considering his idolization of Big Boss, it’s also unlikely Big Boss would have sang praises for that creep either.

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There’s also the fact that in MGS3, he wasn’t fond of Communism at all, and had already interacted with a guy similar to Che in many respects (well, other than maybe in terms of sexuality), Colonel Yevgeny Borisovitch Volgin, as both were renowned sadists, and even directly attempted to cause nuclear war. In fact, even before the torture, Big Boss, more accurately Naked Snake at that time, learned a bit about Volgin’s past, in particular his involvement in Katyn, and presumably Bykivnia and Kurapaty as well due to EVA’s references to similar massacres occurring in Western Belarus and the Ukraine, as you can see below:

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His reaction in that conversation with EVA, in particular Volgin’s personal role in executing those guys, had him downright horrified. Bear in mind that Che Guevara actually DID do several of those things himself, shot innocent and unarmed people, and if anything, unlike Volgin who at least allowed Snake to have weapons on hand to fight him, Che outright dithers when confronted with people using guns, even if they’re his own allies based on his interaction with Jorges Sotus, and to a lesser extent Jesus Carreras. It says a lot when even someone like Volgin, a psychopathic mutant, had more honor than Che Guevara. Plus, in Peace Walker, Big Boss when recalling the Cuban Missile Crisis implied that he blamed that event for his ultimately having to kill The Boss (with Miller even noting it was uncharacteristic of him to get into hypotheticals), as you can see in these screencaps below.

The reason that ties in to Che Guevara is because, believe it or not, Che is the reason why the CMC nearly caused the Cold War to become hot. He and Castro even attempted to launch nukes at the United States, and it actually spooked Khrushchev enough that he had to muzzle Che and agree to end the standoff with the United States via the Turkey Deal (or retrieving Sokolov). Knowing that bit, it’s extremely unlikely Big Boss would have been particularly fond of the guy who essentially set the ground for Operation Snake Eater and his having to kill The Boss. And that’s not even getting into how he tried to stop a nuke being launched not just once in the game, but TWICE, and the second time was a perfect opportunity for him to emulate Che Guevara and succeed where Che failed. When Paz hijacked ZEKE, she revealed that she intended to nuke the Eastern Seaboard and pin the blame on MSF under Cipher’s orders, and yet Big Boss fought her in an attempt to stop her. That definitely wouldn’t have been something Che Guevara would have done, and if anything, he bragged to the London Daily Worker that he WOULD have launched the nukes at America preemptively had they been allowed to remain.

Heck, in Portable Ops and even Peace Walker, or at least the backstory for those games, Big Boss specifically served western interests after Operation Snake Eater. In the former, Big Boss was revealed to have participated in the Mozambique War of Independence, and a comment made by Null, aka, Gray Fox, aka, Frank Jaegar, after being bested the second time around, implied that Big Boss had fought alongside the Portugese during that time (Jaegar at that time was siding with FRELIMO), as you can see from the following screencaps:

And in the tape detailing how he and Miller met (not to mention the extended version included in the Peace and Harmony Blues drama tape that was later included in the Japanese version of Ground Zeroes, specifically chapters 1 and 2), it was mentioned that Kazuhira Miller at the time was a mercenary operating with an implied communist rebel group in Colombia, while Big Boss was clearly siding with the Western-backed government.

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I think the events proper for Peace Walker was the first time Big Boss explicitly sided with Communists (not counting Portable Ops, since it’s implied the Russian soldiers renounced their Communism after being abandoned by the Soviet government), and even there, he did it more out of his own personal motives of getting closure regarding The Boss’s true motives after learning she may have somehow survived Snake Eater than out of any liking of Mena/Zadornov’s objectives.

Besides, Big Boss is former CIA, and grunt or not, he'd still need to have at least some degree of knowledge about Che, namely stuff like how Che tried to commit to the Cuban Missile Crisis and make it a hot war, among other things like his instituting gulags in Cuba. And let's not forget, when Gene in Portable Ops tried to pull a similar stunt, Big Boss was genuinely horrified by what he was planning to do.

Kazuhira Miller

Now we get to Kazuhira Miller, aka, Master McDonnell Benedict Miller. Unlike Big Boss, Miller was consistently up to that point depicted as a good guy (probably the closest he got to engaging in villainy was in MGS1 regarding manipulating Snake into arming REX, and even there, he was dead three days before the events of the game, and that had been Liquid who did so). He was also shown to be a huge Che fanboy, and if anything he was depicted as being an even bigger fanboy than Big Boss himself in that game. And Peace Walker also retconned his origins by revealing he was in fact born in Japan with bi-racial ancestry (Japanese and American Caucasian), as he originally was third-generation Japanese American. He was made clear to have more love for America than his own home country of Japan, and only recognized the meaning of peace when talking to his hospitalized mom. He also was mentioned to have been influenced to get into the mercenary business by Yukio Mishima’s suicide, though he does imply that he wasn’t on the same political spectrum as him. Him singing praises for Che Guevara doesn’t work well at all, especially considering that he repeatedly stressed that they not allow another Cuban Missile Crisis to happen, and going by his comments in these screencaps below (in the same briefing file as Big Boss’s uncharacteristically going into hypotheticals, and if anything happened immediately before then), he was fully aware about how Japan itself was almost nuked again thanks to that event (with the only difference being that the Soviets were more likely to nuke them), as you can see with the following screencaps.

Having him sing praises for Che Guevara, whom as I pointed out earlier actually attempted to launch nukes and jumpstart World War III, comes across as ESPECIALLY distasteful knowing that bit, since it comes across as him basically cheering for the guy who tried to wipe out his fellow Japanese, to say little about the Americans, whom back then, he idolized. It would be the same thing as a Holocaust survivor singing praises for Adolf Hitler after narrowly surviving being killed by him. It also doesn’t match up at all with his characterization in MG2 or even MGS1 (and believe me, Liquid posing as Miller or not, his statements to Snake would have been what Miller himself would have said since Snake didn’t seem suspicious at all about him.), the latter regarding the bit about Meryl after she was captured. Even his not being fond of Japan doesn’t cut it, especially when, ignoring that he put that to the side after his mom was hospitalized, the character Sokolov ALSO wasn’t fond of the Soviet Union at all, risked crossing the iron curtain alongside his family to get away from it, and would have been free as a bird had the CMC not happened, and almost got away again until The Boss interfered. Even THERE, however, he still retained at least some degree of love for Russia itself, as when Gene decided to try to nuke Russia (or at least, that’s what Gene led everyone to believe at the time), he secretly went against Gene and adopted the alias of Ghost to aid Big Boss specifically to prevent a nuke from being launched there, being THAT against harming Russia despite hating the Soviet policies. I would have expected Miller to not be fond of Che Guevara at all for that reason.

Overall

The whole thing also didn’t work since if they were meant to be seen as heroes, it ticks off a whole lot of players who are fully aware of some of the crap Che Guevara caused and know his true nature, and regarding painting them as a villain, the problem is that the story DOESN’T depict them as villains for that. Heck, they don’t even STATE any bad things Che did other than maybe dying, and if anything, the way everyone was talking, you’d think he’d walk on water. If Kojima wanted to depict Big Boss and Miller as villains by having him sing praises for Che, the very least he could have done was make sure to specifically reference Che Guevara’s role in nearly causing the Cold War to go Hot by the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis and his being upset at the nukes being removed.

Apparently, if Kojima’s secretary is of any indication, the reason the Che love was in the game was because Kojima himself tried to force in his socio-political views into the game in blatant disregard for the narrative and characterizations therein, as you can see below with links (screencaps will have to be in an addendum post since, unfortunately, I've hit my limit regarding screencap postings):

https://twitter.com/Kaizerkunkun/status/900937994143649792

https://twitter.com/Kaizerkunkun/status/1179860611297153038

https://twitter.com/Kaizerkunkun/status/1190763430497542144

Themes

The Che praise doesn’t work too well with the themes either, since he was not a peaceful man, even called himself the opposite of Christ, and tried to start a nuclear war. It definitely goes against the stated themes of the game, which was peace, not to mention the anti-nuke themes of the overall franchise. Heck, if anything, specifically referencing Che’s attempt at nuking the US and causing Nuclear War, and by extension outright condemning him for it would have worked much better with the themes of anti-nukes, especially considering that they made sure to reference Vasily Arkhipov’s actions during the Cuban Missile Crisis at one point, not to mention referenced both Katyn and the fact that the Turkey silos were already rendered obsolete even before the Turkey Deal made removing them required due to the advent of nuclear subs in Snake Eater earlier. And without the references to that, or any other bad stuff, you’re literally left thinking that he must be a good guy. I’d know because I fell for that myself, especially after getting the game (I didn’t follow the briefing files, but I did follow the cutscenes on YouTube back when it was still in Japan, and I also was baffled as to how people were talking about Big Boss and Miller were Che fanboys since the cutscenes never even pointed in either direction, and if anything, Big Boss nearly being killed by Zadornov would probably point to him NOT liking Che afterwards due to nearly being forced into Che’s fate).

The only thing it did was just have Kojima force in his political and social views, and I’ll be blunt, that kind of crap is something I have distaste in, I hate having propaganda pushed onto me. Ironically, Kojima or at least the Benson books for MGS1 and MGS2, instilled that view onto me. So my anger at Kojima doing that, after learning what Che was truly like in one of the Politically Incorrect Books (either Vietnam War or the 1960s one), is very much personal as well as political and social.

Aftermath

Well, as I said, I did buy into the narrative around the time Peace Walker was released, but then I learned I was being tricked by Kojima after reading the PIG books. I’d argue that event definitely was a watershed event for me. Not only did it have me lose any respect I might have had for Kojima, it also influenced my outlook on life, left me becoming distrustful the second I started picking up how they’re trying to push an agenda instead of, say, actually teaching the material in college. It also may have influenced my later views on Star Wars and Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (specifically, George Luca’s open admission to basing the Ewoks/Rebels on the Vietcong, and especially modeling the Galactic Empire after American soldiers; and Linda Woolverton admitting that she was trying to push a radical feminist agenda in Beauty and the Beast, the same one she tried to push in that awful Maleficent movie. Though I also was becoming disturbed with Belle for reasons other than that bit due to researching the French Revolution, though I will acknowledge Big Boss and Kazuhira Miller’s fanboying of Che Guevara, and in particular their reference to Sartre and his infamously singing praises for Che as “the most complete human being of the century”, certainly worsened my views on Belle, thinking that she may turn out like Sartre and throw her lot with the Jacobins and other groups.). It also left me distrusting of whatever Metal Gear had to say, may have also led to my not liking Chris Redfield after Resident Evil 5, or heck, some of the more anti-American commentary in 5 and other games, and also Dead Rising. It also influenced my decision to become a Dead or Alive fan (especially when before, I wasn’t particularly fond of the game due to the fanservice stuff), and in particular a Tina and Bass fan. May have also influenced my later distaste of Greg Berlanti’s writing of Arrowverse shows, in particular Supergirl starting with Season 2 (though that also had Heroes Redemption as a factor, which predated Peace Walker, thanks to how it changed Claire Bennet).

#peace walker #Anti-Che Guevara #Anti-Peace Walker #Anti-Hideo Kojima #Metal Gear Solid Peace Walker #Youtube

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aventurasdeunatortuga · 3 years ago

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Laredo Part 2 Day 22

So the border is officially ‘closed’ again. We keep getting a lot of conflicting and unclear information, but it seems that the border will be closed either until July 30th or August 21st. I’ve read different reports with both dates.

Essentially asylum seekers are being blamed for the rise in COVID cases in south Texas, and the shelters are also being blamed as well. The news has been wild lately with unfounded accusations that the shelters drop COVID positive folks off at the airport and have them walk around town which is simply not true. There has been a few folks coming to the shelters to yell at staff and even give death threats to staff. I haven’t seen any of that first hand but the security staff has been working overtime and we’ve had to block out all the windows and doors of Holding to prevent people from trying to yell at or take pictures of folks.

If there is any blame to be placed on rising COVID cases it should be placed on ICE, whose blatant disregard for safety precautions, refusal to test or properly isolate folks for COVID, and keeping of folks in cramped conditions for weeks at a time with limited access to hygiene products puts asylum seekers at risk. Not to mention the Texas government which lifted the mask mandate months ago and the large amount of anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers but I won’t go there.

This means that folks who are in detention will remain there until whenever ICE feels like releasing them and very very few new people will be allowed in. Today at Holding there were 7 people finishing out a quarantine but who will be leaving soon, and at La Frontera we had 10 people who all left today. We have no idea if there will even be anyone tomorrow or if ICE will randomly decide to release some folks.

I’m headed back home anyway the day after tomorrow. I’m bummed that border policy has taken this turn when there are so many people who are in such desperate need. Dumping all of this onto underfunded and understaffed shelters is not the answer but closing the border and keeping folks detained isn’t the answer either. There needs to be government funding and emergency relief funding allocated to support folks seeking asylum. They have a right to seek asylum as outlined by international law and as human beings we have an obligation to treat these folks with dignity and respect, not as criminals or ‘aliens’.

For today’s post I thought I’d get into some of the reasons why folks are being forced to leave their homes in the first place. This is a really complicated issue that people have spent their entire careers studying so please don’t take everything I say at face value, this is just what I’ve learned from my own research and from firsthand accounts of asylum seekers. I encourage folks to do their own research as well.

Most of the folks seeking asylum in the United States are coming from Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. There has also lately been an increase of folks from Cuba and Haiti. Folks leave home for a variety of reasons. Frequently it is to escape extreme poverty and to find opportunities to work. Many folks leave because corrupt governments colluding with cartels have made their homes increasingly dangerous and unsafe. Many indigenous folks are persecuted by these governments and cartels as well. There has also been an increase of folks fleeing because climate change has caused natural disasters which make it impossible to stay in their homes (hurricanes, fires, flooding, water pollution, etc.).

It simply cannot be ignored that the majority of these conditions were caused directly by United States imperialism. The US government has a long and dirty history of interfering in foreign governments to suit their own purposes. Whether it is subsidizing corporations to buy up land and push out local farmers, inciting political instability through misinformation and funding of dangerous groups, or even in some cases assassination of democratically elected leaders in order to install another leader that would be more beneficial to US interests. This has happened all over the world (including but not limited to: Hawai’i, Puerto Rico, The Philippines, The Democratic Republic of the Congo, Vietnam, Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, the list goes on and on).

For background information on Guatemala, I encourage you to look up “The Banana Wars” ( President Eisenhower colluded with The United Fruit Company, the CIA, and Guatemalan cartels to assassinate the democratically elected President Guzman and install a cartel supported puppet government loyal to US interests, resulting in US companies owning a lot of agricultural land in Guatemala, increased cartel violence, and increased hostility towards indigenous Guatemalans)

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMdn6MHqd/

For background information on Honduras, look up Ronald Reagan’s involvement in Honduras in 1988, the U.S.S. Honduras of the 80’s, as well as Hillary Clinton’s involvement in the 2008 Honduras coup when she was Secretary of State.

https://theconversation.com/how-us-policy-in-honduras-set-the-stage-for-todays-migration-65935

For El Salvador, look up El Mozote Massacre and The Salvadoran Civil War. This war witnessed ‘death squads’ and fully trained militias that were paid for by the United States. There were militias of child soldiers recruited by the US government. The Carter and Reagan administration spent $1-2 million dollars DAILY to fund this war over the course of 12 years. This was supposedly to “prevent the spread of communism” but in reality it was to ensure that a government was installed that was loyal to US economic interests, particularly for coffee production. In 1980 Reagan sponsored a coup. The civil war continued until 1992 and its effects are still felt today.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvadoran_Civil_War

For Nicaragua, again look up Reagan’s involvement in the 1980s, the ‘Dollars for Bullets’ policy, and the Sandinistas (a resistance group of Nicaraguans). The Banana Wars were also fought in Nicaragua, and there was a formal US military occupation of Nicaragua on and off throughout the 20th century.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_occupation_of_Nicaragua

I won’t get into Cuba because this is an even more complex issue, but I encourage you to look into the effects that the current blockade has had on Cuba, the UN’s stance on the blockade, as well as the recent demonstrations against the Cuban government.

And finally, Haiti. Again super complex but I encourage you to look into the recent assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse as well as the natural disasters and flooding occurring due to climate change. I’d also recommend looking into the US occupation of Haiti in the 30s.

I could write a dissertation on this subject, and many already have. The long and short of it is that the United States is largely responsible for the conditions that are causing folks to be forced to flee their homelands. The US has manufactured economic and political instability and directly funded violent cartels and militias, installed dictators and assassinated presidents in order to protect US economic interests. We have absolutely no business denying them entry to the US or treating them the way we are treating them, not after what we have been doing to them for centuries.

I’ll get off my soapbox now I promise. But please if you have never heard of any of this before I encourage you to do some research on US imperialism. I took three advanced US history courses in high school and was never once taught anything about this.

Tomorrow is my last day volunteering at the shelters, and apparently a Texas state senator is planning on visiting La Frontera tomorrow morning to give a speech. I’m curious to see what they say.

I will try to post at least one more time before I leave on Saturday.

#laredo #texas #borderlands #immigration #asylum seekers #us imperialism

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mojave-pete · 5 years ago

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The Democrat Party is A Clear and Present Danger to our Nation

I watched the latest Democratic debate with a bit of weariness. I knew what they were going to say in advance and they all said it. Each of them suffered from Trump Derangement Syndrome—even Amy Klobuchar, who is due back at the Senate for the impeachment trial—and her mind is already made up. They all think the president is a danger to the country.

Democrat’s Always Project- James Carville appeared on MSNBC’s Hardball and stated:

“Trumpism is the greatest threat this country has faced since the fall of communism” and Republicans cannot ever be trusted to “save the United States.”

If you replace Trumpism with the Democrat party, Carville gets it right.

The 2020 Democrats all agree on the climate change narrative. Even the so-called ‘moderate,’ Joe Biden, favors the Green New Deal. Shutting down the fossil fuel industries would cost hundreds of thousands of blue collar jobs. The same blue collar workers that Joe claims love and support him. A total restructuring of the nation’s economy doesn’t sound moderate to me, but apparently the left is the new moderate in the Democrat Party.

On the far left we have the shrill Elizabeth Warren (aka Pocahontas) who wants free health care and higher wages for all, free college, free day care and prescription medicines and oh—she wants to lower our national debt while doing it.

The old communist Bernie Sanders brings up the far, far left. He might call what he’s pushing ‘Democratic Socialism,’ but his goal has always remained the same. Everything will be free and everything will belong to a gigantic government with a labyrinth of bureaus and ministries, which he and his comrades would control. This is of course a recipe for disaster. If people get free stuff regardless of how hard they might work, well, eventually they’ll stop working hard. To make people work harder, communist governments often resort to force. Stalin used fear, gulags, and executions. Regardless, in his quest for equality, Bernie would make sure everyone is equally poor.

The crazy commie admired the old Soviet Union, Castro, and supported the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Some of his staffers even think gulags and reeducation camps will be good for Trump supporters. A failed carpenter in his younger days, Bernie worked hard only at running his mouth. Now he leads the field going into the Iowa caucuses early next month. The lure of free stuff remains strong among the ignorant. Someone needs to remind them that nothing is free and freedom must be fought for.

I will fight against Bernie with cartoons. He is a true danger to the country.

—Ben Garrison

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justforbooks · 5 years ago

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Chilean author, campaigner and escapee Luis Sepúlveda dies aged 70 of Covid-19

Dramatic career took in escapes from Pinochet’s regime in the 70s, sailing with Greenpeace and writing books including The Old Man Who Read Love Stories

The celebrated Chilean author Luis Sepúlveda, who was exiled by the dictator Augusto Pinochet in the 1980s, has died from Covid-19.

Best known for his 1992 novel The Old Man Who Read Love Stories and 1996’s The Story of a Seagull and The Cat Who Taught Her To Fly, Sepúlveda died in hospital on Thursday. He first began showing symptoms from coronavirus on 25 February, after returning to his home in Spain from a festival in Portugal. On 1 March, it was confirmed that Sepúlveda was the first case of Covid-19 in the Asturias region, where he had lived for 20 years.

“Health workers gave everything to save his life but he never got over the illness. My condolences to his wife and family,” tweeted Adrián Barbón, president of the Asturias region.

Sepúlveda’s works, appreciated for their simple humour and depictions of life in South America, have been translated in some 50 countries and range from novels and screenplays to children’s stories. Sepúlveda was particularly successful in Europe, where he had been based since the 80s.

Born in 1949 in Ovalle, north of the Chilean capital Santiago, Sepúlveda was a political activist from a young age, first for the Communist Youth of Chile, and then for the Socialist party.

He was arrested and jailed for treason for two and a half years in 1973 under the military regime of Pinochet, whose dictatorship lasted 17 years, during which at least 38,000 people were tortured and 3,200 people killed or disappeared.

After intervention from Amnesty International, Sepúlveda was conditionally freed to house arrest. He then escaped and lived underground for nearly a year before being recaptured and sentenced to 28 years in prison. After more assistance from Amnesty, his sentence was changed to eight years in exile.

In 1977, while travelling to Sweden to teach Spanish literature, Sepúlveda escaped again on his stopover in Argentina and headed to Paraguay. He never returned to live in Chile and his nationality was stripped from him until 2017.

After leaving his home country he travelled around Latin America, where he founded theatre troupes in Ecuador, Peru and Colombia. In Nicaragua, he fought with the Nicaraguan Sandinistas, who went on to overthrow the dictatorship in force at the time.

In 1978, Sepúlveda spent a year living under a Unesco study programme with the indigenous Shuar people in the Amazon. They would feature in his first novel, published in 1992, The Old Man Who Read Love Stories, a rallying call to redefine man’s relationship with nature.

Translated into 35 languages, the novel was a global success and in 2001 a film version starring Richard Dreyfuss was directed by Rolf de Heer.

After 1982, Sepúlveda lived in Europe, firstly in Hamburg, where he became a journalist and sailed the seas for several years with Greenpeace. In 1996, he settled in Asturias, with his wife Carmen Yáñez, a poet who had been tortured under Pinochet.

She survives him.

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at http://justforbooks.tumblr.com

#JUST FOR BOOKS #Luis Sepúlveda

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berniesrevolution · 5 years ago

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Bernie Sanders is considerably older and “maler” than Elizabeth Warren — and, at this point, one could even argue that he’s a smidgen to her right on economic policy. Granted, the Massachusetts senator has been less fulsome in her advocacy for Medicare For All. But Warren’s plans for taxing the one percent’s wealth, breaking up tech monopolies, putting workers on corporate boards, providing universal day care, tackling the housing crisis,and taming agribusiness add up to a vision of sweeping, social democratic change at least as ambitious as her rival from Vermont’s.

This fact, combined with Warren’s proven technocratic chops — and the profound social implications of the U.S. electing a female head of state — has led some progressives to question the rationale for Sanders’s candidacy. In response, the socialist senator’s supporters have emphasized the distinctions between the two candidates’ ideological commitments and political biographies. In their telling, Warren is a Brandesian liberal whose faith in the liberatory potential of market capitalism kept her in (the shrinking liberal wing of) the Republican Party for much of her life. Sanders, meanwhile, is a Debsian socialist whose belief in the indispensability of class struggle long confined him to the far-left fringe of American politics. In the 1980s, Warren supported Ronald Reagan’s GOP; the mayor of Burlington backed the Sandinistas.

I’ve been skeptical of the practical significance of these differences. In Donald Trump’s America, the left would seem to be light-years away from reaching a point at which the policy distinctions between Warren’s “accountable capitalism” and Bernie’s “democratic socialism” would begin to matter. Both candidates favor breaking up concentrations of corporate power, bolstering labor unions, and treating health care, housing, childcare, and higher education as social rights. And on all these fronts, both will have to settle for whatever modest, incremental advances the Jon Testers and Amy Klobuchars of the Senate are willing to countenance. Meanwhile, whatever Warren’s background, there is no question that she can be trusted to stand up to regressive corporate forces within the Democratic coalition. No one fought the party’s Goldman Sachs wing more incessantly — or effectively — during the Obama years than Warren. And if she prefers to describe her social democratic vision as capitalist out of an aversion to the phrase “socialism” — well, that’s an aversion she shares with a large majority of the American electorate. (Plus, it’s hard to see how boiling down the definition of socialism to “European levels of transfer spending and unionization” expands the Overton window in a leftist direction.) Finally, while it is quite plausible that Sanders’s brand of politics is uniquely conducive to movement-building (as his backers insist), the evidence for that claim doesn’t strike me as dispositive.

Or so I recently thought. I now believe that this analysis missed one critical point: Sanders’s socialist background and orientation might not (necessarily) render him uniquely effective at building progressive movements or advancing egalitarian change at the domestic level — but they do appear to have those effects on an international one.

Warren’s background as a Republican-voting technocrat hasn’t stopped her from mobilizing populist anger at creeping plutocracy. But it did prevent her from assembling a decades-long record of decrying American imperialism, and defending left-wing governments the world over. Sanders’s socialist background, on the other hand, led him to do precisely this. And while that record of international leftist solidarity could be a liability with the American electorate, it’s a singular asset within the global left — and in an era when the survival of decent civilization likely depends on building a powerful, transnational left-wing movement, that is no small asset.

As Politico reports:

Bernie Sanders has a base that no other 2020 candidate can claim: left-wing politicians around the globe.

From South America to Europe to the Middle East, leftist leaders are celebrating his candidacy, viewing him as an iconic democratic socialist with the potential to lead a worldwide progressive movement at a time when right-wing populism is on the rise across the map.

… Among Sanders’ admirers: Evo Morales, the socialist president of Bolivia who blasted the United States last year for committing the “most egregious acts of aggression committed during the 21st century.” … Members of Parliament in the United Kingdom’s Labour Party have argued that Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn would have a “special relationship” if the two men both rose to the top of their countries … In Canada, Israel, Germany and Spain, progressive politicians have also hailed the Vermont senator on social media and in interviews, often speaking favorably of his Medicare-for-All proposal, non-interventionist foreign policy, and advocacy for the Green New Deal. Sometimes, the excitement is borderline giddy: Stefan Liebich, a Left member of the German Bundestag, recently posted a photo of himself on social media holding a Sanders figurine, adding, “#feelthebern.”

… In the eyes of progressives across the globe, left-wing populism is needed to take on right-wing authoritarians such as Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who recently met with President Trump.

“The far right have internationalised,” Ross Greer, a Green member of Scottish Parliament who went on the TV show “Scotland Tonight” to declare his support for Sanders, told POLITICO. “They cooperate and coordinate across borders, so if we are to defeat them, we need to do the same. Bernie gets that in a way I’ve not seen from any other presidential candidate.”

Sanders does not owe this international reverence solely to his advocacy for the global left as a young (or, more precisely, less old) activist. The Vermonter may have been conspicuously reluctant to discuss foreign policy in 2016. But this time around, he’s offered a clearer vision for what a progressive geopolitical agenda should look like than any of his competitors. With the help of his foreign-policy adviser, the one-time left-wing foreign affairs blogger Matt Duss, Sanders has woven the Trump-Russia scandal — and the president’s broader affinity for foreign dictators — into a tale about the global struggle between the forces of democracy and the “authoritarian axis.” Plutocrats the world over are using their wealth — and the retrograde politics of right-wing nationalism — to insulate their privilege from the threat of genuine democracy, no matter the dire consequences for the poor, vulnerable minority groups, or even the planet’s survival. Elizabeth Warren has struck similar notes in her public remarks on foreign policy. But Sanders has matched his lofty rhetoric with boldly progressive stances on concrete geopolitical issues to a degree that Warren has not. Sanders has established himself as the Senate’s most passionate defender of Palestinian rights(admittedly, a title somewhat akin to “the world’s largest chihuahua”), led the opposition to U.S. support for the Saudi war in Yemen (and has called for a broader rethinking of the U.S.-Saudi alliance), voted against increasing the Pentagon’s budget (Warren voted for it), and announced the formation of a “Progressive International” with radical Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis.

To be sure, Sanders’s foreign policy vision is still inchoate. On the critical questions of how the U.S. should navigate its relationship with a rising China, how it should seek to reorganize global trade and investment in a progressive direction, how it should balance its domestic interests with its obligations to developing countries — and, above all, how it should deploy its economic and diplomatic power to combat climate change — the senator has offered few details. And the utter lack of a left-wing foreign-policy infrastructure in the U.S. could make ironing out such details a difficult (and potentially, ideologically compromising) process.

(Continue Reading)

#politics #the left #bernie sanders #elizabeth warren #progressive #progressive movement #democratic socialism #2020 election #foreign policy

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offthewallnagoya · 6 years ago

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19.02.23 OFF THE WALL DJ PLAYLIST

○DJ NABESHI

1.fog 132/CUBISMO GRAFICO

2.恋はパラディソ/MAGIC,DRUMS&LOVE

3.恋の煙(同期ver.)with 小出祐介/チャットモンチー

4.CHOOSE GO!/CHAI

5.I Fought The Low/THE CLASH

6.Vinyl Change The World/ザ50回転ズ

7.Brad Pitt/FILTER

8.DJ!DJ!〜届かぬ想い〜feat.YOU THE ROCK★/NONA REEVES

9.Letter To Young DJs/CAFROM

10.ロックンロールは鳴り止まないっ/神聖かまってちゃん

○DJ CRACK UP

1.Made my day/唾奇×Sweet William

2.Pop Virus/星野源

3.LOOP/SIRUP

4.金木犀/TOSHIKI HAYASHI feat.鈴木真海子

5.琥珀色の街、上海蟹の朝/くるり

6.Nonfiction/illmord feat.JIVA Nel MONDO & kiki vivi lilly

7.Calender Girl/TEN

8.Virtual Luv/VaVa feat.tofubeat

9.Love Somebody/織田裕二

10.THANK YOU FOR THE MUSIC/bonobos

11.Bonita/BIM

12.My boo/清水翔太

13.LONELY NIGHT/tofubeat

○DJ Kevin

1.Stay Gold/Hi-STANDARD

2.RAINBOW, RAINBOW/HAWAIIAN6

3.Stick With Yourself/GOOD4NOTHING

4.世界をかえさせておくれよ (きみのためにつよくなりたいバージョン)/サンボマスター

5.By My Side/The Interrupters

6.ROCK'N'ROLL WEEKEND/CLUB SANDINISTA!

7.百鬼夜行/The Chorizo Vibes

8.I want my freedom back/FEELFLIP

9.GO/Northern19

10.BURN IT/FEVER 333

11.ROLLIN/SUNSET BUS

12.ENDLESS CIRCLE/B-DASH

13.小恋指～コイユビ～/GOLLBETTY

14.ジターバグ/ELLEGARDEN

15.KILLING IN THE MOSH PIT/EGG BRAIN

○DJ 90kidz

1.MAGIC / Hawiian 6

2.WE GOTTA POWER /影山ノブヒロ

3.そばかす/JUDY AND MARY

4.貴方解剖純愛歌～死ね～/あいみょん

5.「F」/ マキシマムザホルモン

6.All I Want / The Offspring

7.以心電信/ ORANGE RANGE

8.スターフィッシュ/ ELLEGARDEN

9.完全感覚Dreamer /ONE OK ROCK

○DJ miyau-D

1.Killing in the name/Rage Against The Mashine

2.Can't Stop/Red Hot Chilli Peppers

3.Sabotage/Beastie Boys

4.Still Waiting/SUM41

5.Sugar,We're Going Down/Fall Out Boy

6.Monster Tree/SHAKALABBITS

7.孤高の花/SHACHI

8.良いDJ/キュウソネコカミ

9.KiLLiNG ME/SiM

10.その向こうへ/10-FEET

11.Mr. Brightside/The Killers

12.Dream Chaser ft.BIM/Kzm

13.ソラニン/ASIAN KUNG-FU GENERATION

14.Funny Bunny/ELLEGARDEN

○DJ NABESHI

1.We Will Rock You/Almighty Bomb Jack

2.She’s Kerosene/The Interrupters

3.Time Bomb/RANCID

4.Boys Will Be Boys/The Ordinary Boys

5.CONCRETE JUNGLE/THE AUTOCRATICS

6.Dawning Of A New Era/DOBERMAN

7.LITTLE BITCH/The Specials

8.ONE FOR THE MONEY,ONE FOR THE SOUL/UNITED BALLS

9.UNDER COVER/THE BUSTERS

10.Hippie ‘96/Ngobo Ngobo

11.カナリヤ鳴く空feat.チバユウスケ/東京スカパラダイスオーケストラ

○DJ Kevin

1.アニー/ズーカラデル

2.百合の咲く場所で/Dragon Ash

3.ANSWER FOR …/BRAHMAN

4.Ever Green/HAWAIIAN6

5.人生出会い/RADWIMPS

6.シュプレヒコール/SEVENTEEN AGAiN

7.DAY DREAM BEAT/ハンブレッダーズ

8.素晴らしき世界/THE FOREVER YOUNG

9.Repaint/ONIONRING

10.EVEN/G-FREAK FACTORY

11.Can't Help Falling In Love/Hi-STANDARD

#playlist

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pcvkaplowitz-blog · 7 years ago

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In Retrospect...

“Stand up when your name is called” directed the Costa Rican border agent standing in the front of our bus. Coming from Nicaragua I’d heard a lot about Costa Rica, it seemed like everyone I talked to knew somebody working across the border. The more politically minded would tell me that the only reason Costa Rica was prosperous was because of the Nicaraguans who fled during the war. Since then the border crossing is hard for Nicaraguans, and usually it would have been harder for me as well, but the U.S. Embassies in Nicaragua and Costa Rica had already coordinated with the Costa Rican government to ensure our evacuation went smoothly.

“Josh Wynn” called the agent, and I though back to killing the scorpion and chinche with Josh “Bootylicious” Wynn what seemed like an eternity ago but actually only been the week prior. In Somoto, Clare “Fachenta” Davies looked on in horror, silently praying that the next two years of service in Nicaragua wouldn’t be filled with dangerous insects in a remote mountain village. The bugs were a hardship we expected to face. Indoctrinated with the mantra of resiliency the prospect of leaving Nicaragua before the 27 months term of service ended barely figured into the imagination. Now, almost two months after arriving we were crossing into Costa Rica.

News of the protest first reached me on Thursday while travelling from Somoto back to my training site by way of Managua. The handful of the other volunteers who happened to be traveling on the same bus with as me received texts notifying us of the protests. The first messages were innocuous, telling us that we must take taxis to avoid loitering in the Managua areas. The severity increased with each successive notification until finally we were told to disembark in Tipitapa and avoid Managua all together. In Tipitapa we rendezvoused with Peace Corps officials who drove us back to our sites. Even then I failed to comprehend the extent of the upheaval brewing.

Once safely in Niquinohomo the news of the protests came through filtered sources. It was clear that the initial protest was in response to an executive order changing social security but the reason for the volatile nature of the protests was unclear. The only news channels broadcasting on TV served as offered biased critique and inaccurate reports, skewed to support Ortega. My host sister works in the Mayor’s office and downplayed the protests. Other locals in my house claimed that the protests had been used as an excuse for vandals to loot stores. They all seemed to think there would be a return to order soon. These viewpoints contrasted sharply with those of other members of my community.

On Friday it became apparent that the unrest was bigger than originally apparent. People complained of election fraud, lack of representation, and the disconnect between the Ortega of today and the former Sandinista leader. Some accused Ortega of selling out Nicaragua for his personal profit. Additionally, it became apparent that the peaceful protests had been responded to with violence. Riot police took to the streets and counter-protestors fought the demonstrators. In Tipitapa, where I had been hours before, a Nicaraguan was killed. State news claims the murder was by vandals intent on burning the mayors office, but a number of other sources allege the vandals were paid by the government to cause violence and delegitimize the protestors.

Peace Corps sent me another notification: “Standfast.” The emergency action plan was officially underway. In Niquinohomo it remained calm, it seemed surreal. I had heard the news but assumed it was exaggerated like the way Fox covers the protests in Ferguson and Chicago. I still thought things would settle down. I didn’t pack a go-bag and walked around town in my flip flops chatting with the neighbors.

That night there was a large march in Niquinohomo. Hundreds of people paraded through the streets wearing black, waving Nicaraguan flags, tearing down Sandinista propaganda. Trucks and biked honked their horns. The people chanted. “They have the right to demonstrate” said my sister who works at the Mayors office. She didn’t join the protestors though, I heard anyone who worked for the state (including teachers and local and regional officials) would lose their job for demonstrating or criticizing Ortega. The police in Niquinohomo waited on the street corners and watched. The police in other sites were not so patient.

Violence blossomed over the weekend. Police fired live rounds into crowds, killing students. Snipers on the rooftops in Managua targeted people seeking refuge in a church. I was told “They’re aiming at the head and the heart, they’re trying to take people out.” In Bluefields a journalist was killed, shot in the head while streaming on Facebook live because his channel had been cut off. Across the country the army was deployed.

My friend living in El Rosario texted me: “I heard they are coming to burn our alcaldia (trans. mayors office)...” Her family locked down their house and she slept with her knife. The mob never came for her but in Leon, Diriamba, Masaya, Managua, Bluefields and other cities it did, burning down the mayor’s offices. In Masaya fighting between the police and the citizens was especially severe. “It’s a war over there,” my host family warned me.

Ortega spoke but his two-hour speech only managed to enrage the crowds. His themes were tangential, and his demeanor was slow. He reminded me of a tortoise with Alzheimer’s. He called for dialogue but only with the heads of the COSEP, a group of business leaders that spent the past decade eating out of Ortega’s hand. Later he revoked the executive order, but it wasn’t enough to calm the crowds. Some businesses closed. Many grocery stores and gas stations were looted.

Peace Corps activated the next step of the Emergency Action Plan on Sunday, “Consolidation.” At this point Peace Corps Volunteers in Managua were locked down in the central office, unable to leave even to go pack their belongings for the evacuation. Trainees in Diriamba had spent the prior night gathered at the house of a volunteer avoiding the disturbances downtown. I packed half my things, expecting the reversal of the order to be enough to reverse the consolidation decision.

At 9:00 pm I got a call telling me that I’d be picked up the next morning for Consolidation in Grandad before eventual evacuation to Costa Rica and the States. Reluctantly I admitted that I would have to leave tranquil Niquinohomo. My host mom was upset “We have food, we have water, we have electricity, this house is very secure!” She told me. “Out there is where the craziness is, everything is fine here!” I had to explain the order was from the Ambassador and it was for all volunteers not just us. She still didn’t want to see me go.

I left twice. At 10 AM the van picked us up and I helped load bags on the roof, tying the bags down as the sun beat down. I finished securing the bags and hopped down, ran to hug the host families goodbye, and hopped in the van. We got on the road and began our briefing session when Daniel “Freak” Tassitino asked me where my backpack was. I apologized profusely as we turned the bus around to go grab my laptop, passport, and camera. Twenty minutes later and I was back on the road with my backpack and a big IOU for Daniel’s host family.

In the bus Ashley explained the situation. Official reports of death were underreported and estimates are that 100 people were killed over the weekend. The plan was to stay in Granada for two days and get all volunteers together before moving on to Costa Rica and eventually the United States. The Embassy was evacuating all non-essential personnel. There were concerns about accessing food, water, and gas. Some routes to the embassy had been blocked off leading to fear about being cut off. It felt good to be with the other trainees. We felt safe together and I trusted Peace Corps to keep us safe.

The customs agent began calling names I didn’t recognize. The names of the Volunteers who shared our bus. All the trainees and volunteers got evacuated together. In Granada we mingled awkwardly. The group was conflicted. I’d met some of the volunteers before and I tried to take advantage of the opportunity to talk with them and meet other people who could share some perspective with me. At the same time I tried to avoid being insensitive to those taking the transition harder than I was. Some of the older volunteers resented being pulled away from their families for the last time without being able to say goodbye. Some had friends in jail. But here in a fancy hotel we enjoyed drinks by the pool and catered meals, almost as if nothing happened.

Granada looked peaceful. I knew there had been protests earlier in the week but the tourist district we stayed in was tranquilo. The first day we were locked down in the hotel. There was nothing to occupy our time that first day except the pool and Flor de Cana rum. I don’t think it really hit me that I’d be back in the States in less than a week. When we to packing up all our stuff and leave our homes I told my friend Troy “Sweet T” Marderosian that “best case scenario this is all just an annoyance.” The first day in Granada were like a little bourgeoisie vacation at the time and I enjoyed it while briefly under the impression that we may return to our normal routine before too long.

The briefings began the second day in Granada and it was made clear we would be leaving the country. Don Howard, the seemingly implacable country director, choked up during his speech. He tried to sound hopeful, but the gloomy reality of the situation couldn’t be ignored. The uncertainty that had provided refuge and hopes of a quick return during the consolidation process morphed as Peace Corps switched to “Evacuation” mode. Staff members families were sent to the United States. The Director traveled with an escort from the embassy. The immediate confusion of what going to happen now turned into an anxiety about what’s going to happen next.

We boarded the busses. Fifty volunteers per bus, our belongings stuffed into the storage spaces, only a few hours behind schedule we headed toward the border. Jammed packed, I was grateful for the air conditioning. No stops, I was grateful for the bathroom. Although, we did get off for a minute right before the border while they searched the busses, it was fast almost cursory. And now here we are getting ushered into Costa Rica. When they called my name, I waved from the back row, popping my head above the seats, acutely feeling the privilege of my blue and gold passport.

The border crossing made me think of all the people we were leaving behind. Don Howard had mentioned that all the staff accompanying us were leaving their families. How could anyone be asked to leave their family in an agitated country to accompany some privileged gringos across the border? And what of our own friends and host families? I’m grateful Niquinohomo is safe but the protests have continued. I’m outraged at the injustices committed by the government in Nicaragua, the lack of representation, the twisting of the facts. I also can leave at will. I’m privileged to disconnect.

“Poverty is not knowing if you can ever leave” Said Peter Hatch during our training. And now I’m leaving a country just when the situation gets hairy. It’s funny that just a few weeks prior I was surprised that people had been complaining to me about the government and now there were riots in the street. I guess the people had enough. A number of people told me that Ortega had sold out to corporate interests.

“Nicaragua could be the richest country in central America” said my neighbor. But the country has a brutal history of dictators using the natural resources for their own personal gain, complicit in this is the buying power of the United States and other foreign countries. The U.S. has been responsible for starting wars in Nicaragua and benefited from exploitative trade agreements. It is the pinicle of irony that an American businessman pressured Ortega to reverse the Social Security mandate that sparked the riots. Civil disturbances are bad for business.

“The people don’t trust COSEC, they’ve been stealing from Nicaragua for the past 20 years” Said Ashely. The people have power in the streets, but when they let the business sector speak for them they lose that power. Ortega has dictated who he will negotiate with, the streets don’t care, the streets shout “Ortega, Somoza, son la misma cosa.” The streets want change. The people are finding their voice. And I am leaving.

In Costa Rica the change is noticeable. The countryside houses have cars in front of them. Even the roads in the mountains look different. Although I haven’t had the chance to travel much of Nicaragua, For the first time since moving to Latin America I got to see the Pacific Ocean. We check in and settle into rooms at another nice hotel and meet up for the first debrief sessions.

The sessions at the hotel are mundane. They cover the logistics of the departure. The specific reasons for leaving. They leave the future floating in ambiguity. They share the resources Peace Corps offers to deal with the transition. My mind meanders, my pen doodles on the page. I look around and see other people drifting off in their own worlds.

As a volunteer the time in Costa Rica felt protracted. Our debriefing meetings were done en mass and despite many voices asking, the answer I really wanted was absent. I still don’t know if I’m going back. The officials refused to speculate. It’s really up in the air. At least, I better understand the process of how the decision is going to be made.

The suspension of activities works on 30 day cycles, starting with the date we left the country. Every 30 days the staff in the embassy will assess development in Nicaragua. The criteria they will use to determine if we are cleared to return is the same criteria that factored into their decision to evacuate. These include, access to food and water, access to gas, freedom of travel, peaceful demonstrations. Protests are acceptable as long as the threat of violence is low.

Now I wait. In the meantime, I’m keeping myself occupied, see friends, travel, write, organize my photos… I can already feel a shift in my attitude. When I first got bck I was enthusiastic to explain the situation and confident that I would return, my brain still focused on the content of training. Now, hardly a week later I am thinking in terms of plans and things I would like to do here, imagining my goals for after Peace Corps.

In some ways it’s good to have this opportunity to think a little bit more of my goals for after Peace Corps and direct what I want to get out of the next two years. Assuming I still go. I still want to go but I’m dreading what the culture shock will be like going back and forth. I felt like I was just settling down and getting ready to live in Nicaragua for two years when I got pulled out. If I have to go to another site the wait could be another 9 months, and I don’t know what I would do in the meantime…

So while my head is still spinning it is only because once again the future is unknown. Thrown back into the chasm right when I was getting comfortable with my plan for the next two years.

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ptsdtrbl1 · 4 years ago

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This better not get removed by FB because even leftist controlled 'snopes' says it is true but only found ridicule in why Warren Willham Jr changed his name to De'Blasio in January of 2001. It was supposedly not to hide his Marxist-Leninist assisting in the socialist takeover of Nicaragua, which is all true, he did that in the 1980's. But his changing his name three times finally settling on De'Blasio he told Time Magazine while working for Bill & Hillary Clinton it was "do to his wanting to distance himself from his abusive alcoholic father" who fought in WWII until getting his leg blown off.

Warren Willham Jr grandfather was a devout Communist.

His paternal uncle, Donald George Wilhelm Jr., worked for the Central Intelligence Agency in Iran and secretly wrote the last Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi's, memoir acting as a double agent against the US.

"Bill" might decry the role of "big money in politics," but that hasn’t stopped de Blasio from collecting financial support from one of the biggest names in political spending. Communist megadonor George Soros and his sons, Robert and Alexander, gave $12,400 to de Blasio’s most recent mayoral campaign, according to New York City campaign finance records. The entire Soros clan — including daughter Andrea, sons Alexander, Gregory and Jonathan, plus Robert’s then-wife — were even more generous to de Blasio during his first run, when they collectively pitched in $29,875 to help him secure the mayoral seat. de Blasio was indeed once a strong supporter of the revolutionary socialist Sandinista government in Nicaragua — In 2016, de Blasio was fined nearly $48,000 by the New York City Campaign Finance Board for campaign finance violations that included failing to report transactions, accepting over-the-limit contributions and taking contributions from "unregistered political committees," according to the board’s determination.

Sources: Public Advocate of the City of New York, Federal Election Commission, New York Daily News, City of New York, New York City Campaign Finance Board, The Nation, New York City Conflicts of Interest Board, The Center for Responsive Politics, Politico, and The New York Times.

After WWII both of "Bill's" parents were accused by the US government to having strong ties to Communism.

de Blasio was indeed once a strong supporter of the revolutionary socialist Sandinista government in Nicaragua —The Quixote Center

During the 1980s, de Blasio was a strong supporter of the revolutionary socialist government of Nicaragua, formed by the Sandinista National Liberation Front, commonly known as the Sandinistas. The then-mayoral candidate acknowledged his activities in a September 2013 interview with the New York Times, which outlined his political efforts, including a brief visit to Nicaragua in 1988:

Mr. de Blasio, who studied Latin American politics at Columbia and was conversational in Spanish, grew to be an admirer of Nicaragua’s ruling Sandinista party, thrusting himself into one of the most polarizing issues in American politics at the time. The Reagan administration denounced the Sandinistas as tyrannical and Communist, while their liberal backers argued that after years of dictatorship, they were building a free society with broad access to education, land and health care …

Mr. de Blasio became an ardent supporter of the Nicaraguan revolutionaries. He helped raise funds for the Sandinistas in New York and subscribed to the party’s newspaper, Barricada, or Barricade. When he was asked at a meeting in 1990 about his goals for society, he said he was an advocate of “democratic socialism.”

The Quixote Center

… The roots of Mr. de Blasio’s progressive brand of politics lie in the shadows of volcanoes, thousands of miles from the city he now hopes to lead, at a decaying health clinic in Masaya, a small Nicaraguan city. Mr. de Blasio, bearded, gawky and cerebral, had arrived in the city as part of a 10-day tour of Nicaragua in 1988, the capstone of the year he spent as an employee of the Quixote Center, a social justice group in Maryland. The center, founded by Catholic leaders, officially did not take sides in the Nicaraguan dispute, though much of its aid went to help families sympathetic to the Sandinistas.

… In 1987, Mr. de Blasio was hired as a political organizer, soon after he finished graduate school at Columbia, earning $12,000 a year. He worked inside the Quixote Center’s Maryland office, converted apartments filled with homegrown squash and peace posters. Hunched over his desk with a phone to his ear — his colleagues likened him to “Big Bird with a beard” — he oversaw efforts to solicit and ship millions of dollars in food, clothing and supplies to Nicaragua. He also proved to be a skilled provocateur, twice being arrested during rallies against United States foreign policy that were held in the Washington area.

In 1990, after the Sandinistas were voted out of power in Nicaragua, de Blasio (using the name William Wilhelm) reflected on the party’s time in government in an interview with the New York Times: “They gave a new definition to democracy. They built a democracy that was striving to be economic and political, that pervaded all levels in society.”

However, speaking to the Times for its 2013 article, de Blasio somewhat downplayed his support for Sandinistas and articulated a measure of criticism of the movement: We asked a spokesperson for de Blasio’s 2020 presidential campaign whether the mayor still largely stood by his support and advocacy for the Sandinistas, or whether he had regrets about his activities at that time. We did not receive a response.

He had known his uncle only as a child, he said, but he'd heard through "family lore" that he was "sort of a mouthpiece for the Shah." It was not something he was proud of.

"I think it was the wrong thing to do," said de Blasio. "It's just that simple. The overthrow of [Iran's democratically elected leader Mohammed] Mossadegh was one of the most profoundly negative, immoral, unfair acts of U.S. foreign policy in the last hundred years," he said.

Those who installed the Shah in power, he added, had fueled future conflicts. "Anyone who rightfully fears the current government in Iran should recognize that unfortunately we set the stage for it in terms of the actions of our country," he said.

De Blasio was less critical but equally skeptical about his father's work.

De Blasio said that after his father recovered from the loss of part of a leg while fighting as an Army lieutenant in the bloody battle of Okinawa in 1945, he studied at Harvard and then worked as an economist at the U.S. Department of Commerce. His work there ended abruptly, however, after he became the subject of a McCarthy-era loyalty investigation. The probe was due to questions raised by an ex-communist informant about de Blasio's mother, Maria, who had been active in the Newspaper Guild when she worked at Time Magazine.

"As she got investigated, he got investigated," said de Blasio. "He served his country in the most profound way, and the story in the family always was that he felt this extraordinary anger and frustration that he had served with distinction, he had given up his leg for his country, and that then his loyalty was being questioned."

But if his loyalty was in doubt, Warren Wilhelm seemed clearly aligned in the increasingly sharp divide of the cold war. In 1950, he was quoted extensively in a New York Times article concerning a research paper on industrial development in the Soviet Union that he wrote while associated with the Russian Research Center at Harvard.

De Blasio said he knew little about his father's work there, other than that he wanted to become a teacher: "I remember my mother telling me at one point he very much wanted to be a professor, he wanted to work at the Harvard Business school."

The Russian Research Center, according to a "Compromised Campus: The Collaboration of Universities With the Intelligence Community, 1945-1955," by Sigmund Diamond, was launched with the help of the CIA, which secretly funded some of its research. Recently unsealed CIA records show that among the projects the agency was backing at the time Wilhelm was associated with the center were the debriefing of Soviet-bloc defectors and a handbook on anti-Soviet propaganda.

At some point later-de Blasio isn’t certain exactly when-Warren Wilhelm worked as an executive at Texaco, the giant oil firm with vast interests in the Middle East and South America. The firm was a major beneficiary of the Shah who, promptly after taking power, denationalized his nation's oil and cut a deal to allow a consortium of major oil companies, including Texaco, to handle production and marketing. The company was also one of the big losers to Castro, who seized a Texaco oil refinery after he overthrew Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1959.

Previously secret CIA records show that, months before the disastrous 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, Texaco representatives were among a group of American business executives urging top CIA officials to "get off of dead center and take some direction" against Castro.

What's known of Warren Wilhelm's own anti-Castro efforts is that they were decidedly softer. In 1963, Wilhelm helped spearhead a coalition of multinational corporations aimed at persuading Latin American countries to allow increased outside investment as a means of reducing Castro's influence.

The Atlantic Community Development Group for Latin America, known as ADELA, received strong backing from New York Senator Jacob Javits. Wilhelm, according to correspondence cited by SUNY Professor Salvador Rivera in a 2007 paper about the effort, was considered an important player in the group, thanks to his close links to the Ford Foundation, which was helping fund the group, and the U.S. State Department.

De Blasio said he was unaware of any ties between his father and the Ford Foundation, which acknowledged in the early 1970s that it had served as a secret back-channel conduit for CIA funds routed to nonprofit cultural and social groups. "And certainly nothing about the State Department," de Blasio said.

As for his father's efforts in Latin America, he said they were well-intentioned, but naive.

His father, he said, was "a kind of classic moderate-to-liberal Democrat," a child of the New Deal with "an inherent appreciation for the Roosevelt era."

As a teenager, he said he discussed the Vietnam war with his father, but came away from their talks wondering about what he was told. "I think there was an element of skepticism as I was listening to him, even when I was relatively young in my teens I could feel that something just didn’t add up.”

Vietnam was something of a watershed for his parents, de Blasio said, once his oldest brother, Steven, became of draft age.

"My mother, really like so many mothers in America, became increasingly anti-war, and sort of more and more objective about what was happening," he said. "And I always thought my father had this, you know he was an Army veteran, had this American-centric world view and talked about maybe we should be sending more troops. So he had that, a world view that I found a little out of step with what was happening on the ground."

WNYC asked De Blasio if he would authorize other family members to talk about his father and uncle. He said he would see if that was possible, adding: "I think you won't be surprised when I say people are a little saturated at this point."

A campaign aide later said that other relatives declined to be interviewed. Donald Wilhelm's son John, who has been a major campaign donor and supporter in his cousin's mayoral bid, refused to talk about his father's government work when reached by WNYC. "It's a family matter," he said before hanging up. "I'm not going to discuss it."

Tom Robbins is Investigative Journalist in Residence at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. Twitter: @tommy_robb.

So what this proves is that Warren "Bill De'Blasio" Willham Jr

Has had family working for the CIA destabilizing foreign governments for 3 generations including De'Blasio himself with his help of trying to over throw the elected leaders of Nicaragua in attempts to turn it into a socialist dictatorship.

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dgrwomenscaucus · 8 years ago

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An excerpt from the book Deep Green Resistance, Chapter Three: Liberals and Radicals, by Lierre Keith

Distinguishing Categories of Violence

It’s understandable that people who care about justice want to reject violence; many of us are survivors of it, and we know all too well the entitled psychology of the men who used it against us. And whatever our personal experiences, we can all see that the violence of imperialism, racism, and misogyny has created useless destruction and trauma over endless, exhausting millennia. There are good reasons that many thoughtful people embrace a nonviolent ethic.

Violence can be used destructively or wisely: by hierarchy or for self-defense, against people or property, for self-actualization or political resistance.

“Violence” is a broad category and we need to be clear what we’re talking about so that we can talk about it as a movement. I would urge the following distinctions: the violence of hierarchy vs. the violence of self-defense, violence against people vs. violence against property, and the violence as self-actualization vs. the violence for political resistance. It is difficult to find someone who is against all of these. When clarified in context, the abstract concept of “violence” breaks down into distinct and concrete actions that need to be judged on their own merits. It may be that in the end some people will still reject all categories of violence; that is a prerogative we all have as moral agents. But solidarity is still possible, and is indeed a necessity given the seriousness of the situation and the lateness of the hour. Wherever you personally fall on the issue of violence, it is vital to understand and accept its potential usefulness in achieving our collective radical and feminist goals.

Violence of Hierarchy vs. Violence of Self-Defense

The violence of hierarchy is the violence that the powerful use against the dispossessed to keep them subordinated. As an example, the violence committed for wealth is socially invisible or committed at enough of a distance that its beneficiaries don’t have to be aware of it. This type of violence has defined every imperialist war in the history of the US that has been fought to get access to “natural resources” for corporations to turn into the cheap consumer goods that form the basis of the American way of life. People who fight back to defend themselves and their land are killed. No one much notices. The powerful have armies, courts, prisons, and taxation on their side. They also own the global media, thus controlling not just the information but the entire discourse. The privileged have the “comforts or elegancies” (as one defender of slavery put it) to which they feel God, more or less, has entitled them, and the luxury to remain ignorant. The entire structure of global capitalism runs on violence (Violence: The Other Fossil Fuel?). The violence used by the powerful to keep their hierarchy in place is one manifestation that we can probably agree is wrong.

In contrast stands the violence of self-defense, a range of actions taken up by people being hurt by an aggressor. Everyone has the right to defend her or his life or person against an attacker. Many leftists extend this concept of self-defense to the right to collective defense as a people. For example, many political activists supported the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, even taking personal risks in solidarity work like building schools and harvesting coffee. Indeed some people refuse to call this collective self-defense “violence,” defining violence as only those brutal acts that support hierarchy. I believe it is more honest to call this violence, and accept that not all violence is equal, or equally bad.

Violence against Property vs. Violence against People

Again, some people reject that violence is the correct word to describe property destruction. Because physical objects cannot feel pain, they argue, tools like spray paint and accelerants can’t be considered weapons and their use is not violent. I think the distinction between sensate beings and insensate objects is crucial. So is property destruction violent or nonviolent? This question is both pragmatic—we do need to call it something—and experiential. Destroying property can be done without harming a single sentient being and with great effect to stop an unjust system. Can anyone really argue against the French resistance blowing up railroad tracks and bridges to stop the Nazis?

But violence against property can also be an act meant to intimidate. This is the source of the unease that many progressives and radicals may feel toward property destruction. If you have been a person so threatened, you know how effective it is. Indeed, if violence against property were an ineffective approach to instilling fear and compliance, no one would ever use it. Burning a cross on someone’s lawn is meant to traumatize and terrorize. So is smashing all the dinner plates to the floor. A friend who survived a right-wing terrorist attack on the building where she worked was later hospitalized with severe PTSD (posttraumatic stress disorder). Property destruction can have a crippling effect on sentient beings.

Whatever we decide to call property destruction, we need to weigh the consequences and strategic benefits and make our decisions from there. Again, “violence” is not a bad word, only a descriptive one. Obviously, many more people can accept an attack against a window, a wall, or an empty building than can accept violence against a person, and that’s as it should be. But wherever you stand personally on this issue, basic respect for each other and for our movement as a whole demands that we acknowledge the distinction between people and property when we discuss violence.

Violence as Self-Actualization vs. Violence for Political Resistance

Male socialization is basic training for life in a military hierarchy. The psychology of masculinity is the psychology required of soldiers, demanding control, emotional distance, and a willingness and ability to dominate. The subject of that domination is a negative reference group, an “Other” that is objectified as subhuman. In patriarchy, the first group that boys learn to despise is girls. Franz Fanon quotes (uncritically, of course) a young Algerian militant who repeatedly chanted, “I am not a coward, I am not a woman, I am not a traitor.” No insult is worse than some version of “girl,” usually a part of female anatomy warped into hate speech.

With male entitlement comes a violation imperative: men become men by breaking boundaries, whether it’s the sexual boundaries of women, the cultural boundaries of other peoples, the physical boundaries of other nations, the genetic boundaries of species, or the biological boundaries of ecosystems. For the entitled psyche, the only reason “No” exists is because it’s a sexual thrill to force past it. As Robin Morgan poignantly describes the situation of Tamil women,

To the women, the guerillas and the army bring disaster. They complain that both sets of men steal, loot, and molest women and girls. They hate the government army for doing this, but they’re terrified as well of the insurgent forces ostensibly fighting to free them. Of their own Tamil men, one says wearily, “If the boys come back, we will have the same experience all over again. We want to be left in peace.”

Eldridge Cleaver announced, “We shall have our manhood or the earth will be leveled by our attempts to gain it.” This is a lose-lose proposition for the planet, of course, and for the women and children who stand in the way of such masculine necessity. Or as the Vietnamese say, when the elephants fight, it’s the grass that suffers.

As we can see from these examples, whether from a feminist understanding or from a peace perspective, the concern that taking up violence could potentially be individually and culturally dangerous is a valid one. Many soldiers are permanently marked by war. Homeless shelters are peopled by vets too traumatized to function. Life-threatening situations leave scars, as do both committing and surviving atrocities.

But violence is a broad category of action; it can be wielded destructively or wisely. We can decide when property destruction is acceptable, against which physical targets, and with what risks to civilians. We can decide whether direct violence against people is appropriate. We can build a resistance movement and a supporting culture in which atrocities are always unacceptable; in which penalties for committing them are swift and severe; in which violence is not glorified as a concept but instead understood as a specific set of actions that we may have to take up, but that we will also set down to return to our communities. Those are lines we can inscribe in our culture of resistance. That culture will have to include a feminist critique of masculinity, a good grounding in the basics of abuse dynamics, and an understanding of posttraumatic stress disorder. We will have to have behavioral norms that shun abusers instead of empowering them, support networks for prisoners, aid for combatants struggling with PTSD, and an agreement that anyone who has a history of violent or abusive behavior needs to be kept far away from serious underground action. Underground groups should do an “emotional background check” on potential recruits. Like substance abuse, personal or relational violence should disqualify that recruit. First and foremost, we need a movement made of people of character where abusers have no place. Second, the attitudes that create an abuser are at their most basic level about entitlement. A recruit with that personality structure will almost certainly cause problems when the actionists need sacrifice, discipline, and dependability. Men who are that entitled are able to justify almost any action. If they’re comfortable committing atrocities against their intimates and families, it will be all too easy for them to behave badly when armed or otherwise in a position of power, committing rape, torture, or theft. We need our combatants to be of impeccable character for our public image, for the efficacy of our underground cells, and for the new society we’re trying to build. “Ours is not a war for robbery, not to satisfy our passions, it is a struggle for freedom,” Nat Turner told his recruits, who committed no atrocities and stole only the supplies that they needed.

Only people with a distaste for violence should be allowed to use it. Empowering psychopaths or reinscribing the dominating masculinity of global patriarchy are mistakes we must avoid.

A very simple question to ask as we collectively and individually consider serious actions like property destruction is, is this action tactically sound? Does it advance our goal of saving the planet? Or does it simply answer an emotional need to do something, to feel something? I have been at demonstrations where young men smashed windows of mom and pop grocery stores and set fire to random cars in the neighborhood. This is essentially violence as a form of self-expression—for a very entitled self. Such random acts of destruction against people who are not the enemy have no place in our strategy or in our culture. It’s especially the job of men to educate other men about our collective rejection of masculinist violence.

Editors Note: The organization DGR is founded on the ideas and analysis laid out in the book by Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, and Aric McBay. To increase the book’s accessibility, especially to international audiences, we’re now making it available for free in two ways:

Read Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet as a browseable website.

Download an epub or PDF through the DGR Store. (We suggest a $5 donation, but you can set it to whatever you like, including $0.)

#DGR #radical feminism

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morganbelarus · 6 years ago

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Facing Down the Death Squads of Nicaragua

Bianca Jagger is on the phone from Nicaragua. Over the past two weeks she has campaigned for human rights in her native country, and borne witness to mounting violence as the regime uses murder to hold on to power. We had talked several times over several days, but now, as she spoke about students she had met with, and who had been shot down, she choked back tears.

Over the last two months, largely unnoticed by the rest of the world, unrest in Nicaragua has grown into a nationwide uprising that has fought to remain peaceful. What began in mid-April after a violent crackdown on protests about pension reforms has continued to gain popular support, and to be met with increasing brutality and deadly force, especially by the paramilitary gangs known as shock forces or turbas.

Human rights groups have recorded more than 140 deaths, more than 1000 injured, and counting. Families search for relatives, especially young people, taken violently on the street and disappeared into the countrys prisonsor disappeared altogether. Bianca, representing the Bianca Jagger Human Rights Foundation, participated in a press conference where Amnesty International presented its investigation of the violence. The title summed up the governments policy in three words: Shoot To Kill.

The regime of Daniel Ortega has shown it will stop at nothing to crush the opposition. Yet the spirit of the opposition will not be crushed. The students are exhausted, Bianca said, sounding exhausted herself. They are worn out. They are drained. And they are aware of how much in danger they are. How threatened they are. Their courage and determination to achieve justice and democracy and free elections is astonishing given the horror they are facing.

The title of the report summed up the governments policy in three words: Shoot to Kill.

As we talk, I am in something of a time warp. Bianca Jagger and I have known each other for almost 40 years, having met in Nicaragua when the Sandinista revolution still seemed like it might be something to celebrate. She was a passionate defender of human rights and democracy even then, although best known in those days as a beautiful actress who had married a rock star.

In this uprising there are so many echoes of the past, so many images from the old days. For the young men and women at the barricades today, even the smells must be much the same as they were during the uprisings 40 years agothe lacerating fumes of tear gas, the dust of cinder block barriers, and the sweat dripping off young men and women waiting under the hot Central American sun for the inevitable attacks on their thrown-together redoubts. They are far too young to remember first hand. But what they do know is that one aging, corrupt leader of that old revolt has become the savage enemy of this one.

Another key difference: These protests are non-violent. Its the government thats doing the killing, not the kids whove cordoned off their colleges and set up scores of roadblocks on the nations highways. In some contested areas people carry makeshift mortars, but not guns. They are determined to have nonviolent resistance, says Bianca. When people have shown up with weapons they have sent them away. Nobody in the uprising wants armed struggle in Nicaragua.

But despite efforts by the Catholic Church and others to mediate, the government response remains ferocious, and in the world of 2018, as we know all too well by now, this is the way horrible disasters start. In recent memory, we saw the inspiring enthusiasm of the young people who thought they could overthrow the dynastic revolutionary regime in Syria in 2011. But they were met with gruesome repression as the leader preferred to drag his country into the maelstrom of civil war rather than surrender his dictatorship.

A paradigm closer on the map and much closer in culture is Venezuela, where the regime of Nicols Maduro faced massive protests in recent years, and wore them down, and tore the opposition apart, then did the same to the whole political system of his country until he could guarantee his own re-election. The suffering of his people be damned; he has survived. At least for now.

All that said, Nicaragua is its own place, and it may yet surprise us. The problem there is focused very clearly on two people at the top, former Sandinista commander and junta member, and now president, Daniel Ortega, and his wife Rosario Murillo. And, realistically, at this point the solution must not be to compromise with their rule but to end it.

In the world of 2018, as we know all too well by now, this is the way horrible disasters start.

On Monday two weeks ago, Bianca and Erika Guevara-Rosas of Amnesty International visited the Jesuit university in Managua, the UCA (Universidad Centroamericana de Nicaragua). They wanted to meet its rector, Jos Alberto Idiquez, known as Father Chepe, who has received numerous death threats.

Just a few days earlier at a little before 1 a.m. on May 27 two Hilux pickup trucks, the preferred vehicles of the turbas, pulled up in front of the main entrance. Hooded men in the back of one of them shot a one-pound mortar at the two guards. They missed, but not for want of trying. Father Chepe denounced the attack and declared, The UCA, faithful to its Christian principles, will continue demanding what our people demand: justice for the dozens of people murdered in the massacre of April that continues in May.

Again, there are terrible echoes of Central Americas past, including the murders in El Salvador of Archbishop Oscar Romero in 1980, and of the Jesuit educators at the university in San Salvador in 1989. But, then, the death squads served the interests of the fascist right wing. In Nicaragua, they serve Ortega and Murillo.

Pope Francis, a Jesuit who has vivid memories of the repression in his native Argentina, spoke out publicly, condemning the serious violence" in Nicaragua "carried out by armed groups to repress social protests.

One of the most powerful voices for the people has been Silvio Jos Baz, the auxiliary bishop of Managua, a heroic priest, says Bianca, who has been the object of many death threats himself.

The church was instrumental pressuring Ortega to allow a mission by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) to visit Nicaragua on a fact-finding tour in mid-May.

Ortega had claimed that people killed in the protests were murderers. Murillo accused them of fabricating deaths and acting like vampires hungry for blood to feed their personal agendas.

That is not what the human rights commission found: Dozens of persons killed and hundreds wounded; illegal and arbitrary detentions; practices of torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment; censorship and attacks on the press; and other forms of intimidation such as threats, harassment and persecution, all aimed at dissolving the protests and inhibiting citizen participation.

Ortega claimed people killed in the protests were murderers. Murillo accused them of fabricating deaths and acting like vampires hungry for blood to feed their personal agendas.

As Bianca and Guevara-Rosas talked in Father Chepes office, we suddenly heard shots and mortars outside, Bianca told me.Guevara-Rosas remembers the terrible thunder of gunfire was relentless. The action was at the engineering university across the street from the UCA. It was under attack by the turbas. As Bianca watched from the street, crowds rushed to the scene to try to stop the attackers. Then the anti-riot police arrived in force, some of them with AK-47 assault rifles. They came on as if they were going to war, Bianca remembered. By that evening, the staff at Bautista hospital said they treated 41 young people, one of whom died from a chest wound.

The next day, Amnesty together with the Bianca Jagger Human Rights Foundation officially presented the 36-page report, Shoot to Kill: Nicaraguas Strategy to Repress Protest (PDF), and Bianca spoke at the press conference. She started by pleading with Ortega to stop killing the students, the journalists, the workers. What we have here is a dirty war, she said, using a phrase that evoked the gruesome right-wing repression in Latin America in the 1970s. She said Ortegas minions are killing young people like dogs and called on them to stop.

Tensions were building in anticipation of the march called for May 30, Mothers Day in Nicaragua, when the mothers of scores of young people whod been slain would be at the heart of the procession.

Huge crowds poured into the streets of Managua and other cities. There were hundreds of thousands of people with Nicaraguan flags, Bianca told me, and many reports confirmed the phenomenal scale of the demonstration.

Just before it began, Bianca visited students at Nicaraguas national university, then spoke with Christiane Amanpour on CNN, who asked if she was afraid. And yes, she said, she was.

On Twitter there are some calls to attack the mothers and all of those who will participate in the march, she said. So when I go out I am wondering what will happen. What will happen to them? What may happen to me? I dont know. I hope that God is with us and that I will come back and be able to talk to you again.

People who say they are not afraid, they are foolish, said Bianca. I know the risks. I am here because I think that my voice is important. I am here because I feel about each of these kids as if they were my kids or maybe my grandchildren. As a mother. And because I cant fathom that little childrenbecause they are children, some are 15have been killed. And that they are prepared to be killed. They are prepared to sacrifice themselves. I have met with them. And they say to me, You know, we think we are dead. Every minute that we live we are living on borrowed time.

Later, on the phone from Managua, Bianca told me, Everybody thought that Ortega and Murillo couldnt attack the march because it was a peaceful march on Mothers Day. There were the mothers who had lost their children; and many more mothers who could imagine losing their children. Bianca walked with a walking stick, as she does these days. People came to me and said, Dont leave us. She moved toward the forward ranks of the demonstration, not to the front, but the second rank of mothers. And then the shooting began. Some of the people got me out of there, she said. By the end of the day, 16 more people had been killed, apparently by snipers, and 70 or 80 injured.

In the early 1980s, many people had high hopes the Nicaraguan revolution would find a path forward to democracy.

Ortega first came to power as part of the collective Sandinista leadership after battles had been fought by rag-tag muchachos in many of the same cities and towns that have seen uprisings in the last few weeks: Masaya, Estel, Monimbo, and of course Managua. On July 19, 1979, at last, the Sandinistas overthrew the Somoza family dictatorship that had been installed by the American Marines half a century before.

In the early 1980s, many people had high hopes the Nicaraguan revolution would find a path forward to democracy for the impoverished peoples of Central America. (Even Henry Kissinger acknowledged some sort of revolution was needed.) Volunteers from Europe and the Americas, including the United States, poured into the country to help. And many on the left saw the Sandinistas as heroes, especially as they faced the calculated wrath of the right-wing Reagan administration, which mined Nicaraguas harbors and underwrote a brutal covert war by rebels known as Contras. Resolutely, and with increasing brutality of its own, the Sandinista regime survived and Ortega maneuvered himself into the presidency. Then, in 1990, when the Soviet Union was collapsing and had no need for clients in Central America, Ortega was defeated in national elections and chose to step down peacefully.

After many long years in opposition, and two failed bids to retake the presidency, Ortega and his disciplined party made a comeback in 2007. Corruption scandals had shaken the interim administrations to their foundations. Indeed, Arnoldo Alemn, president from 1997 to 2002, was named by Transparency International as one of the 10 most corrupt leaders in the world.

In the years since their return, Ortega and Murillo, who is his vice president as well as his spouse, have cut extraordinary political deals to insure their survival. I know Daniel Ortega very well, Bianca told CNN last month. When he came back to power he was perverse. He was corrupt. He made deals with the most corrupt segments of society.

Ortega stacked the courts and reinterpreted the constitution to allow him to keep his post as president, potentially, for life. (His control over the judiciary also helped protect Ortega from accusations by his stepdaughter, Murillos child, that he had sexually abused her for many years, starting when she was 11 years old.) He also bought up almost all the press outlets in the country, and since the unrest began, the few independent voices have come under direct attack. An independent radio station was torched. A reporter was shot and killed on Facebook live.

Over time, Ortega and Murillo have shown there is no one they will not embraceor betrayto hold on to power. Thus their courts reversed former President Alemns 20-year sentence for corruption in an apparent trade-off for conservative votes in Nicaraguas National Assembly. Ortega and Murillo helped the rich get richer, cementing support from the private sector. These so-called Marxist-Leninist atheists professed their Catholic faith and won the support of the conservative Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo by banning all abortions, including those that endanger the mothers life. (Obando y Bravo died on June 4 this year after several years in retirement.) When Ortega and Murillo met resistance they set out to intimidate and crush protest movements by using the police and the turbas.

Ortega is a liar, a hypocrite, Bianca told CNN. He has given himself control over all the powers of coercionthe military, the police, the riot police, the mobwhile he has dismantled all legal institutions that might be an obstacle to his total control of the country.

As Univision News wrote succinctly last year, Ortega is a wily politico who has made a career out of hatching secretive pacts with opponents, then devouring them alive. And a major concern among Nicaraguans last year was that Organization of American States Secretary General Luis Almagro, in secretive talks with Ortega, would allow the Nicaragua strongman to buy time, and eventually stay in power. In fact, Almagro legitimized Ortegas completely illegitimate election to a third consecutive term. OAS representatives have been back in Managua in recent days, and many fear theyre going to buy Ortega still more time to do more killing.

The devastating report by the human rights commission might not prevent that, but when it presents its full findings to the OAS, few doubts will remain about the evil of the Ortega regime.

The revolutions of Iran and Nicaragua, born at the same time in the late 1970s, are almost twins, Ortega declared.

Nicaraguas population is a little over 6 million, about the size of Marylands, with few natural sources and a tiny economy. But Ortega, now 72, always hoped to project himself on the world stage as his generations version of Fidel Castro, and he has remained a committed third-worlder hobnobbing with leaders despised by Washington.

In the early days of the Sandinista regime, Ortega embraced the PLOs Yasser Arafat and Libyas Muammar Gaddafi. After Ortegas return to power in 2007, one of his first trips abroad was to Tehran to meet with Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who declared that nothing could separate the two countries, which were united to face common enemies. The revolutions of Iran and Nicaragua, born at the same time in the late 1970s, are almost twins, Ortega declared.

But Ortegas greatest international ally was Venezuelas late strongman Hugo Chvez, who shared his countrys vast oil riches generously with little Nicaragua. Indeed, Ortega hosted Chvez, along with Ahmadinejad, at his second consecutive inauguration in 2012. At that event Ortega also lamented the death of Gaddafi, and reportedly offered a brief valediction to Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

Ortega has sought support from Russias Vladimir Putin, who paid a brief visit in 2014, and has cultivated ties with Beijing. A few years ago, Nicaragua announced grandiose and improbable plans with a mysterious Chinese financier to build a canal through the center of the country. The project may never be completed, but it gave a pretext to the Ortega regime to seize vast tracts of land by eminent domain, and continues to pose enormous risks to the environment well beyond Nicaraguas borders. Bianca has called it, with reason, an environmental crime.

Despite all this, theres barely been a ripple in Washington. Where once Nicaragua was the center of world attention thanks to the hostile spotlight put on it by the Reagan administration, its travails now attract little notice from North American media.

Why is Nicaragua not the center of attention? Students are being killed! Bianca asked CNNs Christiane Amanpour, who had no real answer.

Perhaps the media are waiting for Trump to tweet something about whats going on. And perhaps, when his grotesque feud with the G6 and the circus in Singapore subside, that day will not be so far away.

On Thursday, the U.S. State Department made an interesting announcement: The political violence by police and pro-government thugs against the people of Nicaragua, particularly university students, shows a blatant disregard for human rights and is unacceptable. So visa restrictions are being placed on National Police officials, municipal government officials, and a Ministry of Health officialspecifically those directing or overseeing violence against others exercising their rights of peaceful assembly and freedom of expression, thereby undermining Nicaraguas democracy. These officials have operated with impunity across the country, including in Managua, Len, Estel, and Matagalpa. In certain circumstances, family members of those individuals will also be subject to visa restrictions. The communiqu did not name names, but the State Departments targets presumably know who they are.

Meanwhile, the roadblocks and barricades called tranques continue to be thrown up on main roads all over the country. On Wednesday there were at least 40 described by the local press as permanent, meaning they stopped all traffic but emergency vehicles, and another 18 or so that allowed staggered passage for traffic, say, once an hour.

We have raised to the president [Ortega], the pain and anguish of the people.

Cardinal Leopoldo Brenes

On Thursday evening last week, the Catholic bishops of Nicaragua asked to meet with Ortega, to see if they would renew the dialogue that they broke off in May. The goal back then, said Auxiliary Bishop Silvio Jos Baz, was to pave the way for the democratization of Nicaragua. But that was not happening and the violence was growing worse. This time around, the bishops did not say that they demanded Ortega step down, but they came very close, demanding that new elections be held on an accelerated timetable:

We have raised to the President the pain and anguish of the people in the face of the violence suffered in recent weeks, Cardinal Leopoldo Brenes said in a statement. We have delivered the proposal that reflects the feelings of many sectors of Nicaraguan society and expresses the desire of the vast majority of the population. We await his written response as soon as possible. They gave Ortega two days to reflect.

That same night, Bianca talked again with the exhausted students protesting at the national university who told her they would persevere no matter what.

A few hours later, another Hilux pickup truck rolled up in front of their barricade and opened fire. Two were injured. One was killed.

That was Ortegas answer, said Bianca.

France 24 reports from Monimbo

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