More Concerned With The Tone Of Someone’s Message Than You Are With The Message Itself? #MillsVsPenobscots

Chloe Cekada and Iris SanGiovanni of Greater Portland SURJ disrupt Maine Attorney Janet Mills

calling for her to respect Native rights to protect the Penobscot River and its many life forms.

Guest post from Sass Linneken, program coordinator for Resources for Organizing and Social Change, who had just returned from a Maine People's Alliance event on June 29, 2017 (MPA is a "progressive" Democratic Party lobbying organization).

Musings on Maine’s Democratic Party, white feminism, and how white men take up space:

I went to the Resistance Rising summit hosted by MPA tonight and came away with some thoughts I need to roll out before going to sleep.

#1) I get anxious when I’m going into crowds, and anxiety is for the birds.

#2) The Democratic party is in no way leading anything resembling resistance at this point.

#3) The Democrats are having a difficult time realizing that taking a paternalistic/tone-policing attitude toward people they view as disruptive is not helping them to galvanize their base, it’s doing the opposite.

Villainizing disrupters is supremacist, and it completely negates the truths that exist within the disruption, for instance, the very fact that political disruption is a small thing compared to whatever issue is at the root of the disrupters’ cause.

***Case in point: Disrupting Janet Mills might feel egregious to people who support Mills, but that disruption is not going to kill her, or take her self-determination from her. On the flip-side of that coin, her refusal to support the Penobscots instead of lead the charge to steal their water rights and redraw the boundaries of their reservation when they hold less than 1% of the land they once did *will* impact their livelihoods and impact their ability to self-determine their own futures.

Letter found by Community Water Justice organizer Nickie Sekera in her son Luke's
pocket. Luke just graduated from middle school and is already a seasoned water protector.

Refusing to revisit the standards for justification in state-sanctioned police violence when there has been a drastic increase in police shooting fatalities *will* result in avoidable deaths, particularly of those who don’t look or live like Janet Mills. Rudeness in messaging should really be the least of worries in this context.***

Luke Sekera speaking at a previous event where Mills was confronted about her attack on
the rights of the Penobscot people to protect their water against industrial polluters the state of Maine protects.
Luke is being protected by Elizabeth Ann Mitchell, a Penobscot water protector.

#4) A candidate should not get a free pass if she’s a woman because she has it harder than her male counter-parts on the campaign trail or in office, and to suggest that the only reason she’s being held accountable is because she’s a woman is as sexist as the perceived sexism in the allegation to begin with.

#5) Saying that a candidate deserves our respect because she’s a champion for women’s rights when she is simultaneously engaging in an agenda that hurts women of color is the epitome of white feminism.

It’s not only hella problematic in its analysis of women’s rights, it’s detrimental to any perceived effort of resistance. To the contrary, it’s the very upholding of the systems and structures liberals/progressives claim to want to smash.

#6) If you’re a cisgender, able-bodied white guy, you’ve had the floor long enough. Shut the hell up.

The fact is, if your platform is not centering and considering the needs of PoC, you’re doing it wrong.

Trump was no accident, and if you think his agenda is egregious, it’s time to look in the mirror and ask yourself how you are complicit in his getting to where he’s at. And I don’t say that sitting on any kind of a pedestal, I’m a white person on a life-long learning curve.

All I’m saying is if you’re more concerned with the tone of someone’s message than you are the message itself, you are more a part of the problem than the solution, and that should matter to you if you want things to change.

Sass

The Corporate Government War On Life Itself: Mni Woconi (Water Is Life)

Collage by James Fangboner

A new Facebook friend, Danica Niketic, shared this gem yesterday with the comment "Think about where you can apply this definition..."

Anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes has observed that Genocide is a continuum that runs for years, decades or centuries. It begins with marginalization and dehumanization of an identifiable minority, the theft of their lands and property, their slaughter and decimation, and the gradual squeezing of remnant populations. The central organizing principle of the continuum is a narrative that turns "others into non-persons or monsters," that normalizes atrocities and rationalizes the "every day practice of violence."

Who could read this without thinking of Standing Rock? The extreme violence against Native water protectors and their supporters has normalized atrocities reminiscent of Nazi atrocities against Jews, especially spraying them with sustained blasts of water at freezing temperatures. The irony of turning water into a weapon against water protectors is apparent.

Of course Israel has long been guilty of using water as a weapon against its indigenous population, the Palestinian people it attempted to displace very much as European settlers attempted to displace North America's Native peoples. In an arid agricultural region withholding water from farmers is one way of driving people out, while spraying them with sewer water is a tactic for attacking those who aren't working the land. 


"Turning others into non-persons or monsters" is the weak link in the genocidal chain. 

In the case of Standing Rock, despite the corporate media's virtual news blackout, respect for Native leadership in protecting the watershed for millions is enormous.

"Police turn water cannons on Dakota Access Pipeline protesters." from Workers.org

Thousands of veterans are traveling to North Dakota to form a human shield between the Native water protector front lines and the heavily militarized police and National Guard troops attacking them. 
Millions have donated supplies, showed up ready to help, and shared the news of Standing Rock atrocities acting as citizen journalists. The whole world is watching to see what will happen on December 5 when state agents have announced the final eviction of the camp now surrounded by pipeline construction equipment. 

Veterans For Peace chapter 001 presenting a check to Chief Francis of the Penobscot Indian Nation
to support the DAPL resistance. Photo courtesy of Richard Clement, VFP.

The long international campaign to turn Muslims into monsters has been far more effective, thanks to the collusion of propaganda outlets and the regular, suspiciously convenient "terror" events alleged to have been orchestrated by Muslim extremists. The chief crime of Muslim people in the eyes of corporate government is that their faith predominates among the indigenous population in parts of Asia and Africa where fossil fuel reserves are found and/or transported. 

The war on Muslims has been underway since the Ottoman Empire began shedding colonies in the run up to WWI, as the history of Afghanistan's occupation by one super power after another demonstrates. (Not much oil there, but it is a key transport region due to geographical location.)

The attempted genocide against the Native people of the Americas has been going on even longer, essentially since 1492. Here in the 21st century, corporate greed for control of fossil fuels and control of water have crossed paths in the many pipeline projects being actively resisted in North America. Just yesterday the Prime Minister of Canada announced with a winsome smile that he had approved the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain Pipeline over the objections of First Nations people. 

Corporate government has two faces which it alternates: the pretty ones like Trudeau and Obama who lull liberals to sleep while stealing the commons, and the baldly ugly ones like Trump who wake liberals up to demand narrowly defined civil rights for certain identity groups.

But it doesn't matter to the groups targeted for genocide whether the faces under the riot gear helmets are attractive or not. Black Lives Matter activists have repeatedly said that having a Black man in the White House has done nothing to stem the tide of state-sanctioned violence and prison enslavement of Black citizens. What it mostly appears to have done is piss off millions of racist voters whose economic prospects are dim and whose grasp of the reality behind the facade is even dimmer. 

The lumpen proletariat vote against their own interests because propaganda confuses them into thinking a billionaire kleptocracy will protect them and others with white privilege; it will do nothing of the kind. Instead it will continue using genocidal tactics to steal the commons upon which all life depends. For profit.

Our best defense is to refuse to marginalize or dehumanize any groups, and to always follow the money.

The handful of people still confused by why the U.S.-led coalition attacked and occupied (and continues to attack and occupy) Iraq may want to listen in to the ongoing Iraq War Tribunal as it examines the lies told about the monsters sitting on those oil fields. Of course today there is a new lie: ISIS makes them do it. Or in other words, the presence of ISIS "rationalizes the everyday practice of violence." But who made ISIS? Few in the U.S. care to pursue that question.

Just as few noticed that Obama spent his final few days in office this week adding Al Shabab in Somalia to the list of targets authorized for attack after 9/11, even though Al Shabab did not exist in 2001. And also authorized deployment of U.S. Special Forces anywhere on the planet to conduct secret assassinations outside of recognized war zones.

Under Trump even liberals are likely to wake up and realize what indigenous people have known for a long time: the whole planet is a war zone.