Global

Dred Scott lives!

With the Supreme Court’s declaration that President Trump’s third version of a Muslim travel ban is now enforceable, even as legal challenges against it proceed, the court and the country reopen the racism that permeates American history.

“The question is simply this: Can a negro, whose ancestors were imported into this country, and sold as slaves, become a member of the political community formed and brought into existence by the Constitution of the United States, and as such become entitled to all the rights, and privileges, and immunities, guaranteed by that instrument to the citizen?”

Thus begins Chief Justice Roger Taney’s explanation of the Supreme Court’s 1857 ruling against the slave Dred Scott’s lawsuit that he was entitled to freedom when he was taken by his “owner” to a free territory. Taney’s answer, of course, was no. Sorry, you’re not one of us.

Donald Trump is tweeting about a particular spot in Hawaii. He visited it recently on his way to threaten war in Asia. It’s a big feature this week in lots of U.S. magazines and newspapers. It has a lovely name that sounds like murder and blood because Japanese airplanes engaged in large-scale murder there in 1941: Pearl Harbor.

Pearl Harbor Day today is like Columbus Day 50 years ago. That is to say: most people still believe the hype. The myths are still maintained in their blissful unquestioned state. “New Pearl Harbors” are longed for by war makers, claimed, and exploited. Yet the original Pearl Harbor remains the most popular U.S. argument for all things military, including the long-delayed remilitarization of Japan — not to mention the WWII internment of Japanese Americans as a model for targeting other groups today. Believers in Pearl Harbor imagine for their mythical event, in contrast to today, a greater U.S. innocence, a purer victimhood, a higher contrast of good and evil, and a total necessity of defensive war making.

Do you use the internet? Like, at all? On your phone, on your laptop, on a big glowing gaming rig or a desktop held together with chewing gum and good thoughts? Then you should know we’re on the cusp of something that could destroy the internet as we know it: the end of government-enforced net neutrality.

Back in our June 2017 issue, I wrote about what net neutrality is and why it matters. But so much has been happening that it feels like years since then, so I’ll give you a refresher: “Net neutrality” is the policy that all internet traffic should be treated the same regardless of its source. Service providers aren’t allowed to throttle, for example, Netflix, which they might want to do to make their own streaming service look more appealing or so they can charge an extra fee to get it at full speed. Or they might just do it because they think it’s too much of a burden on their networks – they’ve done it before.

While the Netflix example is the most likely to spur your average citizen into action, it’s also vital to anyone whose politics fall left of center to keep the internet free from corporate control and censorship.

In his remarks on the recent International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women – see ‘Violence Against Women is Fundamentally About Power’ – United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres inadvertantly demonstrated why well-meaning efforts being undertaken globally to reduce violence against women fail to make any progress in addressing this pervasive crisis.

Hence, while the UN might be ‘committed to addressing violence against women in all its forms’ as he claimed, and the UN might have launched a range of initiatives over the past twenty years, including awarding $129 million to 463 civil society initiatives in 139 countries and territories through the UN Trust Fund to End Violence against women, his own article acknowledges that ‘Attacks on women are common to developed and developing countries. Despite attempts to cover them up, they are a daily reality for many women and girls around the world.’

When I was teaching myself how to write, when I was about 20 to 25, I churned out (and threw out) all kinds of autobiographies. I wrote glorified diaries. I fictionalized my friends and acquaintances. I still write columns all the time in the first person. I did write a children’s book in recent years that was fiction but included my oldest son and my niece and nephew as characters. But I haven’t touched autobiography in more years than I’d been alive when I used to engage in it.

I’ve been asked a number of times to write chapters for books on “how I became a peace activist.” In some cases, I’ve just apologized and said I couldn’t. For one book called Why Peace, edited by Marc Guttman, I wrote a very short chapter called “Why Am I a Peace Activist? Why Aren’t You?” My point was basically to express my outrage that one would have to explain working to end the worst thing in the world, while millions of people not working to end it need offer no explanation for their reprehensible behavior.

Writer/director Alexandra Dean’s nonfiction Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story is a 90 minute slice of cinema history - and much more - about an enigmatic screen star who was also a behind-the-scenes inventor. Like 2015’s documentary Listen to Me Marlon, Dean uses tapes featuring the thespian’s own voice to tell the inside story of the iconic, exotic actress who dazzled and delighted audiences in movies such as 1938’s Algiers (where Hedy romances Charles Boyer as jewel thief Pepe le Moko in this classic directed by John Cromwell, scripted by John Howard Lawson - both of them future blacklistees); the 1940 Soviet spoof Comrade X (appearing opposite her Boomtown co-star Clark Gable for the second time that year); the titillating Tandelayo n 1942’s White Cargo; the Biblical temptress in 1949’s Samson and Delilah co-starring Victor Mature, directed by Cecil B. DeMille; etc.

Daniel Ellsberg’s new book is The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. I’ve known the author for years, I’m prouder than ever to say. We have done speaking events and media interviews together. We’ve been arrested together protesting wars. We’ve publicly debated electoral politics. We’ve privately debated the justness of World War II. (Dan approves of U.S. entry into World War II, and it seems into the war on Korea as well, though he has nothing but condemnation for the bombing of civilians that made up so much of what the U.S. did in those wars.) I’ve valued his opinion and he has rather inexplicably asked for mine on all sorts of questions. But this book has just taught me a great deal I had not known about Daniel Ellsberg and about the world.

In order to shed some clear illumination on what is really at stake in Alabama's December 12 US Senate Election, I am submitting this pair of letters from two key Alabamans regarding Roy Moore. Alabama may be a long way geographically from California, but these two letters brings us closer together!

The first, from the first accuser of Roy Moore going back to sexual manipulation when she was 14 and he was a 32 year old Assistant District Attorney, recently ran in Alabama.

The second, that of his former Law Professor, Guy Martin, was also published his in Al.com, the largest newspaper media group in Alabama, on Sept. 21, just before the Alabama Primary. We acknowledge the high principles of the journalism displayed by Al.com, in their originally publishing these two letters, and thank the editors there for their courage and their integrity in leading this effort, and making clear, as they put it recently, that they don't want to be "on the wrong side of History."

Letter from Leigh Corfman to Roy Moore:

http://www.al.com/…/…/11/roy_moore_leigh_corfman_accuse.html

he most dangerous thing about the North Korean missile launch is the reaction of the unprincipled, under-informed, white identity extremist sitting in the Oval Office. If there’s a nuclear war coming out of this manufactured “crisis,” the buck will have stopped with him. Not that President Trump doesn’t have other fools egging him on to risk global chaos and destruction in response to an imaginary, inflated threat from an impoverished nation of 25 million people. Sadly, this is not a surprising development after more than sixty years of aggressive US behavior toward North Korea.

We’re supposed to think that the United States is threatened for no reason by irrational subhuman monsters arising out of the less important bits of the earth found beyond U.S. borders.

We’re supposed to think that the bigger the U.S. military is, and the more places it’s based in around the world, the better it can counter those monsters.

We’re supposed to think that other nations don’t have this sort of problem or depend on this sort of solution because the United States does it for them.

We’re supposed to think that selling and giving weapons to the rest of the world makes the world safer.

We’re supposed to think that arms dealing and militarism are economically beneficial.

We’re supposed to think that helping people would cost more, economically, than killing them.

We’re supposed to think that U.S. wars kill few people, most of them soldiers.

We’re supposed to think that wars happen on things called battlefields.

We’re supposed to think that genocide is something different from war and can be prevented with war.

We’re supposed to think that war has always been present in human existence and always must be.