Jethro Tull
1st September 2009, 03:13
sorry for the spam, but i feel this is of obvious interest to the community
aich tee tee pee colon slash slash rocktownrebel dot wordpress dot com
as our first offering to the blogosphere we present a scathing attack on an ICE detention center in being built in Brandywine, W.V.
-----------------------------
THROUGHOUT NEARLY THIRTY YEARS, THE BERLIN WALL KILLED HUNDREDS (Source: Reuters, 08/11/09)
THE U.S.-MEXICAN BORDER KILLS OVER A THOUSAND IN SIX YEARS (Source: NY Times 10/03/04)
Thankfully, the anti-immigration movement is running out of steam. It’s not so easy to shout “they took our jobs!” when none of us have jobs – Latino unemployment rates in New England are now at 16.30%, only 1.10% higher than blacks, but 9.20% higher than whites. (Source: Center for Market Labor Studies, Northeastern University) In California, blacks take the unemployment lead at 14.2%, followed by Latinos at 12.7% and whites at 9.5%. (Source: LA Times, 08/22/09) Besides, when did we ever have any job security? When did wage-slavery not entail constant anxiety over precarious fluctuations of the global economy?
Here’s another good one: “European culture is being destroyed!” Those who’ve actually researched European culture are well-aware that it was already destroyed by centuries of witch-hunts, industrialization, disease, social domestication famine, eradication of “black arts” and “superstitions”, violent appropriation of communal land, cultural homogenization, consolidation of tribes into nation-states, world wars, etc. What European culture are these people still clinging to, exactly?
“They’re changing our language!” Maybe, but so what? How many thousands of languages were wiped out by the genocide of North American Indians perpetrated by English, Dutch, French, and Spanish settlers? (Not to mention the hundreds of African slaves forced to forget their mother tongue)
“We’re being forced to send their kids to school with our tax-dollars!” Aren’t children forced to attend school in the first place? Aren’t we forced to pay taxes in the first place?
“But…but…we were here first!” Considering Nevada, California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah are territories the US annexed from Mexico, (displacing and killing thousands in the process) and with 90% of Mexicans, 97% of Hondurans, and 91% of Salvadorans being either full-blooded or mixed American Indian descent, (Source: CIA. The CIA’s statistics on Guatemala fail to differentiate between mestizos and Europeans, however, 40% of Guatemalans are still full-blooded Indians) this is the most heinous and absurd lie of them all…
“We didn’t cross the border! The border crossed us!”
NO UNCLE SAM’S GULAGS ON OCCUPIED APPALACHIAN LAND
The story of the South-western US is a story of brutal military conquest, cultural eradication, ethnic apartheid, and the construction of an occupying totalitarian police-state. The same statement is true of Appalachia. “Imperialism is not the creation of any one or of any group of states. It is the product of a particular stage of ripeness in the world development of capital, an innately international condition, an indivisible whole, that is recognisable only in all its relations, and from which no nation can hold aloof at will. ” (Rosa Luxemburg, The Junius Pamphlet)
In other words, we are living in a global empire of money, controlled by computerized police surveillance and weapons of mass-slaughter, but also by salaries, mortgages, taxes, rent, and other forms of extortion. No clear distinction can be drawn between American Indians, diasporic Africans, Chicanos, Hawaiians, and Puerto Ricans in the US and Tibetans and Uyghurs in the PRC, Basques in Spain, Arabs in Israeli-occupied Palestine, Tamils in Sri Lanka, or Irish Catholics in Northern Ireland.
104 PEOPLE HAVE DIED IN I.C.E. DETENTION CENTERS SINCE 2003 (Source: WSJ 08/18/09)
The racist Harrisonburg Daily-News Record, of course, reports only on the white nationalist, petit-bourgeois “opposition” to the proposed immigrant detention center in Brandywine, West Virginia. One white settler articulates her objections to the plan: “I think bringing in 1,000 illegal immigrants will drastically change our community forever”. Another who is quoted says “If the building of the prison is allowed to happen, life as we know it will cease to exist,” and invokes jingoistic anti-islamism by reminding us that “the present administration in Washington is looking for places to transfer terrorist prisoners from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba”. Another says “Let the politicians put this wonderful institution in their county”. (Source: “Detention Center Opposed”, Harrisonburg Daily-News Record)
It goes without saying that this example of pseudo-journalism totally discounts and ignores the experiences of the detainees themselves, thereby dehumanizing illegal immigrants. Also dehumanized by proxy are the millions more (over-proportionately New Africans, Latinas, American Indians, East-Asians, and working-class / rural whites) trapped in prisons (including “immigrant detainment centers”) across the US for “crimes” as fictitious, irrelevant, and intrinsically rooted in the ideology of state-monopolization as smoking a joint, owning an unlicensed firearm, practicing oral sex, committing unauthorized redecoration of our desolate landscape, and re-appropriating funds and materials violently stolen from us and our Mother Earth by capitalist conglomerates.
Unsurprisingly, ineffectual opposition to this new center is allowed, but removed from a holistic view of our global political crisis, (which is ultimately a crisis of capital and social domination) and, like always, presented as an atomized “single issue” crusade. This mentality must be overcome – the subjugation of immigrant detainees and other prisoners by guards and other staff is connected to the subjugation of wives by husbands, employees by bosses, prostitutes by pimps, children by the education system and abusive parents, the elderly and sick by bureaucratic medicine, laboratory test-animals by scientists, the general public by police, and the Earth by industry.
Redneck Liberation, United with our Latina Sisters!
Contrary to what some racist whites may believe, our Appalachian home has already been “drastically change[d] [...] forever”. Forests of centuries-old trees, twelve feet in diameter, have been cleared away by the timber industry, causing the irreparable collapse of the Appalachian eco-system. Entire races have been wiped out forever. (For example, the Senedo.) Entire valleys have been drowned by hydro-electric dams, first built by FDR and Truman as an allegedly eco-friendly alternative to coal-mining. Coal barons tricked myriad small-farmers into selling the mining-rights away to their properties, further desecrating the Earth’s skin. Everything from pumas to deer hunted to extinction. And now, with the pioneering of mountaintop-removal coal-mining, whole mountains remain only as grey, gravel-encrusted craters.
We can’t help but laugh at those who refer to the immigration of Spanish-speaking workers as a “drastic change” to a geographic region scoured by the Civil War and cannibalized by subsequent decades of industrialization. The implicit class-treachery, however, in allowing pathological racism to drive oneself to lynch others over a minor civic infraction (equivilant to cheating on tax reforms) such as immigrating illegally; this is no laughing matter. In fact, it makes us sick.
As working-class, Southern, rural whites, how are we any different? Are we any less dependent on the system for survival, or vise versa? Are we any more respectful of our tyrannical government and its inane laws? Is our culture any less “mongrelized”? After all, it’s a very common sight to see rednecks adorn themselves with dramatic American Indian motifs (such as dream-catchers and shirts depicting wolves, bison, and other indigenous animals) or break into outbursts of excessive joy and exuberance over the Redskins kicking the Cowboys’ asses. This is quite telling in a region where most people who identify as “white” have at least one eighth or one sixteenth Cherokee (or other American Indian tribes) in their blood.
We Appalachian whites, although we benefit from white-skin privilege, are often ourselves identified as only semi-white by derogatory terms such as “redneck” and “white trash”. From the beginning, a divide was drawn, segregating Scotch-Irish “hillbillies” from “high” Anglo-Saxon culture. One Yankee industrialist described Kentucky hillbillies as “rather yellow and cadaverous-looking, owing to their idle and shiftless ways”, before noting somewhat optimistically (and tellingly, from our perspective) that they at least make good workers. (Source: Harper’s Magazine, 1891) George Washington described the Shenandoah Valley’s residents as “a parcel of barbarians and an uncouth set of people”, and, of poor white settlers in general, he said; “as ignorant a set of people as the Indians”. (Source: quoted in “The Whiskey Rebellion: Frontier Epilogue to the American Revolution”) In 1899, the president of Berea College asked “whether ther mountain people can be enlightened” or if they “must [...] melt away like so many Indians”. One Reconstruction-era missionary described Southern whites as among “the worst housed, the worst fed, most ignorant, most immoral” races. Other words of discription for Appalachian hillbillies from historical sources include “mutant race”, “half-savages”, not “white enough”, and descended from “degenerate” Celtic “racial stock”. (Source: “The Legacy of Applachian Scholarship”, Wilma Dunaway) Recently, the Global Exchange of San Francisco described Appalachia as “the third world within the United States”. With that in mind, whose side should we be on? Our fellow prisoners, or the warden? Those who eat with us at the servants’ table, or those who eat for us?
aich tee tee pee colon slash slash rocktownrebel dot wordpress dot com
as our first offering to the blogosphere we present a scathing attack on an ICE detention center in being built in Brandywine, W.V.
-----------------------------
THROUGHOUT NEARLY THIRTY YEARS, THE BERLIN WALL KILLED HUNDREDS (Source: Reuters, 08/11/09)
THE U.S.-MEXICAN BORDER KILLS OVER A THOUSAND IN SIX YEARS (Source: NY Times 10/03/04)
Thankfully, the anti-immigration movement is running out of steam. It’s not so easy to shout “they took our jobs!” when none of us have jobs – Latino unemployment rates in New England are now at 16.30%, only 1.10% higher than blacks, but 9.20% higher than whites. (Source: Center for Market Labor Studies, Northeastern University) In California, blacks take the unemployment lead at 14.2%, followed by Latinos at 12.7% and whites at 9.5%. (Source: LA Times, 08/22/09) Besides, when did we ever have any job security? When did wage-slavery not entail constant anxiety over precarious fluctuations of the global economy?
Here’s another good one: “European culture is being destroyed!” Those who’ve actually researched European culture are well-aware that it was already destroyed by centuries of witch-hunts, industrialization, disease, social domestication famine, eradication of “black arts” and “superstitions”, violent appropriation of communal land, cultural homogenization, consolidation of tribes into nation-states, world wars, etc. What European culture are these people still clinging to, exactly?
“They’re changing our language!” Maybe, but so what? How many thousands of languages were wiped out by the genocide of North American Indians perpetrated by English, Dutch, French, and Spanish settlers? (Not to mention the hundreds of African slaves forced to forget their mother tongue)
“We’re being forced to send their kids to school with our tax-dollars!” Aren’t children forced to attend school in the first place? Aren’t we forced to pay taxes in the first place?
“But…but…we were here first!” Considering Nevada, California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah are territories the US annexed from Mexico, (displacing and killing thousands in the process) and with 90% of Mexicans, 97% of Hondurans, and 91% of Salvadorans being either full-blooded or mixed American Indian descent, (Source: CIA. The CIA’s statistics on Guatemala fail to differentiate between mestizos and Europeans, however, 40% of Guatemalans are still full-blooded Indians) this is the most heinous and absurd lie of them all…
“We didn’t cross the border! The border crossed us!”
NO UNCLE SAM’S GULAGS ON OCCUPIED APPALACHIAN LAND
The story of the South-western US is a story of brutal military conquest, cultural eradication, ethnic apartheid, and the construction of an occupying totalitarian police-state. The same statement is true of Appalachia. “Imperialism is not the creation of any one or of any group of states. It is the product of a particular stage of ripeness in the world development of capital, an innately international condition, an indivisible whole, that is recognisable only in all its relations, and from which no nation can hold aloof at will. ” (Rosa Luxemburg, The Junius Pamphlet)
In other words, we are living in a global empire of money, controlled by computerized police surveillance and weapons of mass-slaughter, but also by salaries, mortgages, taxes, rent, and other forms of extortion. No clear distinction can be drawn between American Indians, diasporic Africans, Chicanos, Hawaiians, and Puerto Ricans in the US and Tibetans and Uyghurs in the PRC, Basques in Spain, Arabs in Israeli-occupied Palestine, Tamils in Sri Lanka, or Irish Catholics in Northern Ireland.
104 PEOPLE HAVE DIED IN I.C.E. DETENTION CENTERS SINCE 2003 (Source: WSJ 08/18/09)
The racist Harrisonburg Daily-News Record, of course, reports only on the white nationalist, petit-bourgeois “opposition” to the proposed immigrant detention center in Brandywine, West Virginia. One white settler articulates her objections to the plan: “I think bringing in 1,000 illegal immigrants will drastically change our community forever”. Another who is quoted says “If the building of the prison is allowed to happen, life as we know it will cease to exist,” and invokes jingoistic anti-islamism by reminding us that “the present administration in Washington is looking for places to transfer terrorist prisoners from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba”. Another says “Let the politicians put this wonderful institution in their county”. (Source: “Detention Center Opposed”, Harrisonburg Daily-News Record)
It goes without saying that this example of pseudo-journalism totally discounts and ignores the experiences of the detainees themselves, thereby dehumanizing illegal immigrants. Also dehumanized by proxy are the millions more (over-proportionately New Africans, Latinas, American Indians, East-Asians, and working-class / rural whites) trapped in prisons (including “immigrant detainment centers”) across the US for “crimes” as fictitious, irrelevant, and intrinsically rooted in the ideology of state-monopolization as smoking a joint, owning an unlicensed firearm, practicing oral sex, committing unauthorized redecoration of our desolate landscape, and re-appropriating funds and materials violently stolen from us and our Mother Earth by capitalist conglomerates.
Unsurprisingly, ineffectual opposition to this new center is allowed, but removed from a holistic view of our global political crisis, (which is ultimately a crisis of capital and social domination) and, like always, presented as an atomized “single issue” crusade. This mentality must be overcome – the subjugation of immigrant detainees and other prisoners by guards and other staff is connected to the subjugation of wives by husbands, employees by bosses, prostitutes by pimps, children by the education system and abusive parents, the elderly and sick by bureaucratic medicine, laboratory test-animals by scientists, the general public by police, and the Earth by industry.
Redneck Liberation, United with our Latina Sisters!
Contrary to what some racist whites may believe, our Appalachian home has already been “drastically change[d] [...] forever”. Forests of centuries-old trees, twelve feet in diameter, have been cleared away by the timber industry, causing the irreparable collapse of the Appalachian eco-system. Entire races have been wiped out forever. (For example, the Senedo.) Entire valleys have been drowned by hydro-electric dams, first built by FDR and Truman as an allegedly eco-friendly alternative to coal-mining. Coal barons tricked myriad small-farmers into selling the mining-rights away to their properties, further desecrating the Earth’s skin. Everything from pumas to deer hunted to extinction. And now, with the pioneering of mountaintop-removal coal-mining, whole mountains remain only as grey, gravel-encrusted craters.
We can’t help but laugh at those who refer to the immigration of Spanish-speaking workers as a “drastic change” to a geographic region scoured by the Civil War and cannibalized by subsequent decades of industrialization. The implicit class-treachery, however, in allowing pathological racism to drive oneself to lynch others over a minor civic infraction (equivilant to cheating on tax reforms) such as immigrating illegally; this is no laughing matter. In fact, it makes us sick.
As working-class, Southern, rural whites, how are we any different? Are we any less dependent on the system for survival, or vise versa? Are we any more respectful of our tyrannical government and its inane laws? Is our culture any less “mongrelized”? After all, it’s a very common sight to see rednecks adorn themselves with dramatic American Indian motifs (such as dream-catchers and shirts depicting wolves, bison, and other indigenous animals) or break into outbursts of excessive joy and exuberance over the Redskins kicking the Cowboys’ asses. This is quite telling in a region where most people who identify as “white” have at least one eighth or one sixteenth Cherokee (or other American Indian tribes) in their blood.
We Appalachian whites, although we benefit from white-skin privilege, are often ourselves identified as only semi-white by derogatory terms such as “redneck” and “white trash”. From the beginning, a divide was drawn, segregating Scotch-Irish “hillbillies” from “high” Anglo-Saxon culture. One Yankee industrialist described Kentucky hillbillies as “rather yellow and cadaverous-looking, owing to their idle and shiftless ways”, before noting somewhat optimistically (and tellingly, from our perspective) that they at least make good workers. (Source: Harper’s Magazine, 1891) George Washington described the Shenandoah Valley’s residents as “a parcel of barbarians and an uncouth set of people”, and, of poor white settlers in general, he said; “as ignorant a set of people as the Indians”. (Source: quoted in “The Whiskey Rebellion: Frontier Epilogue to the American Revolution”) In 1899, the president of Berea College asked “whether ther mountain people can be enlightened” or if they “must [...] melt away like so many Indians”. One Reconstruction-era missionary described Southern whites as among “the worst housed, the worst fed, most ignorant, most immoral” races. Other words of discription for Appalachian hillbillies from historical sources include “mutant race”, “half-savages”, not “white enough”, and descended from “degenerate” Celtic “racial stock”. (Source: “The Legacy of Applachian Scholarship”, Wilma Dunaway) Recently, the Global Exchange of San Francisco described Appalachia as “the third world within the United States”. With that in mind, whose side should we be on? Our fellow prisoners, or the warden? Those who eat with us at the servants’ table, or those who eat for us?