“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”
– Dr. Martin Luther King

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., like all great visionaries, is remembered not so much for his courage, his determination, and his ability to inspire and lead, but ultimately, for the power of the ideas and things he created – or perhaps, more to the point – illuminated — that continue to outlive him. King is forever linked in a pantheon of visionary leaders like Moses, Ghandi, Bolivar, who took us to the promised land, but didn’t make it themselves. The fact that they didn’t arrive at the destinations that beckoned them, though sad, was somehow right. In a world of opponents and at the very least, naysayers, it was proof that the power of their ideas could survive without them. King knew that. On April 3, 1968, just one day before his death, he gave his famous “I’ve been to the mountaintop” speech, telling his followers “I’ve seen the promised land,”  and concluded, prophetically, saying “I may not get there with you.”

In the darkest days of the Civil Rights era, militant racists sought to destroy the movement. Their tactic was terror. Leaders and footsoldiers in the battle for equality were assassinated.  Children were sacrificed, because of the color of their skin. Those who marched, and risked their lives, created a new chapter in American history. It was written with the blood of the Civil Rights Martyrs.

It was a time of reckoning for America. By most accounts, it was a war.  The stakes were nothing less than Freedom. In the summer of 1999, I made a documentary about the Civil Rights Movement, traveling across America, walking in the footsteps of those selfless men and women, who marched, spoke, organized and paved the way for equality and freedom — sometimes at the cost of their own lives. I traveled to Chicago and met up with Rev. Jesse Jackson, who was with Dr. King when he was cut down. “Those who died in domestic wars, not just foreign wars, they made America better,” he said.

In Montgomery, Alabama, the city where Dr. King had his church, I interviewed Morris Dees, Co-founder and Chief Trial Counsel of the Southern Poverty Law Center, who said, “The Civil Rights Movement was really a struggle to ensure that America live up to its promises of equality, written in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.”

On one side stood those who sought to abolish a century’s old, state-sanctioned system of segregation. I spoke to Rep. John Lewis, U.S. Congressman for Georgia, who marched and was beaten in the infamous “Bloody Sunday” march across the Pettus Bridge to Selma, Alabama. “These people literally put their bodies on the line, to make our country something better. Many of these young people went into the lion’s den. It was very dangerous.”

They clashed with an army of white supremacists desperately clinging to the last vestiges of their belief in white superiority. As in any war, there were casualties. But in this case, on only one side of the battlefield.

“We must never forget,” said Rep. Lewis, “that in our own country, in a short period of time, many of our citizens gave their lives, in another war, in another battle. And these people, these martyrs, didn’t receive any honors or medals. But they were fighting in a war, just as important as any war our country has engaged in abroad.”

As the death toll rose, the oppressed cried out for justice. But the brutality did not destroy the movement’s resolve. It only stoked the fires of freedom.

“Every time the blood of the innocent was spilled,” Rev. Jackson said, “every time a (civil rights) worker was martyred, it exploded interest in our struggle.

On April 4, 1968, a shot rang out in the Memphis night. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the leader of the Civil Rights Movement, was assassinated, as he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. The bullet that entered his face and exited his back made King a martyr. A life of flesh and blood, that had taken on mythic proportions, had come to an end.

But while King was the conscience and epicenter of the movement, there were other martyrs to its cause. Men and women who died in defiance. Children who died in innocence. Today, we remember, not just King, but everyone who sacrificed their lives for something many of us in America take for granted today.  Medgar Evers, who preceded King as the first leader of the movement and was assassinated, Viola Liuzzo, the Detroit housewife who drove down to Alabama to march from Selma to Montgomery, and was murdered when racists saw her giving a ride to an African-American who’d been in the march, Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley, Addie Mae Collins, Carol Robertson — the four little girls killed in the bomb blast of the 17^th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, Rev. James Reeb, Jimmy Lee Jackson, Vernon Dahmer – all killed by the Ku Klux Clan for their participation in the movement, and Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner, the three Civil Rights workers who lost their lives when Neshoba County (Miss.) deputy sheriff Cecil Price held them until members of Ku Klux Klan arrived and murdered them in cold blood.

“Find the cost of freedom, buried in the ground. Mother earth will swallow you. Lay your body down,” sang Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young in 1974.

Sadly, hauntingly, it still rings true today. Let us never forget.

Avatar half-tells a story we would all prefer to forget

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 11th January 2010

Avatar, James Cameron’s blockbusting 3-D film, is both profoundly silly and profound. It’s profound because, like most films about aliens, it is a metaphor for contact between different human cultures. But in this case the metaphor is conscious and precise: this is the story of European engagement with the native peoples of the Americas. It’s profoundly silly because engineering a happy ending demands a plot so stupid and predictable that it rips the heart out of the film. The fate of the native Americans is much closer to the story told in another new film, The Road, in which a remnant population flees in terror as it is hunted to extinction.

But this is a story no one wants to hear, because of the challenge it presents to the way we choose to see ourselves. Europe was massively enriched by the genocides in the Americas; the American nations were founded on them. This is a history we cannot accept.

In his book American Holocaust, the US scholar David Stannard documents the greatest acts of genocide the world has ever experienced(1). In 1492, some 100m native peoples lived in the Americas. By the end of the 19th Century almost all of them had been exterminated. Many died as a result of disease. But the mass extinction was also engineered.

When the Spanish arrived in the Americas, they described a world which could scarcely have been more different from their own. Europe was ravaged by war, oppression, slavery, fanaticism, disease and starvation. The populations they encountered were healthy, well-nourished and mostly (with exceptions like the Aztecs and Incas) peacable, democratic and egalitarian. Throughout the Americas the earliest explorers, including Columbus, remarked on the natives’ extraordinary hospitality. The conquistadores marvelled at the amazing roads, canals, buildings and art they found, which in some cases outstripped anything they had seen at home. None of this stopped them from destroying everything and everyone they encountered.

The butchery began with Columbus. He slaughtered the native people of Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic) by unimaginably brutal means. His soldiers tore babies from their mothers and dashed their heads against rocks. They fed their dogs on living children. On one occasion they hung 13 Indians in honour of Christ and the 12 disciples, on a gibbet just low enough for their toes to touch the ground, then disembowelled them and burnt them alive. Columbus ordered all the native people to deliver a certain amount of gold every three months; anyone who failed had his hands cut off. By 1535 the native population of Hispaniola had fallen from 8m to zero: partly as a result of disease, partly as a result of murder, overwork and starvation.

The conquistadores spread this civilising mission across central and south America. When they failed to reveal where their mythical treasures were hidden, the indigenous people were flogged, hanged, drowned, dismembered, ripped apart by dogs, buried alive or burnt. The soldiers cut off women’s breasts, sent people back to their villages with their severed hands and noses hung round their necks and hunted Indians with their dogs for sport. But most were killed by enslavement and disease. The Spanish discovered that it was cheaper to work Indians to death and replace them than to keep them alive: the life expectancy in their mines and plantations was three to four months. Within a century of their arrival, around 95% of the population of South and Central America had been destroyed.

In California during the 18th Century the Spanish systematised this extermination. A Franciscan missionary called Junipero Serra set up a series of “missions”: in reality concentration camps using slave labour. The native people were herded in under force of arms and made to work in the fields on one fifth of the calories fed to African-American slaves in the 19th century. They died from overwork, starvation and disease at astonishing rates, and were continually replaced, wiping out the indigenous populations. Junipero Serra, the Eichmann of California, was beatified by the Vatican in 1988. He now requires one more miracle to be pronounced a saint(2).

While the Spanish were mostly driven by the lust for gold, the British who colonised North America wanted land. In New England they surrounded the villages of the native Americans and murdered them as they slept. As genocide spread westwards, it was endorsed at the highest levels. George Washington ordered the total destruction of the homes and land of the Iroquois. Thomas Jefferson declared that his nation’s wars with the Indians should be pursued until each tribe “is exterminated or is driven beyond the Mississippi”. During the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864, troops in Colorado slaughtered unarmed people gathered under a flag of peace, killing children and babies, mutilating all the corpses and keeping their victims’ genitals to use as tobacco pouches or to wear on their hats. Theodore Roosevelt called this event “as rightful and beneficial a deed as ever took place on the frontier.”

The butchery hasn’t yet ended: last month the Guardian reported that Brazilian ranchers in the western Amazon, having slaughtered all the rest, tried to kill the last surviving member of a forest tribe(3). Yet the greatest acts of genocide in history scarcely ruffle our collective conscience. Perhaps this is what would have happened had the Nazis won the second world war: the Holocaust would have been denied, excused or minimised in the same way, even as it continued. The people of the nations responsible – Spain, Britain, the US and others – will tolerate no comparisons, but the final solutions pursued in the Americas were far more successful. Those who commissioned or endorsed them remain national or religious heroes. Those who seek to prompt our memories are ignored or condemned.

This is why the right hates Avatar. In the neocon Weekly Standard, John Podhoretz complains that the film resembles a “revisionist western” in which “the Indians became the good guys and the Americans the bad guys.”(4) He says it asks the audience “to root for the defeat of American soldiers at the hands of an insurgency.” Insurgency is an interesting word for an attempt to resist invasion: insurgent, like savage, is what you call someone who has something you want. L’Osservatore Romano, the official newspaper of the Vatican, condemned the film as “just … an anti-imperialistic, anti-militaristic parable”(5).

But at least the right knows what it is attacking. In the New York Times the liberal critic Adam Cohen praises Avatar for championing the need to see clearly(6). It reveals, he says, “a well-known principle of totalitarianism and genocide – that it is easiest to oppress those we cannot see”. But in a marvellous unconscious irony, he bypasses the crashingly obvious metaphor and talks instead about the light it casts on Nazi and Soviet atrocities. We have all become skilled in the art of not seeing.

I agree with its rightwing critics that Avatar is crass, mawkish and cliched. But it speaks of a truth more important – and more dangerous – than those contained in a thousand arthouse movies.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. David E Stannard, 1992. American Holocaust. Oxford University Press. Unless stated otherwise, all the historical events mentioned in this column are sourced to the same book.

2. http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-miracle28-2009aug28,0,2804203.story

3. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/dec/09/amazon-man-in-hole-attacked

4.http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/017/350fozta.asp

5. http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/2802155/Vatican-hits-out-at-3D-Avatar.html

6. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/26/opinion/26sat4.html

When you enter the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, and are about to enter the tour, you have a choice of doors. One is marked “Prejudiced.” The other door is marked “Unprejudiced.” But the second door, if one checks, is locked. The point of this is to immediately get you in touch with your own inner bigot. In truth, we all harbor prejudice, to one degree or another. And no matter how nice a person we think we are, we’re fooling ourselves if we think otherwise.

So when Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, admitted – admitted! – to authors of a book about the last presidential election, that he had thought Barack Obama was a viable candidate, because he was “light-skinned” and had “no Negro dialect,” he wasn’t referring to his own prejudice. He was referring to the prejudice that all of us have. He was saying that if a black man were going to be president, he would have to be someone who was less black – someone who wouldn’t activate the latent bigotry inherent in white America. (He wasn’t concerned with blatant bigots or racists, as they would have never voted for a black man in the first place.)

Interestingly, Senator Joe Biden, made similar comments, with the same reasoning, early on in the campaign. Mr. Obama understood the context of his remarks, and chose him as his Vice Presidential running mate.

Here’s another wrinkle on the black and white issue. Two years ago, when the light-skinned, non-Negro dialected Mr. Obama was eager to gain the votes of blacks, it was not uncommon for him to alter his dialect and mannerisms, depending upon whether he was addressing black audiences in South Carolina, or white audiences in New Hampshire. He understood that a certain kind of reverse bigotry was inherent in blacks, and needed to convince them that he was one of them.

And now, the Republicans calling for Senator Reid’s removal as majority leader are clearly engaged in playing politics. They point to the fact that the Democrats dethroned Sen. Trent Lott for a similar peccadillo.  The difference is, Mr. Lott said that Sen. Strom Thurmond, who was an avowed segregationist for much of his career, would have made a great president. In other words, he was praising a man who was an acknowledged bigot. A man who would have divided America even further. Given those circumstances, Mr. Lott’s fall from grace was justified.

Mr. Reid is no more bigot than you or I. He simply pointed out that we have a long way to go towards becoming colorblind. President Obama understands that. And that’s the reason he correctly accepted his apology.

So think about it. Are you ready to acknowledge your own inner bigot? Sen. Harry Reid is no more bigoted than you or I. Recognizing the prejudices we all have, great or small, is a first step in the right direction.

The suicide bomber who blew himself up and killed seven C.I.A. officers has been identified as Humam Khalil Mohammed, a Jordanian physician. A double agent, who worked for the Jordanians, but also, it turns out, for Al Qaeda, where his loyalties obviously lay. While everyone is so shocked by the fact that he was, in death, and in terror, exposed as a double agent, to me, the shock is that he was a doctor. To Westerners, who hold life sacred, the notion of killing oneself, whether for a cause or out of despair, is anathema. To practitioners of Judaism, the person who dies of suicide has so betrayed the God-given gift of life, that he or she cannot be buried in a Jewish cemetery. Their soul is stained for eternity. So the idea of a doctor committing a suicidal act of terrorism is even more hard to fathom.

The Hippocratic Oath is an oath historically taken by doctors swearing to ethically practice medicine. It is widely believed to have been written by Hippocrates, the father of western medicine. Among several verses, a physician pledges to prescribe regimens for the good of his or her patients and never to do harm to anyone. Unfortunately, Mohammed was not the first, and probably not the last doctor to become a jihadist and turn away from helping people, in favor of killing others, including himself. Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda’s No. 2, whom the C.I.A. was trying to get to through Mohammed, trained as pediatrician. Hamas leader in Gaza George Habash and Mahmoud Zahar also trained as medical doctors.

The great psychologist Carl Jung, father of analytical psychology (also known as Jungian psychology), believed that at the most fundamental level, human beings operate and are motivated by one of two emotions – love or fear. When they endeavor to act out of love, others, as well as themselves, benefit. When they act out of fear, a primary emotion that spawns negative secondary emotions like anger, and ultimately hatred, no one benefits. In the instance of the aforementioned doctors who have eschewed their pledges to do no harm and help others, we are witnessing a profound tragedy on the world stage. They have made a stand, and the message is clear. They have chosen hate over love. For the jihadists, practitioners of radical, fundamental Islam, and would-be soldiers in an unfortunately growing army of haters, they have set the worst example possible.

There is a pearl of wisdom in the Talmud that says, “He who saves a single life, saves the world.” The whole world? Yes. That person sets an example, that can be followed by others, who will continue setting examples. So by extension, everyone plays a role in saving the world. Love begets Love. Hate begets Hate. What kind of world do you want to live in?