Repeating history...

I’ve been thinking a lot about history lately. Perhaps it’s because this past weekend, Old Fort Niagara hosted its annual War of 1812 re-enactment and I live close by. Maybe it’s because events in the Middle East and the Ukraine have resurrected thoughts about “ethnic cleansing,” and the Holocaust. Or it could just be that events at home in places like Ferguson, MO put me in mind of the paramilitary “policemen” who were responsible for the deaths/disappearances of hundreds of thousands in places like El Salvador, Argentina, or Chile in the 1970s and ‘80s. Maybe it's just that we're entering another election cycle. Whatever the cause, I find such thoughts fill me with anxiety.

As Americans, we seem to either turn a blind eye to comparisons or to willfully rewrite history in such a way as to gloss over the ugliest and blackest parts of our traditional story. Some states have gone so far as to rewrite history textbooks so there is virtually no mention of slavery, the Pinkertons and the struggle for workers’ rights or women’s rights. The Civil Rights Act gets a couple of lines, the Voting Rights act none at all in some texts (leaving the door wide open for the Court to cut the legs out from underneath it just in time for another election cycle). What is glorified in EVERY American textbook is the heroic “entrepreneur.” Robber barons are no longer the bad guys who amassed their wealth using exploitative practices and enriching themselves at the expense of underpaid workers slaving away in horrendous conditions. Now they are the models for today’s corporate giants – the Koch brothers and others like them whose philanthropy involves only the manipulation of the electoral process and contributions to political parties, or the endowment of chairs in law schools for ultra-conservative professors who craft law review articles endorsing the corporate position or the conservative position on everything from health care to gun control. Such corporations have no national loyalties, moving both jobs and earnings offshore to increase profits and decrease tax liability - taxes that pay for everything from education and defense to health care and roads and bridges.

In 2010, the far right wing of the Republican Party, supported generously by the Koch Brothers, successfully lobbied and politically engineered the death of a progressive community organization known as ACORN. From the noises made on the right, you’d have thought ACORN had billions of dollars, millions of members and an agenda designed to undercut democratic voting in America. The organization, which never consisted of more than 200,000 low to moderate income families, was a community group which worked together for social justice in 75 cities campaigning for better schools, health care and job conditions as well as actively working to get out the vote for progressive candidates. The two “filmmakers” who conducted the “sting” on ACORN were conservative activists Hannah Giles and James O’Keefe who targeted the organization purposely because of its huge voter registration efforts. Groups like ACORN can receive federal funding because of their efforts to increase voting and the highly edited films released by FOX news resulted in the loss of funding to ACORN pending investigation, its eventual bankruptcy and ultimate disbanding in 2010. Later investigations at the state and federal levels cleared ACORN of any impropriety or misuse of funds and ACORN won its lawsuit against the filmmakers for creating a misleading impression of voter fraud.  The victory came too late. Conservatives paid no attention to that fact and have used ACORN’s alleged activities and the misleading films as the excuse for limiting voting rights for minorities, requiring stringent voter ID policies, reducing voting hours and the number of booths in certain minority precincts and other means of limiting the Democratic or Independent vote. Then corporations and their superPACS won the biggest victory of all in 2010 – the Supreme Court ruled that corporations are people with an unlimited right to free speech – AND they declared that money in the form of political contributions is a form of free speech. The floodgates were opened for big money to buy our freedoms.

Most Americans think that the Tea Party movement was a grassroots uprising against more taxation, big government and threats to the Bill of Rights from liberals. It wasn’t – the talking points, the catch phrases, the sloganeering, even the baseless attacks on the President – were carefully orchestrated and fostered by ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council) – more about that in a minute - Americans for Prosperity (the Koch Brothers political arm and super PAC) American Crossroads (Karl Rove’s superPAC) and hundreds of corporate sponsors from AT&T, Exxon-Mobil, Koch Industries to WalMart. According to SourceWatch.org, “ALEC is a corporate bill mill. It is not just a lobby or a front group; it is much more powerful than that. Through ALEC, corporations hand state legislators their wishlists to benefit their bottom line. Corporations fund almost all of ALEC's operations.” At regular ALEC meetings, state legislative candidates, Republican governors, Republican Congressmen and Senators are given “mock” bills to introduce at both the state and federal levels. All the bills advance corporate interests at the expense of the environment, workers’ rights, decent wages, women’s rights, jobs, education and health. Often the bills are introduced exactly as written by ALEC executives. The flags are waved, the propaganda dispersed, the slogans authorized and the contribution checks written out to those campaigns most in line with ALEC’s agenda. Then the word drifts out to the “little people” – the grassroots folks – and rallies are organized to turn talking points into slogans – “they’re coming for our guns,” “Obama is a socialist” or “a fascist tyrant” or “the Bill of Rights is in jeopardy.”  Wrap all that up in a “God-fearing Christian” blanket and get it repeated by a major news outlet 100 times a day and you have a propaganda machine that is historically unparalleled with virtually limitless funding and access…until you look back at Nazi Germany in the 1930s...only in our case it is corporate interests rather than the state per se who controls the machine.   

The problem is too few Americans CAN look back at the events of the 1930s in Germany…at least not from what they learn in school. In my own experience both as a teacher and as a Mom, American history focuses on the Revolutionary War, the Civil War (to a greater or lesser degree depending on whether you live in the North or the South of the country), Reconstruction with an emphasis on the failure of former slaves to understand democracy properly, the great Industrial Age and the success of entrepreneurs like Carnegie, Rockefeller, Mellon, J.P. Morgan, Gould, Vanderbilt and yes, even then, the Koch family. With luck, students might get to the Great Depression with all the emphasis on events here at home and almost no mention of what was going on in the rest of the world. High school history usually ends with the attack on Pearl Harbor and the ultimate American victory. What was going on in Germany is not the focus of study of the 1930s. In some texts, the rise of the fascist states and the Holocaust are barely mentioned.

Surveys of adult Americans prove time and again that we do not understand the distinctions between fascism, communism and socialism and therefore people on both sides of the political aisle throw around labels without having an idea of what they are accusing the other side of being. Critical thinking is not only NOT taught in most high schools, in some states, like Texas, it’s actually banned.  The 2012 Texas Republican Party platform included the following – “Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.” Unfortunately, as Texas goes (textbook wise at least) so goes the rest of the south who have little choice but to buy the same texts from the same publishers. That same platform endorsed the repeal of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and a ban on reauthorizing it.

Thomas Jefferson by Rembrandt Peale

At the very beginning of our American saga, Thomas Jefferson (the great hero of the right but only with regard to the 2nd Amendment), recognized how critically important it was for the American people to be well-informed and knowledgeable. Introducing a bill called, “Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge” in 1778, Jefferson said, “…experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms, those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny; and it is believed that the most effectual means of preventing this would be, to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large,...” Such illumination is nowhere apparent in the United States today and that, I fear, may doom us to a repeat of a history – the rise of an oligarchical dictatorship under the guise of the “people’s will” in a “democratic” election that is nothing but a farce bought and paid for by powerful corporate interests. “Those entrusted with power” are too often merely puppets dancing to the manipulations of moneyed interests and we are already seeing what kind of perversion that can create. If we love this country the way most of us claim to, it behooves us to be informed, to seek the truth, to expose the lies for what they are and to take back our country from those whose interests are antithetical to democracy. 

Old Fort Niagara

http://fineartamerica.com/featured/old-fort-niagara-lianne-schneider.html

Tell Your Truth...

"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to remain silent" 

"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of conscience to remain silent."

Edmund Burke

A Stalwart Beacon

http://www.lianneschneiderart.com/DigitalPainting/Enchanted-Seas/i-7959cMB/A

I've tried not to be too political in this blog - though as a very politically minded person, that has been very hard to do. I've tried to focus on art, poetry, philosophy, self-awareness and avoid antagonizing my readers or polarizing people any more than they already are. But we've entered into another political election cycle and I just cannot be silent. Too much is at stake. 

"Money talks" and as the Supreme Court has ruled, corporate money is a form of political speech that cannot be limited. So these days money talks loudly - louder than the little guys on the other side of the political spectrum who can't buy television time or governors or congressmen with their $100 contributions. But the Koch Brothers and others of their ilk can buy just about anything - their money has bought and paid for Tea Party candidates, the governors and legislatures of too many states, Congressmen and women of both parties who will vote for corporate tax breaks, XL pipelines, fracking, the auctioning off of public parks and recreation areas, cutting food stamps and an end to Medicare and Social Security among other things. 

Last week, John McCain and Lindsay Graham appeared on virtually every weekend talk show and, of course, were all over Fox News, expounding the ridiculous notion that President Obama should have stayed in Iraq and now should go back in with troops (not advisors) to finish what he failed to do. Hardly a single journalist called McCain on his statements - no one mentioned directly to him that it was George W. Bush who had negotiated the timeline for our withdrawal from Iraq and that the Iraqi government not so politely insisted that we go. No one reminded John McCain that he was among the first to vote for a war based on lies to begin with and he supported Bush's withdrawal timeline. 

And yet, the propaganda drumbeat gets louder and louder that it is the poor who are to blame for the nation's ills, the immigrant children, or a president who has been prevented at virtually every turn from accomplishing anything he set out to do. Daily Rupert Murdoch's "news" crew beats the anti-Obama drum - against medical care, over Benghazi, for fracking, blaming the president for wildfires, the civil war in Iraq - you name it. But there was an almost deafening silence when the House Intelligence Committee (chaired by a Republican and dominated by that party) reported no administrative wrong-doing in Benghazi. This same propaganda machine forgot to mention as they hyped the lawsuit John Boehner brought against the President that they were suing Obama for not doing what they fought 57 times to prevent him from doing - implementing every aspect of the Affordable Care Act. You heard right - they are suing him for NOT implementing a bill they tried 57 times to overturn. 

So how is it that these lies, distortions, obstructions and outright unconstitutional behaviors have become the "truth" that a majority of Americans hear on the airwaves every night whether they watch Fox News or not? I have a theory - and that is that the more wrong, the more deceptive, the more distorted the political harangue is, the louder it gets and the more often it is repeated. Lies are quickly perceived as truth if they are repeated often enough and by people who are recognizable as so-called experts in the field. Note how often a certain phrase will be repeated by every single commentator on certain networks - it's as if the editorial board hands out flash cards at the morning meeting with instructions to get that phrase into every broadcast as often as possible. Yesterday, the catch phrase was "cigar store robber" in reference to the young man shot to death in Ferguson, MO. While it may well be that Michael Brown had robbed a convenience store of some cigars a few minutes before his death, the officer who stopped him and ultimately shot him did not do so in relation to the robbery. Even the chief of police admits that - the officer stopped him for walking in the street. How often will you see that "truth" on Fox News? Whether Mr. Brown robbed the store or not, all you will see from this point on is a carefully orchestrated character assassination to justify a completely unjustified shooting. Last I heard, stealing cigars was not a death penalty offense. 

But that can't be the only reason that lies, distortions and propaganda have taken over our political dialogue or our newscasts. Actually, it's our own fault. We have become lazy and apathetic. Critical thinking is no longer required in school or in life. Opinions are treated as fact and seldom double-checked unless it's to refute an opposing view on Facebook. Most importantly, we think there is little we can do to offset the power of big money or to set the record straight about their agenda. And so we choose silence - and we rationalize that as avoiding the negatives or confrontations in our lives. I did it myself - purposely refrained from using my voice to support the truth as I find it, to oppose the lies and distortions, to fight against the many injustices and environmental disasters conservative big money is willing to perpetrate against us all for the sake of greed. 

Listen to this brilliant young teacher explain what he teaches about the value of truth in his classroom. Please be patient while this loads - I promise that it's worth the wait. 

Clint Smith - poet/teacher

04:22 minutes · Filmed Jul 2014 · Posted Aug 2014 · TED@NYC

I cannot remain silent any longer. I've noticed in the past 9 months that more and more people are becoming animal rights advocates, posting daily about the horrors perpetrated against animals and speaking out daily on their behalf. I applaud that - but...I would like to see even one quarter of that passion directed toward the political injustices both around the world and here at home that we close our eyes and ears to because it's too controversial, confrontational or adversarial...or because we just don't think we can be heard over the loud cacophony, the drumbeat of propaganda that rationalizes or justifies those actions in the name of greed and a political ideology that supports it. We can be heard - but only if every good person is willing to speak up, speak out, act in concert with others. Only if the objective is truth - not more propaganda. Only if we are willing to do the work to find the truth and not simply accept what some loudmouth tells us is true. I don't have all the answers - and my truth may not be yours in some cases. But ultimately there is such a thing as TRUTH and we can find it if we want it badly enough.  

If we truly love this nation, then we should know its history (warts and all), we should know the meaning of the words we throw around so casually as indictments of the other side, we should understand the intent and the context in which our founding documents were written. We should know who paid for the law review articles redefining the first and second amendments to reflect a particular political agenda. There are more of "us" than there are of "them" - and together we can create a cacophony of our own.  I cannot stand silently by and watch the triumph of evil because I was too cowardly or too willing to appease in order not to rock the boat or offend anyone.