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Walk like a warrior
Reviewed by John Lapp
May 1 (AGR) — No snitchin; family first; each one teach
one; be productive: these are the basic RBG code. RBG is a concept that
Dead Prez created which stands for Revolutionary But Gangsta. Coincidentally
RBG (released on Mar. 30) is also the title of the long awaited follow
up to their 1998 Let’s Get Free album. In the six years between
the two albums Dead Prez have become veritable legends within activist
communities, playing shows in support of a variety of causes from a
free tour of South Africa to playing at the 2003 anti-FTAA protests
in Miami, Florida. The two are also very active in the Uhuru Movement,
a movement focused on the liberation of African people in the US and
throughout the world: “Uhuru means freedom,” according to
the movement’s web site www.inpdum.org.
This album also comes at the heels of two mix tapes the politically
charged duo released. The tapes were released on an independent label
and the two called themselves DPZ, fearing that their record label Sony,
might try to sue them for a breach of contract. The mix tapes were definitely
underground gems; poking fun at mainstream hip-hop (mix tape volume
2 was titled Get Free or Die Trying, an obvious jab at 50 cent’s
Get Rich or Die Trying) and attempting to break out a whole onslaught
of a brand new revolutionary MCs.
Dead Prez’s newest release is certainly worth the long wait. It’s
songs deal with a wide array of issues facing oppressed communities
everywhere, from terrible minimum wage jobs to alcohol addiction. In
“W-4” (an obvious reference to government welfare forms) the
two express the daily pain that poor families go through everyday in
order to stay alive. “What you know bout bein’ po’ seein’
most of yo kinfolk be on dope? Ain’t nobody in the hood got no
hope in this fucked up system and that’s why we don’t vote.”
Another personal song is entitled “Fucked Up” in which the
duo describes the painful fight they’ve had to wage against alcoholism
and how important it is for people to not succumb to drinking if they
intend to make real change: “I used to have a thing for conyak,
nowah days I train for combat” is continually repeated as the song
fades out.
The album also includes two songs that focus on physical and spiritual
discipline. The track “50 in the Clip” is solely about the
importance of doing push-ups in order to be able to, basically fight
the police. “Way For Life” speaks to the oneness of mind and
body. The lyrics to this song are all about “stayin committed when
your hommies ain’t with it,” or basically, sticking to your
training even if it isn’t the easiest thing to do.
One of the shinning moments of the album comes at the end of the track
“I Have a Dream, Too” (a song about “turning drive bys
revolutionary”) they list a long line of people who have fought
back throughout history -- Assata Shakur, Leonard Peltier -- and end
the list by giving a shout outs to historical movements -- the Black
Liberation Army, The Zapatistas -- and then shout “Black and Brown
Power!” This simple display of love for past and present revolutionaries
who come from a plurality of ethnic backgrounds seems to dispel all
the ignorant white liberal rhetoric of Dead Prez being “racists.”
RBG features some very unlikely rap legends; such as the track “Walk
Like A Warrior” that features Krayzie Bone from Bone Thugs-n- Harmony.
KB’s rhyme is surprisingly revolutionary, ”and when we put
em [cops] they graves, we toss them a donut and tell em we don’t
surrender!” An even more unpredictable match up comes in the last
track on the album, a remix of the song “Hell Yeah” that has
“king of New York” Jay-z rapping the last verse, in which
he tells the story of selling drugs in order to eat and getting hounded
by the police, he shouts “you fucked up the hood, nigga right back
to you!” at the end of the track.
Dead Prez’s newest album may upset some of the white liberals who
buy it; because it talks about killing cops, and because of the concept
of embracing gangs and trying to turn them into revolutionaries. And
to that these supposed progressives have to consider two things: the
Black Panther Party saw it’s largest recruiting base in the masses
of young armed gangs that had proliferated with the increases of ghetto
populations; and Dead Prez really couldn’t care less what you think,
they are committed activists and renowned musicians.
Derrick Jensen: hopeless and free
By Dave Pike
May 3 (AGR) -- If you are hoping the war in Iraq will stop and
peace come to the Middle East, you are doomed. First, you are presuming
the combatants are able to stop. You are also presuming we live in a
cultural framework that allows for peace. Lastly, you are even ceding
your possible personal intervention in the matter by hoping instead
of acting.
When author Derrick Jensen spoke at Malaprop’s café and
bookstore in Asheville Sunday, Apr. 19, he spelled out some of his major
critiques of civilization in a similar manner. Preferring to speak on
his book-in-progress dealing with bringing down civilization and cheered
by the crowd to do so, he asked people to begin recognizing the structure
of our culture and the terrible destruction demanded by its design.
Jensen’s idea is that when someone starts by breaking the unwritten
rule of looking at and even talking about the underpinnings of the dominant
culture, i.e. civilization, that person collapses an entire wall hiding
a history of pain, a murderous present and a very doubtful future. For
people who think “we” have progressed as a society, Derrick
Jensen’s work as a critic of civilization will either destroy their
worldview or entirely confuse them when the all too common mechanisms
of denial kick in.
Jensen draws clear analogies of present-day culture to aspects of the
Nazi Third Reich — indeed, fascism, as per Benito Mussolini, is
only the merger of state and corporate power. He cited how when Third
Reich doctors operated in the concentration camps, they reportedly did
their best to aid and comfort the prisoners. They apparently did whatever
they could for those in their care, everything except question the over
lying framework of forced labor until death, conscious de-humanizing
of whole ethnic groups, and the mass eugenics program of The Final Solution
for creating a master race.
Today, corporate and state power are as merged as ever, the master race
could be seen as the human race and the new eugenics as being carried
out through genetic engineering. However, human life, too, seems to
be nearly as cheap as animal and plant life, particularly when you’re
not ‘white’ or ‘male.’ No, the master race is not
even a living being; it’s the ludicrous race to more, bigger, and
forever.
Jensen defines civilization as “a way of life characterized by
the growth of cities” and cities as “a grouping (not a community)
of people large enough to require the importation of resources.”
Showing the trend, the Population Reference Bureau in Washington DC
reported in the year 2000 that about 47 percent of the world’s
population, about 2.8 billion, lived in urban areas. This coming up
from 3 percent in 1800 and using a definition of urban different than
Jensen’s.
The planet may, by optimistic estimates, be able to sustain the current
population— the current human population that is. Everything else
would have to be bent to the yoke of industrial culture. And the managers
will have to act quick with ocean fish stocks crashing, species extinction
speeding up, global climate change an accepted fact by most of the world’s
researchers, dead zones forming in the oceans, and the world’s
phytoplankton — a foundation for life on earth — now showing
a fall.
Derrick Jensen explains his books A Language Older Than Words, The
Culture of Make Believe and the upcoming one on taking down civilization
as a trilogy dealing with the psychological, social, and physical aspects
respectively of an irredeemable culture. In dealing with this subject,
and the actual reality as a survivor of sexual and physical abuse by
his father, he gives real advice. Instead of wanting to kill himself
in the face of such a desperate situation, he points out the utter beauty
of life. The culture is fucked; life is beautiful. He also recommends
allowing the pain to come and learning to live with despair along with
all the other emotions human beings are capable of. His experience is
that the immense pain kills hope and when hope dies, new freedom comes:
“When you give up on hope… it kills you. You die. There’s
a wonderful thing about being dead which is that once you’re dead,
those in power can’t touch you anymore — not through promises,
not through threats, not through violence itself. Once you’re dead
in this way, you can still sing, you can still dance, you can still
make love, you can still fight like hell, you can still live because
you are still alive. … The socially constructed you died, the civilized
you died, the manufactured, fabricated, stamped, molded you died. The
victim died.”
Jensen also rejects the other common reaction to a dying world—partying—as
simply a failure to truly love, an avoidance. Love, he points out, does
not, however, imply pacifism. Passionate love actually gives reason
for defending those loved by all necessary means. As people living in
this system to varying degrees, we all have some amount of blood on
our hands already. Dealing with this, realizing the violence used by
the powers that be to keep the status quo and choosing our actions consciously
and strategically is essential. “We are in a very complex and difficult
situation; It is our responsibility and our joy to attempt to discern
right action. Don’t be blanket ‘this is good, this is bad.’”
This and his exhortation to give up on hope, show his willingness to
really go out on a limb. Asking people to go to the point of personality
(ego) breakdown in the hope they will not turn into cold-blooded killers
could be brave, except Jensen claims to not hope for anything. He acts
as his own agent in the world as an author of heretical books. How did
he make it through despair to hopeless compassion? How do so many Palestinian
bombers, ghetto gang-bangers, and US Marines find murder so easy?
I know I have also walked the clear-cuts, seen the ovens at Auschwitz,
had my sister mangled by a late-working car culture, my aunts and uncles
pushing smiles through life with cancer. My luck was and is the privilege
of having time to contemplate and concentrate my awareness of what matters
most to me. Rich and poor may be an enforced delusion of the economic
system as Jensen claims, but faith creates reality for the faithful.
I guess that’s another limb to go out on.
Self-proclaimed ‘Recruiter for the Revolution’ Derrick Jensen’s
work can now be found on Chelsea Green Publishing and also includes:
Listening to the Land, Strangely Like War: The Global Assault on Forests
with George Draffan and Walking On Water: Reading Writing and Revolution.
His other book in progress is on surveillance and the machine culture
due out this summer.
Stage takes on the stupid box
Stefania Milan
Rome, Italy, May 1 (IPS) — Ambra Jovinelli, an old theater
inaugurated in 1909, is filled with spectators looking forward to
an evening away from the ‘stupid box’. The crowd is oddly
uniform in its diversity: an array of intellectuals and alternative-looking
thirty-and forty-somethings.
Political theatre is not new in Italy, but it has flourished in response
to the control wielded over private and public television by Prime
Minister Silvio Berlusconi.
The show ‘Radio Clandestina’ (Clandestine Radio) by Ascanio
Celestini is a political monologue spattered with witticisms and scorn,
a rumination on how Rome came to be what it is today, and updated
with constant references to current politics.
Celestini’s play is only one among a dozen plays listed on the
billboards.
“The actor is a story-teller who provides the spectators with
a context to better understand the facts,” 25-year-old theatre-goer
Chiara D’Ambros told IPS. “In politics it is difficult to
know where the truth lies. After the representation, you have no answers,
but more questions, different points of view. This is why I go to
theater.”
It was called the narration theater until four years ago. “After
the Italian political situation changed, it has been renamed political
theater,” 33-year-old Celestini said.
“We reveal history through real stories,” Celestini said.
” Our theater is the product of the investigative stories that
Italian journalists do not do any more, especially on TV. People need
theater exposing real facts now because there is an empty space left
by the media.” Italy was rated only “partly free” in
a survey published Apr. 28 due to increased media concentration and
subsequent political pressure. This is the first time since 1988 that
the media in a Western European country has been rated “partly
free.” The survey was conducted by Freedom House, a non-profit
organization based in Washington.
Berlusconi controls 95 percent of Italian television, according to
the European Federation of Journalists.
“Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has been able to exert undue
influence over the public broadcaster RAI,” says Karin Deutsch
Karlekar, managing editor for the survey. “This further exacerbates
an already worrisome media environment characterized by unbalanced
coverage within Berlusconi’s enormous media empire.”
Berlusconi’s extensive family business holdings run three of
the seven largest private television stations (Rete 4, Canale 5 and
Italia 1), one newspaper (Il Giornale), the biggest Italian publishing
house (Mondadori), and a film production house (Medusa). His business
also has a significant portion of the advertising market.
As head of government, he controls also the three public channels
(RAI).
Some actors and journalists have been “silenced” under his
charge. A satirical actor Sabina Guzzanti whose program was cancelled
on public television after the first show (dedicated to a funny analysis
of Berlusconi’s ‘conflict of interests’), migrated
from television to stage.
Paolo Rossi, who created a show on the improbable theme of the Italian
Constitution has also moved to stage.
Michele Santoro, who ran a political talk-show on TV, and the 84-year-old
analyst Enzo Biagi had their shows cancelled in 2002 ”because
they make criminal use of the public television,” Berlusconi
said then.
In April last year, Reporters Sans Borders, an international association
that defends press freedom worldwide, published a report on the “Italian
anomaly,” asking without success for reinstatement of the dismissed
journalists.
Following calls for reform, Italian legislators introduced the controversial
“Gasparri law” last year in a reference to Communications
Minister Maurizio Gasparri. The bill sought to allow increased cross-ownership
of broadcast and print media.
Critics asserted, however, that the law was tailor-made to get around
a court ruling adverse to Berlusconi’s media empire. The law
reversed a decision that would have pushed Berlusconi’s company
to move its station Rete 4 to less profitable satellite television.
The bill was presented in Parliament 19 months ago, but was rejected
by the opposition five times. It was finally passed, but vetoed by
Italian President Carlo Ciampi in December.
The Gasparri Law was finally endorsed by the Parliament Apr. 29. But
until 2006 Rete 4 is safe and Berlusconi’s empire is not at risk.
“Just a few days before World Press Freedom day, Italian lawmakers
have reinforced the most flagrant abuse of principles guaranteeing
media diversity in the western world,” says Aidan White from
the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) in a press release.
It is not clear whether the European Union will accept the law as
it is. On Apr. 20, the European Parliament asked the European Commission
to legislate urgently to curb media concentration within the Union,
mentioning Italy as a negative example.
Fortunately the concentration is considerably less in the print media,
which continues to be critical of the government. And in theater “you
can hear many voices, not just one,” says Chiara D’Ambros.
Iraq: The Moon is Down, again!
By William Marina
Apr. 23 — Art, films and literature often offer insights
that help to explain human situations perhaps better than does history.
My favorite book on the integral interaction between occupiers and
those being occupied, is John Steinbeck’s The Moon is Down
(1942), shortly thereafter made into a film starring Cedric Hardwicke,
Lee J. Cobb and Henry Travers. I first saw the film in the 1950s,
but it is not shown these days.
It is a story about the German invasion of a small town in Norway
in 1940 and the developing reactions of the inhabitants as the Nazis
seek to insure that the mines nearby continue to send coal to the
Third Reich’s war machine. Readers this year may be tempted to
replace the term “Norway” with “Iraq,” “coal”
with “oil,” and “Germany” with the phrase “Coalition.”
The story even has a “fifth column” Ahmed Chalabi-like character,
who sets up the town for an easy occupation, imagining he will be
dearly beloved by the people.
The central confrontation of the book, however, is between Mayor Orden
and the German officer in command, Col. Lanser, a Wehrmacht veteran
of occupied Belgium over two decades earlier. Lanser urges cooperation
rather than violence, which will lead, he warns, inevitably to more
violence on the part of the Germans.
Woven through the plot are the increasingly violent acts of “the
people.” Early on, Lanser’s mind wanders back to a friendly,
old , gray-haired Belgian lady who killed 12 Germans with a 12 inch
hat pin before she was caught and shot. He still retains the hat pin
at home.
Of course, the violence begins at once, and the Germans retaliate
on a much larger scale on the Norwegian people. At the same time,
many of the German troops, yearning to go home and for some companionship,
begin to develop various symptoms of psychological stress.
The Germans, like imperial conquerors back to the Romans and beyond,
sought to legitimatize their occupation in the eyes of the people.
They understood that quislings wouldn’t work in the long run.
John Lukacs devoted a large part of his book, The Last European War:
September, 1939-December, 1941, (1976) to demonstrating how they failed
in a attempt to establish legitimacy over the nations of occupied
Europe.
“Legitimacy,” to paraphrase, Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Ah,
there’s the rub!” Incidentally, the movie version of the
book opens with a quote from Roosevelt using the resistance of Norway
to explain the meaning of W.W.II.
At the end, the quisling, having obtained authority from the Nazi
command in Oslo, orders Col. Lanser to execute the old Mayor and the
town doctor if the people begin to use the dynamite, dropped by parachute
by British airplanes, to destroy the mine. As the explosions begin,
the two are executed as the Mayor repeats an old speech he used many
years before - the last words of Socrates to the Athenian people.
It is clear the occupiers, despised by the people, are in for a long
and bloody time ahead.
In a New York Times op-ed piece (4/11/04), “Nasty, Brutish and
Short,” Thomas Friedman, mentions the word “legitimacy”
four times and flip-flops on whether it can be bought with cash or
compelled with force before finally concluding that the US cannot
do so. He adds that with all of the retaliatory killing, “we
have a staggering legitimacy deficit.” I wonder if legitimacy
is something you can have in gradations as he suggests. Either one
is an occupier, or one is not!
As reported in The London Telegraph, (4/11/04) among our major partners
in the so-called “coalition,” the British senior officers,
speaking anonymously, have already expressed a growing sense of “unease
and frustration,” about American tactics in the occupation. Part
of the problem, a British officer said, is that Americans tend to
see the Iraqis as “untermenschen,” the term for “sub-humans.”
He continued: “The US troops view things in very simplistic terms.
It seems hard for them to reconcile subtleties between who supports
what and who doesn’t in Iraq. It’s easier for their soldiers
to group all Iraqis as the bad guys. As far as they are concerned
Iraq is bandit country and everybody is out to kill them.”
British rules of warfare allow troops to open fire only when attacked
and to use the minimum force necessary and at identified targets-not
a massive use of firepower in urban areas, as do the Israelis on the
Palestinians and now American troops on the Iraqis.
In short, The Moon is Down again.
Source: OnPower.org.
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