The Hungarian Past and Present: Contested Ground

October 26, 2016

Over the course of the past few years, I have visited Prague’s “Museum of Communism,” Budapest’s “House of Terror” and Tirana’s “National History Museum” and “Bunk’Art 2.” But these were no museums; they were ideological forcing-houses.

Here tourists and the next generation of Czechs, Hungarians and Albanians become more self-assured of their touristified, pro-capitalist, “end of history” view of the world in all of its infinite complexity.

Whose ‘House of Terror?’

I visited an ahistorical (as in anything but historically accurate) museum in Budapest’s bustling, vintage city center today. The “House of Terror” — as it is called — claims to recount Hungary’s history under Nazi and Soviet occupation.

There was a two hour long tour — complete with haunted house music and imagery — through the “horrors of communism.” The fascist invasion is conflated with the Soviet arrival and defeat of the Nazis as though the two chapters formed one continuous tragic episode in Hungary’s history. How can the genocidal invaders be compared to Hungary’s liberators who acted out of self-defense to defeat the Nazis?

Thousands of tourists lined up to cement their triumphalist view of Western exceptionalism and victory over the evil force of communism. There was a sensationalist presentation of a macabre interrogation room, replete with a collage of thousands of photos said to be “the victims of Soviet purges.” Interviews with survivors of gulags were played over and over.

There is no question every social transformation has its excesses. The changes wrought on Hungarian society by the arrival of the Red Army were radical, as they dug up and overturned feudal and anti-Semitic roots. But only through the prism of the rich — fearing a second emboldening of the sidelined producing classes — would everything be presented as completely negative.

There is much to consider. Not since the 1919 Hungarian Soviet, had the propertied classes’ monopoly over land and production been challenged. Before 1945, 40 families controlled the land while 3,000,000 peasants lived as landless serfs. It is the heirs of this class rule who today lament the earth-shattering changes spun in motion by WWII and the arrival of Soviet workers’ bayonets.

Unresolved Questions

Hungary’s four-decades long existence as a workers’ state begs many critical inquiries. What were the balance of class forces on the ground in Budapest after the Red Army trounced the Nazis and their Hungarian counterparts and underlings? Did the Soviet Union act too severely in its intervention against the Hungarian counterrevolution in 1956? If the U.S. lost 1/6th of its entire population to a Nazi onslaught, would it not also seek to secure its borders against a rearmed fascist threat? Was it wrong to punish and in some cases execute Nazi leaders and collaborators who had helped to execute 400,000 Hungarian Jews? Were there bureaucratic deformities in Hungary and how did they manifest? What toll does bureaucratic degeneration take on society when weighed in comparison to the complete monopolization of a society’s wealth by a small coterie of expropriators?

These are legitimate questions for critical-minded thinkers to take up. The science of historical materialism seeks to soberly weigh and evaluate every unique, dynamic situation. Sensationalism — the “museum’s” trademark — predictably shied away from these uncomfortable questions.

The revolution was not completely home-grown. Nor was the Hungarian holocaust completely foreign inspired. The analyst must weigh the dialectical interaction between inner-Hungarian class forces and the Global Class War that was at the heart of post WWII international relations.

‘The End of History’

When the tour was complete, tourist guides handed out brochures urging foreigners “to continue the fun” and join a pub crawl. The homeless panhandlers looked on passively, pondering what stage of history will take them into consideration.

Under the Hungarian Workers’ State, private property was nationalized. Everyday people benefited from socio-economic rights, such as the right to a home, a job and medical care. A well-balanced view of post WWII Hungary must weigh both the challenges and the gains of the expropriation of the expropriators. Failure to understand this context leads to a lazy perpetuation of the anti-communist myth of “the evil Soviet empire.”

Today, Hungary is again grappling with the return of fascism —both in crypto form under its leader Viktor Orban, and with the growth of outright fascist groups such as Jobbik (Movement for a Better Hungary). The nation’s living standards are atrocious and the ruling sectors have taken advantage of this to blame refugees and promote xenophobia.

There is a direct link between the past and present. The class that controls the present controls the past in hopes of perpetuating their control long into the future.

This “museum” deletes facts and ignores context because its designers arrogantly profess “the end of history.” The reign of AT&T, British Petroleum and Kentucky Fried Chicken is presented as the culmination of every Eastern European fantasy and is not to be questioned. They fear the possibility of Hungarian children learning to dream beyond free markets, free trade and free-dumb.

History has only begun to breathe and the reign of the silenced is forthcoming. Every dog has his day. Then, and only then, will such propaganda, masquerading as history, take its rightful place in the scrap heap of history. Until then, Hungary’ rulers should be honest and call this museum what it is, Budapest’s House of Anti-Dialectics.

Stirrings in Vienna

October 21, 2016

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Five centuries ago, Austrian laborers built the 1,411 room Schönbrunn palace to house “the royal family,” the Hapsburgs. Today, in our world, there are still emperors and plebeians; they have just been assigned new names.

Today’s global order of refugees and right-wingers, the refused and the ravagers, the confined and the benighted is but a continuation of the epoch of empire. OXFAM (Oxford Committee for Famine Relief) released a study this year revealing that 62 individual billionaires now own as much wealth as 3.6 billion people, or half of humanity.

The social implosions and explosions are pending. Revolutionaries prepare for the eventuality of a class showdown, redirecting both destructive and constructive energies into the channels that will bring peace to future generations. What we are living today is not peace; it is its diametrical opposite; greed.

Mark our words: the day will soon come when the Schönbrunn palace is reopened to house the refugees of imperialist-fueled wars in Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria and beyond. The uprooted families will find a home here until they can return peacefully to their homelands and reparations can be restored to tune of billions of dollars. Reparations are merely the returning of what was stolen over the course of centuries from Africa, the Arab world and the rest of the “third world” to fund empires of a bygone past and build decrepit, soulless artifacts — such as the Schönbrunn palace.

In Search of White Gold (Part III.)

October 18, 2016

7

“Shuh No one Knows”

Every morning we took our places on an assembly line to harvest “white gold.” We all played our role on the conveyor belt — sifting, cleaning, and mixing the golden crop — though it was never clear when cryptic healing formula would be ready.

The nutritional sorcerer claimed we were harvesting hundreds of thousands of dollars of monotonic gold that he discovered in the Rocky Mountains. According to Jubb’s research, this compilation of small atom clusters consisted of ruthenium, copper, iridium and other elements that penetrated and rejuvenated the cell in a revolutionary way. White gold was said to repair the DNA like no other mineral concoction. There was a whispering campaign around the night fires to reassure the infidels that this treasure chest would soon bring us all great wealth. It seemed strategic for my co-conspirators to seek part-time work in the meantime, before we cashed in on our pots of white gold.

One Kitchen, One Ego

The owners of the home were the well-to-do, old money Arizona families, the Schners and the Shnedleys. They established strict rules about the rental, unsuspecting that a mad scientist was opening their property up to a commune of rutabaga fermenters and urine drinkers. Jubb’s wandering family lived under the threat of being discovered and kicked out by the police at any moment.

Though he had set up shop on rented property, with someone else’s backing, Jubb called all the shots. To venture outside of his routine brought consequences. When the patriarch was not in the kitchen, Sitting Moose made cherry electrolyte lemonade with the Vitamix. The Life Foods chief stormed into the kitchen and yanked the blender out of his hand, insisting “Sitting Moose: electrolyte lemonade is not sustainable for the entire collective.”

Nothing was transparent at our fort. We tasted raw strawberry cheese cakes, quinoa lasagnas, quinergy pizzas, probiotic beverages, white gold and evacuees (a grounded power of root crops and vegetables) but we never learned what went into these elaborate concoctions. He was careful to protect his exact measurements and concoctions, remaining forever paranoid that someone else might master his potions. I picked up the tidbits that I could but so much of what we ate remained shrouded in secrecy. After the fact, we learned that our cheeses were cultured with the most lively Life Food of them all, breast milk. But we never learned how to culture and integrate the healthy enzymes into the almond and pumpkin seed-based cheeses. We feasted on plates that cost $50 at one of Manhattan’s two or three raw food restaurants. But no recipe was ever written. Why was Dr. Jubb maintaining a monopoly over the healing secrets?

There was only one meal, dinner. It was served any time between 9 pm and midnight. Jubb then served an extravagant desert, such as coconut-based ice cream, peach cobbler or blackberry strudel. Sitting Moose and Raining Dance infamously woke up early to raid the refrigerator and stock up on the previous night’s left overs. This was the only hour they could sneak into the kitchen unchaperoned.

We lived off of 100% Life Foods at the campsite. No other food was tolerated.

‘Maybe we are a Cult’

We rarely adventured off of the land unless the local healing community or University of Arizona organized public events for the good doctor to speak at. We were his private army of Life Food elves. With our name tags and varying commands of the Life Foods gospel, we were at his beck and call. We passed out samples of Brazil nut milk, life dogs, and fermented drinks. As we signed people up for consultations, cleanses and orders, I realized there would never be any follow up. There was no centralism nor professionalism. There was only the promise of now.

Jubb was a charismatic, humorous speaker with a unique dominion of the English language. His invention of words and new grammatical rules was limitless, eloquently incorporating them into sentences that had a life of their own. Here before us in the flesh was a born entertainer. He was on this earth to take the stage.

Upon cleaning up after dinner we sat around a table under the stars posing questions about quantum physics and consciousness, cosmic numerology, social anthropology, & the proper mechanics of exercise. We listened to his whirlwind responses that navigated every topic under the sun. Is there a book he has not read? Is there a question he has not pondered?

His response took us to Atlantis, Sri Lanka, Sweden and beyond. Fifteen minutes later, he took a puff on his peace pipe, having sown more confusion and curiosity than clarity. When he took his habitual puff, Sea of Sands chimed in with two sentences to address the question the twenty year-old had originally posed about what it means to derive energy, survive and thrive off of the Amazonian basin, precluding the need to consume food. Happy Face claimed he had survived off of the land for two years without eating. A camera crew and news network tracked his journey. Sun gazing afforded him the energy he needed to perform exercises that built up his muscles. Such elaborate tales kept the jaws of the clan members agape, hungry for more.

Lost in the Desert

Each personage has their own spiritual outlook, their own eccentricities and their own imbalance. Some people were open to reason. Others were closed and accepted every teaching as unchallengeable. There were those who realized that they were contradictory individuals and sought to come to terms with that. Others had no interest in plunging deeper into their shortcomings. The latter were a dangerous breed. They spewed out lesson after lesson but when it came time to travel deeper into their own story, how quickly their defense mechanisms surfaced! It was a waste of breath to engage souls who were not open to growth. These were not breatharians. These were exhalarians, blocked off from inhaling growth and healing.

There were Jubb prodigies who regurgitated his words and mimicked his style. This parroting of Jubb’s teachings and mimicking of his eccentricities presented an awkward picture to outsiders. Others learned not to lose sight of the teachings because of the all too human flaws of the teacher.

Even when Jubb was in the big house, Fire Glacier remained loyal to the holy Life Foods gospel. He had not reached out to his family in eight months. An older companion challenged Fire Glacier: “Young Blood: your messiah sleeps in the big house. You don’t have to talk like that to us out here in the forests. Think for yourself. Take it all in but remember who you are too.” The elder nutritionist encouraged him to reach out to his family back east in Pennsylvania, who he had become estranged from for the past year. How worried they must have been, knowing only that their son had hitchhiked west to join a raw foods commune.

The all-knowing Jubb claimed that the organic tobacco and weed were good for the lungs. Yet those who followed his ways remained short of breath in the canyons. The youth-enhancing lifestyle that was said to produce real life Benjamin Buttons involved no physical activity. Jubb set the pace and if something was out of whack, he just explained it away as part of eco-sterilization and other incomprehensible theories. He put fourth convoluted concepts that no one dared challenge so as not to confront the imbalance of it all. The great orators, spokespeople and proselytizers did not believe that listening was also a great skill.

Disharmony

Spectral Gaze and Humble Elk made a beautiful couple but they were constantly at each other’s throats. Because Spectral Gaze was Filipina from Hawai’i and Elk was Puerto Rican, they made matching t-shirts for their children that said “Hawai’a-Philirican and Proud.”

The past four years were a series of ebbs and flows for the Hawai’a-Philirican family. They emitted a complete sense of resentment and tension. Anyone in their presence could feel the disconnect. They had a four year old girl, Purple Tree, a three year old boy, Fury Vision and a newborn boy, Selfless.

Spectral Gaze was aloof and detached. Her trauma and mental illness hid behind her escapes; she only responded to life when she successfully “bummed” marijuana off someone. Even then, the couple argued over the joint and how much should be allocated to who. Her silence — pregnant with self-hatred — threatened to explode and hurt someone. Would she hurt one of her children but make it look involuntary? Spectral Gaze reminded us that hurt people take their pain out on those who are closest to them and most vulnerable.

For over a year, the couple bounced from home to home. They took advantage of unsuspecting families who took them in with their three beautiful children for a weekend that quickly turned into a month. The couple launched into arguments blaming one another for their plight. When questioned by their hosts about when they were leaving and why they do not pursue work opportunities, they lamely repeated: “This is what the universe has given us.”

Toxic Yoga

Sprawling, open fields were nestled in between awesome, fire-orange canyons of jagged geometrical proportions. This was the land of the grazer, the adventurer and the hunter of destiny.

Humble Elk and I descended into the lush verdant valley for shaman training. Barefoot and bare-chested, only Humble Elk’s arrogance separated him from the earth. He swore he had everything figured out. We began two separate yoga practices. We exchanged light banter as we breathed through different poses.

In reverse warrior position, I inquired about his plan for his family. Launching into a diatribe that blamed everyone else for their plight, his voice pierced the mountains. Instead of reflecting on a logical plan, his penned-up fury against his partner, Spectral Gaze, bellowed out across the valley: “How can she reason? She doesn’t even poop! Compact fecal matter! Compact fecal matter! That is the problem! Until she poops, we’ll never understand one another!”

The root causes of a relationship, in dire straits, was reduced to a lack of bowel movements.

Gobsacked, I nearly fell out of the downward dog I had cartwheeled into. This would have been hysterical were our dear healer not completely sincere in his denunciations of his non-pooping companion. Convinced I could never make headway before his one-dimensional stubbornness, I retreated back into my breath as he continued his ranting. I left him alone with the breathtaking mountain landscape, capable of absorbing his swarming anger better than I was.

Banking Reform

Dr. Jubb resented when people focused solely on the nutritional aspects of his teachings. Recently, he put forth the theory that all social ills were rooted in the banking system. In a hushed, conspiratorial tone the shaman emerged from the darkness, passionately pledging war on the banksters: “Mate: We will not rest until the people reclaim the money supply!” As his tone intensified, the audience tuned in to the latest pronouncements on the pending appropriation of the banking industry. Estranged from reality, the communards fervently swore to topple the Rothschilds and their banker cliques. Here assembled before my eyes was a revolutionary army like no other I had ever seen.

At any moment, the chief spiraled off onto sweeping tangents, pledging to lead a moratorium against the bankers that would be the basis for a social revolution. “All we have to do is check the box for a moratorium. It is a box, mate. Check check.” I looked around at the burnt-out crew, sipping their eighth tea of the day and puffing on their ninth joint. I was worried about humanity’s fate if it was in their hands. Still, Jubb’s inflections and eyes bedazzled the audience. Even if you knew it to be pure hullabaloo, his emotions drew you in as they rose and contracted.

The teacher had a volatile side as well. I committed a blunder one night. Through another one of Jubb’s students, I learned that a couple in Idaho sold 60 pound tubs of raw honey for $189. Because two pounds of unheated honey sold for $30 dollars, buying in bulk made sense. Salmon Valley honey had been my supplier for the past few years. I shared this brilliant deal and passed the information along to others. I received an ear full from Jubb for divulging the secret of the treasure chest of unrefined honey. Jubb insisted that they were his exclusive contacts, not to be shared with anybody. He denounced Whirlwind and I for daring to pass along “his contacts.” “Mate you must tell Whirlwind to never give out those contacts. That is nooooot correct mate. I do not expect this to happen again.” Incandescent from the anger, he lectured all of us on respecting his command over the Life Foods mothership.

The Human Connection

Paranoia and inner-compound arguments were common. The Life Foods movement never grew beyond a few dozen followers spread out across the globe because there was only room for one messiah. Other self-anointed saviors emerged to set up their own kingdoms. The unwritten rule was one massive ego per encampment.

I stayed clear of any disagreement or confrontation, focusing on the human connections that united us all. I recognized that this was not a temporary, entertaining escapade for everyone. I listened to everyone, drew out their story and offered insights on how to go deeper into forgiveness, healing and self-love, with the ultimate aim of rising up on the system that was responsible for our suffering. I questioned the worth of individual cleansing if it was disconnected from the healing of the unhealthy, absurd society we lived in. The point was not to withdraw permanently, like vegan hermits into the mountains, but to remain within the insidiousness, sharing Life Foods healing so that others could take power back over their health. Until the nutritional world was connected to the broader mission of overthrowing oppression and seizing power, who did it serve?

I trusted that material reality would prove to be a superior hypnotist and guide Jubb’s troops away from dead-end conspiracy tales towards the only denouement that can ever liberate us all from our common foe — struggle, class struggle.

He Never Stopped Teaching

As soon as Dr. Jubb reached for his pipe, I had my questions ready: “How do we understand schizophrenia and heal it?” “Tell us about autism” “Is there any cancer we cannot heal?” The wilder the question I posed, the more unpredictable the response it elicited. Dr. Jubb’s pedigree and knowledge were inspiring. It was bedeviling to gather at his side for hours and only understand a fraction of the words I was enmeshed in.

The roving, playful medicine man had no interest in stability. Nature was his element. He was in Nebraska one week, and then suddenly hitching a ride off to the Rocky Mountains. He made a brief appearance in Tasmania until he made an impromptu trip to set up shop in Mexico or Malaysia. He lived on the run. He hid out and reappeared. Some of the forward-thinking campers urged him to open a bank account. He refused. He advised his followers not to pay taxes or work. He lectured on common law and how to outsmart the courts. He designed documents to win land grants from the government. But he, who would lead us all over the horizon towards a new human epoch, did not have his own house in order. He, who charged exorbitant prices for all of his products, did not have a dime to his name.

Was this Spiritual Materialism? What working-class person could spend hundreds of dollars on cleansing products? He was uncompromising about his prices but only sold an occasional jar of almond milk or probiotic rutabaga. Giving away his delicious recipes in the course of the extravagant collective dinners and lectures he hosted, the control freak was at the same time a sentient, giving being.

We were all part of Something Special

It was unpredictable who might make an appearance at the Eagle campsite. We hosted a full spectrum of visitors — leading scientists, a local medicine man, actors among them Woody Harrelson, the model Donna Karan, music producers, a contestant for Mr. Universe and patients recovering from cancer or Lyme disease. Hip hop performers from Wu Tang Clan and other rap groups dropped in for a visit, looking for their own healing and answers. That was the fun of it all. You never knew who would wander in over the canyons next.

I asked Jubb to reveal the names of some of his past clients. He retorted: “Mate do you think this is about me mentioning the prime ministers, Olympic athletes and kings that I have worked with? You want me to drop names? That is not who I am mate.”

Despite his inner-contradictions, from which none of us are free, David Jubb was a warm, kind, generous, sweet man. I felt his love for all of us in his gentle words and actions. He took care to integrate everyone into his Life Food operations. One minute he read us a poem before shifting to pick up his drum and flute or retrieving a bottle of Black Gold and teaching us how to massage one another’s’ injuries. There was never a dull moment.

Jubb paid attention to everyone and met them where they were at. The partially literate Sitting Moose became his video man. He beamed with pride after putting together a video clip about sun-dried sea salt and it’s functioning within the cell. I asked Sitting Moose where he was a few months ago and how he felt now. His response was: “A year ago I was fresh out of prison and addicted to Crystal Meth. Now? Well, fuck I’m bored and freaked out by all the hippies but I know that I am onto to something worth checking out. Since I was homeless and hungry, I said what the fuck!”

A unifier, Jubb had a way of bringing us all together. Reading people’s energy and bodies like a book, he popped up out of his chair mid-sentence and attended to someone’s aching injury. A story teller of the first sort, did he separate fact from fiction? One dawn, as the dew spread across the front lawn, the omniscient chief described how Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky were Brooklyn school boys the Rothschilds had whisked into St. Petersburg in order to keep Russia in the hands of the bankers. As a student of Russian history, I wondered if I should laugh or if he sincerely believed his own wild tales? He was dead serious. Had the years of hallucinogenic experimentation altered his mind?

We huddled around the camp fire one last night. Jubb’s drum transported us back to the ancestral Lakota homeland. It felt like I was back at my aunt and uncle’s house where my family congregates to celebrate Christmas. There was a deep sense of community and an overpowering feeling of love and solidarity. I had to leave and return to my son, my classroom, my home and my reality; it was tough to pull away from this parallel universe.

One month after my departure, the Schners and the Shnedleys, the old German scions of wealth who owned the property, contacted the state police, reporting that a druggie commune had squatted on one of their properties. The police descended on The Return to the Eagles’ Nest and the eviction began shortly after. Once again the road called. Jubb and his faithful followers departed into the night. Where would the shaman set up his next encampment?

In Search of White Gold (Part II.)

October 6, 2016

10

The Mystique

Exactly who was I was searching for a few hours north of 114 degree Phoenix?

Some looked upon Dr. David Jubb as visionary; others wondered if he was a madman.

Jubb was a shaman in the Toltec tradition. He came of age along the untouched, pristine shores of Tasmania. He earned a PhD as a neuro-behavioral physiologist at NYU. He was a pioneering thinker on agrarianism, colloidal biology, ancient civilizations, futuristic dwellings, non-surgical removal of neo-plasm (cancer) and other diverse topics. His books Secrets of an Alkaline Body and The Lifefoods Recipe Book, among others, are brilliant reads. Internationally recognized as a pioneering microscopist, hematologist, cytologist, naturalist and linguist, Jubb has two post-doctoral degrees, deepening what is known about the digestion of different foods at the cellular level.

Hushed whispers circulated the fireside, embellishing the legend. Dr. Jubb, or Happy Face as he was known in the healing world, worked out in in 177 degree saunas. He had a 26 inch waste. He trained princes and prime ministers. Mr. Universe came to study in his kitchen. He practiced breatherianism for a year in Brazil, consuming nothing but water and lemons. Buried deep in the Amazonian basin, deriving energy purely from sun-gazing and his own breath, the immortal Pacific Islander put on ten pounds over the course of months. He trained Brad Pitt for Fight Club. After completing his gall-bladder and liver cleanses, participants discarded their eye-glasses; their vision was corrected. When he discovered he had cancer, he trekked across Eastern Africa, surviving off only his own liquids. His “breakfast of champions” consisted only of urine therapy and the contents of his pipe. He led ayahuaska retreats in northern Mexico. The real-life, most-interesting-man-in-the-world, was an enigma.

Cloud Two Children — of the Cree and Lakota people—adopted Dr. Jubb and spiritually mentored him. The Cree split away from the Seminole nation because they refused to stay on the reservations assigned to them by the U.S. government and continued to break away west in search of freedom to practice their ancient ways. Dr. Jubb’s spiritual journey brought him to live among the maroon nation. It was a point of contention among the native elders that a person from outside the lineage of Crazy Horse and Two Feathers — two of the ancestral leaders of the nation — deemed him a spiritual son of the Cree. Cloud Two Children re-baptized him, “Happy Face.”

‘We are not a Cult!’

A wide spectrum of personalities flocked to Jubb in search of themselves.

Each character in the compound — Dancing Swan, Medicine Brook, Raining Dance, Firefly, Dream Walker, Healing Stream — had their own story. No one addressed anyone else by their legal name. According to Jubb, in the Toltec tradition, the healer bestowed names upon everyone in the community that captured a certain irony about their characters. It was a bluff of sorts or what Dr. Jubb called “the secret of the trance.” I wondered if this was a harmless practice or cultural appropriation.

Here at the Eagle camp, no one knew my real name. After two weeks of my presence, Jubb grabbed my hands and squeezed his eyes shut. He pressed his temple to my heart. In the thirty-sixth year of my life, he re-baptized me; my name was Lame Wolf.

Dancing Swan

At twenty, she was the oldest of eight sisters who grew up in Columbus, Ohio. Her mother became a neglectful pain pill addict and drowned one of her sisters. Landing in foster care, Dancing Swan was filled with resentment. Abandoning Ohio, she headed west, eventually finding room and board with an alcoholic friend. Searching for a permanent escape, Dancing Swan had grown morbidly obese and began chain smoking. She had never known a home but had never ceased to search for one. The non-judgmental affection and acceptance she received at the Eagle’s Nest ensured her loyalty to the outcast community.

Fire Glacier

At a suburban New Hampshire high school, Fire Glacier dabbled with marijuana, coke, mollies and pain pills. Spiraling out of control, by nineteen, he was a full-fledged heroin addict. After three of his childhood friends overdosed, Glacier landed in rehabilitation. Seeing the writing on the wall, he kicked the drugs cold turkey and then hit the road in a hippie Volkswagen van with four companions he met online. They vowed to only drink freshly made juice on the open road. After a year of liquefied cleansing and traversing the American wilderness, Glacier met some like-minded youth in Nebraska who were students of Jubb. The unlikely clan hopped in the graffiti-decorated van until they tracked down Jubb. Fire Glacier never looked back. He has been following the Life Foods lifestyle for six months.

Sitting Moose

Standing an intimidating 6’3”, 230 lbs. of steel and anger, Sitting Moose’s social background turned him into a tough, ruthless man-child. Deprived of a childhood in Portland, Oregon, he learned what it meant to be a man when he was eight years old. Bastardized when the state locked up his parents, his two older brothers—lieutenants in a white supremacist motorcycle gang, Hitler’s Helpers—raised him. The Trump-admirers tried to hire Sitting Moose as one of their enforcers but he turned them down because, in his words, “I hate everybody equally.” The 20-year-old wanderer was not invested in the Eagle’s Nest but rather saw the camp site as a place to lay low until the smoke cleared from the crimes he had committed.

At twenty years old, Sitting Moose had lived and suffered more than most adults three times his age. He was an underground cage fighter on the reservations of Oklahoma. He followed his beloved older brother, Rocko’s footsteps until the Mexican Mafia disappeared him. He went on the run. Imprisoned for over three years in Oregon for attempted murder, his young age saved him from a lifetime prison sentence. Some days he disappeared for hours without alerting anyone, hitchhiking fourteen miles into Sedona to gobble down McDonalds.

I laid down on the ground alongside Sitting Moose in the darkness of the forest, trying to drift off to sleep to the rumblings of javelinas. Just as I closed my eyes the first night, he said “Oh yo Wolf, you hear that noise? Those are wild pigs looking for food. All right good night dude.” I didn’t sleep a wink that night.

Sea of Sands

Sea of Sands was Chowdury Bikram’s assistant for ten years. Uneasy because of the megalomania of the founder of Bikram Yoga, she teamed up with Jubb in Eastern Africa. She was the only communard who did not smoke marijuana and tobacco. As the chief organizer of The Return to the Eagle’s Nest, she set the tempo for the rest of the camp. She was in charge of Dr. Jubb’s writings, videos and speaking engagements. Without her, nothing moved and the camp descended into hippie hedonism. She brought class to an otherwise chaotic, dysfunctional scene. When several Lifefoodarians lost their minds, she supported them. A mother figure, Sea of Sands had one foot in Jubb’s world, the other in reality. She shadowed the larger-than-life alchemist in the kitchen, documenting his alkaline and colloid secrets in hopes of helping him organize the next Life Foods recipe book. Seeing Sea of Sands as a successful and stable figure, some observers wondered why she offered her talents to the “burnt-out” scene.

Healing Stream

An enemy of bathing, his name did not fit his persona. Healing Stream’s oversized shorts fell beneath his beltline. He cut his hair like “his messiah,” Jubb, shaving his hair on the side but leaving a patch of hair on the top that he put in a ponytail. A young wanna-be wizard, Healing Stream broke out of his mother’s basement and found his new home in Sedona. I dubbed him Polluted Stream and Stinky Bear for obvious reasons. If anyone wanted to make the case that we were being brainwashed and cultish, Healing Stream seemed to confirm this argument. His robotic like behavior and regurgitation of Jubb’s lessons gave birth to many rumors.

Healing Stream’s strength was that he was a junior mad scientist. Brilliant, he was the only Life Foods disciple who grasped the intricate teachings and made them intelligible to the rest of us. This was very helpful. Although he came across as a know-it-all and regarded himself as Jubb’s personal assistant, when he spoke to others alone, he let his guard down. He was just another young man searching for himself. When his arrogance was in retreat, his humanity emerged.

Rainey Toad

This 62-year-old woman was a raw foodist who left Arkansas to hit the hippie trail. In the 1960’s, she trained under Ann Wigmore, the mother of living foods. In order to heal from Lyme disease, she invested $5,000 to contract Jubb’s services and establish the Eagle’s Nest. At times Rainey Toad was the sweetest, little grandma. In other moments, when she ran out of her magic pipe, she turned into Grumpy Toad. Holding the keys to the big house, she decided who could take a shower inside the home and who could not. Even in our parallel universe, money regulated human relationships.

Doc Precise

Forced to commute two hours uptown to school because of the danger in his neighborhood, Doc Precise wasn’t supposed to leave his block in South Jamaica, Queens, never mind the state of New York. Coming of age a few blocks away from 50 Cent, the young Trinidadian, Doc Precise, shattered some teeth and had his share of teeth shattered. Jubb’s one-time weed supplier, emerged as a Life Foods apprentice. The antithesis of a hippie, he proletarianized Life Foods like no one else. With the flare of a hip hop artist and a performance poet, he explicated the chemistry of fruitarianism and popularized the lifestyle. Eloquent and dynamic, like Sea of Streams, he lent credibility to a clandestine lifestyle, guiding others through the reversal of heart disease, not through pseudoscience but through hard work. While others lost their minds and flew the coup, Doc Precise remained calm and consistent. As tempests of gossip and intrigue consumed others, Doc P didn’t flinch. His catch phrase, whenever someone left the compound and goodbyes were exchanged, was “Peace Brethren, Catch you in the whirlwind.”

Raining Dance

Raining Dance was from 129^th street in Harlem. Many of his contemporaries and siblings fell victim to the concrete jungle. He was raised to be nutritionally conscious by a single father. By his mid-20’s he became a loyal follower of Dr. Jubb. One Saturday, Raining Dance was walking down 116^th with a massive backpack that contained his Vitamix and glass jars of Life Water, fizzy shots and home-fermented kombucha.[1] The police stopped him, frisked him and handcuffed him for no reason. Because of his training in Jeet Kune Do — the martial art form made famous by Bruce Lee — they could not wrestle him to the ground. The police officer’s brutality was caught on camera and uploaded to social media for the world to witness. For a breathless two minutes, seven police jostled and beat a man whose hands were handcuffed behind his massive backpack. Ten officers then manhandled him as he laid face down in the concrete. This was the same man who taught my nine-year-old son to offer a cucumber up to any police officer who ever mistreated him. He fled New York to avoid the dreadful bureaucracy of a police summons, court and a warrant. He never looked back. He took his life foods expertise on the road. With razor-like exactitude, he talked people through every detail of cellular rejuvenation and liver flushes. He was to Jubb what Malcolm was to Elijah Mohammed.

A drifter, he had no plan for his four young children, his partner and his mother. They lived on the road for the past three years, camping out across the Midwest and Southwest, escaping reality and ACS (the Agency of Child Services).

At the End of the Rainbow

This is a partial portrait of our community. Others came and went. Empty Nest, Rainbow Hawk, Proud Turtle, Light Frog and others appeared out of the night, searching amidst the bewildering galaxies. The Eagles’ Nest attracted young women and men with dreams who found themselves stuck, chasing illusions. There were common threads of family trauma and drug abuse that ran through the stories. Staying up to smoke organic tobacco and marijuana, until the sun rose, they woke up in the early afternoon. Perplexed by their own material reality, Jubb’s followers saw the millennial leader as their escape. Jubb was their messiah and he promised everyone that the Eagles’ Nest was sitting atop half a million dollars of a mysterious mineral known as white gold.

[1] Life Water is 8 ounces of structured water mixed with baking soda, Epson salt, castor oil, MSM, and apple cider vinegar. The breakfast of champions!

In Search of White Gold (Part I.)

October 1, 2016

14

In the summer of 2014, the nomadic Tasmanian shaman, Dr. David Jubb set up a mobile healing camp at the foot of Arizona’s picturesque canyons, which he named “The Return to the Eagles’ Nest.” Jubb is the designer of a nutritional lifestyle — Life Foods — that had transformed my life and extended my youth by years. I drifted across the United States to join the clan of herbivorous desert nomads. In the upcoming weeks, I will be publishing installments of what I lived that magical Arizona summer, alongside the founder of Life Foods healing. In my account, I changed the names and certain details about the encampment to protect the privacy of the individuals I camped out with in Sedona.

Chasing the Enigma

I had been following Jubb for years, watching and studying his zany, comical ramblings on infinite topics revolving around natural living. A perplexing figure — reminiscent of the Toltec shaman Don Juan — I partially owed my reinvention to Dr. David Jubb.[1] His teachings helped set my nutritional freedom in motion. In 2009, one of Jubb’s mentees, Thomas the Cleanser, coached me through my own destarchification. I learned to prepare and consume natural foods based on organic fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds. Within days, I felt lighter and sharper than I had in years.

Lured by this mysterious aura, Life Foods students traversed oceans and continents to camp out with Jubb in the mountains of Sweden, the plains of South Africa, the reservations of Oklahoma, the cornfields of Nebraska and the hot springs of Colorado.

I was hot on Jubb’s heels in Morocco over a year ago but missed him by days. The stories that emanated from Chefchaouen, Marakesh and Casablanca only contributed to Jubb’s allure and heightened my curiosity. When I learned that I was only a few hundred miles away from this sought-after healer, who was cultivating white gold—an arcane healing formula —in the canyons, I boarded a bus in Los Angeles bound for Phoenix.

A Lost Art Form

Sedona was twenty five miles outside of Flagstaff. No public transportation serviced Sedona. Upon receiving advice from the local owners of an organic coffee shop, I made a Sedona Please cardboard sign, in hopes of making it closer to my destination. I remembered my mother’s stories about hitchhiking across the Americas and Europe but, as I learned, it was not 1969; it was 2014. Hitchhiking was a lost art form.

After waiting an hour under the unforgiving sun and watching my duffle bag collect dust, I hitched my first ride. The very couple who had advised me earlier, drove up next to me and told me to hop in. I suspected they were not “headed south” but rather offered me a ride out of pity. It felt like cheating but, nonetheless, I was thankful to be three miles closer to Sedona.

The second ride was from the town sheriff. A pale, lumbering, gruff-looking man, he approached me aggressively, with the intent of ticketing me. He harassed me, asking me if I knew it was illegal to hitchhike. I remained seated, unemotional, on a rock as the sheriff returned to his police cruiser to run my ID. I answered all of his questions and converted his anxiety into curiosity. The sheriff, Gus wanted to know about my accent and if New York City was everything it was said to be.

When my ID came up clean, he made more small talk. Within minutes, he began to relate to me as if we were two old friends. He complained to me about “drunk Indians and dead beat hippies who hitched around the reservations.” It was as if he was citing this “mischief” in order to justify his initial hostility. I took in his clichés and mediocrity, observing this clog-in-the-machine simpleton. I thought about code-switching and the many advantages of being white in America. With a little bit of whiteness and money — you can just be, without worrying about how you will be perceived.

After more small talk, Gus offered to drive me eight more miles down the solitary road to where his jurisdiction ended. Again, this was not hitch-hiking as I expected but I was drawing closer to my destination.

The final lift was the most sincere. Two young women — who lived on an organic farm and spearheaded a campaign against baby male circumcision — told me to hop in the back of their black Ford pickup truck. They said I could live on their farm for as long as I needed. We conversed through the small window of their pickup truck, shouting raw foods recipes back and forth. I had known them for a total of 20 minutes and they were ready to adopt me on to their land and baptize me into their campaign against “male genital mutilation.” Only in Sedona, was the slogan I had heard before. I gently declined their invite, focusing on the approaching moment, when I would at last come face to face with the fabled medicine man.

As the sun set over the canyons, sublime oranges and reds ricocheted off the gorges. Awe-struck by the towering landscape, I grabbed my bag, dismounted the back of the pick-up and window-shopped at a health food store where I had coordinated to meet up with Dr. Jubb’s travelling band of Life Foodarians. A rented aqua blue Honda Sedan rolled slowly up to me. The driver slowed to a halt, rolled down the window and said “There he is! How about ‘cha mate?”

It was Dr. David Jubb. He invited me into the car.

When I jumped into the car, the passengers and driver introduced themselves as Sea of Sands, Sitting Moose, Rainy Toad, Fire Glacier and Happy Face. The adventure had begun. I had found the man behind the legend.

A Kaleidoscope of Life

Followers and mentees of Dr. Jubb pooled together money to rent a home in Arizona with turquoise and purple orchards and land to cultivate. This was typical for the impromptu teams Jubb assembled. An incessant transient, Jubb resisted the idea of stability and permanence. In the summer he set up camp in the hot springs of Colorado, only to disappear in the winter into the blue mountains of northern Morocco. Just when a potential student thought she had caught up with him in the glaciers of Norway, she received word that Jubb had reappeared among the Hindu temples off the coast of Sri Lanka. Jubb specialized in evasiveness. The shaman didn’t believe in the past or the future. He was fond of saying “we only have now.” Elucidating the concept of timelessness, Jubb refused to say his own age. When asked how old he was, he simply stated “I am entering my second lifetime presently.”

On the arid outskirts of Sedona, the elder Lifefoodarians slept inside the home. The younger communards slept outside, in a make-shift fort, hidden eighty yards into the forest.

We drifted off to sleep in the stiff heat, gazing up at a prodigious flock of stars that pranced through the night. We slept aside one another in the pitch darkness of the forest, illuminated only by the perennial motion of the celestial bodies above. The rumblings of javelinas, a type of wild boar, was the only sound bold enough to break the silence of the night.

There were extraordinary colors dancing in everything that we did — picking ripe fruits, preparing Life Foods cuisine and living in nature. The rainbow of life took the weary under its wing, offering a fresh perspective on both the mundane and the extraordinary.

We woke up to the poignant greens of the trees. Florescent and alive, they discouraged us from sleeping in. The blooming blues of the sky invited yoga, barefoot running, and harvesting white gold. Lava red canyons sprouted up from the barren earth. A treasure-chest of nature opened up around us.

My thoughts shifted east, back home to the Bronx: How criminal that most of our families were confined to a survival routine, without the ability to wander out and roam this vast, open land! I remembered Bob Marley’s prophetic lyrics:

Oh why can’t we roam?
There’s open country. 
Tell me
Why can’t we be what we want to be?
We want to be free.

[1] Reference to Carlos Castaneda’s 1968 book, The Teachings of Don Juan.

Meddling in International Waters

September 29, 2016

4

Confronted with the July humidity and tired of running over incandescent swaths of the mega-tropolis’ concrete, I visited Shanghai’s public pool for a workout swim.

When the clock struck midday, a class of adolescent swimmers exited the pool and the “free swimmers” proceeded in for their hour of glory. I charged in anxious to work up a sweat.

The Olympic size pool had lap lanes but I quickly learned it was a free-for-all; swimmers, revelers, and families alike shared the same pool.

I was at peace with the elders offering their grandchildren elementary swim lessons but there was another faction that vied for hegemony over the pool. As we sought to swim vertically, there was a retrograde group who insisted on swimming east to west, partitioning the rectangle and cutting off my free path.

Despite the human traffic, the serious swimmers with their goggles and swim caps smoothly coasted from one end to the other uninterrupted. How did they do it?

I was envious because just when I achieved some momentum, human bodies acted as barriers, breaking my rhythm.

Mid-stroke, I stopped to appeal to the authorities. Inspired by the veterans’ example, I too was determined to complete some laps.

I looked up at the life guards on both sides of the pool but as soon as we made eye contact, they shifted their glances away from me, ignoring my pleas for order. Cross-swimmers were in clear violation of international swimming protocol but no one was taking a stand.

I plunged my body back into the water and in the middle of my third stroke, a cross-swimmer charged into my sternum. Livid, I burst out of the water like the great leviathan himself, flailing my arms to exaggerate the infraction.

My descent complete, I again appealed to the higher order, subtly motioning my head at the guilty party, an elderly woman who was swimming with her entourage of friends.

A fusillade of whistles blared out. I thought, at last, the heavens have heard my plea.

The chief life guard took his index finger and middle finger, pointed them at his own eyes, then at me, as if to say he had witnessed the entire international episode and knew who the aggressor was.

I looked around to measure the temperature of the pool. The momentum had shifted against me.

The elderly woman had a home field advantage. All I had was raw emotion. I took my two hands to my chest incredulously, as if to confirm the verdict and ask “me?”

I searched for international solidarity but the entire pool community was in motion. There was a group of little girls flapping their feet on the edge who stopped to observe the unfolding situation. I thought I would drown in their disappointed glances.

The die was cast.

The chairman of the lifeguards raised his two hands and began to count down from ten, one finger at a time. I wondered what fate awaited me after ten seconds.

I made my way from the middle of the deep end to the ladder. It was the longest walk of my life.

The cute little children in their floaties stopped mid-lesson, cheering my exit. I looked back one final time; the vertical and horizontal swimmers continued unimpeded, crisscrossing the pool as if nothing happened. It was one harmonious society.

“Human Rights” as a Weapon of Imperialism: Teaching “International Law” in Nicaragua

April 28, 2016

38

In 2005, La Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Nicaragua (UNAN) hired me to teach International Law through the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) at Columbia University, where I was finishing my graduate degree. After several weeks instructing and advising a group of 60 law students in Leon, Nicaragua, my work was closed down by forces within the university. I write to detail this experience, and to clarify the course of events.

The U.S. embassy intervened within the autonomous life of the university. This intervention ultimately contributed to my dismissal. My experience amounted to censorship and speaks to the power relations that persist in Nicaragua, keeping this Central American nation in the U.S.’s sphere of influence.

Before I document my experience in Managua and Leon, it is important that the reader have a basic foundation of Nicaraguan history in order to understand, first and foremost, how this country arrived at such an astonishing level of poverty. This is an article I wrote for the American reader, on the 36^th anniversary of the Sandinista revolution. Without some familiarity with Nicaragua’s tortuous yet triumphant history, the build up of tensions and the denouement of the plot in which I played a small part will make little sense. This was the country I was entering into, a country I had read about, and admired for its resistance, my entire life.

I. War and Occupation: Through whose Eyes?

In the introductory {1} seminar, I highlighted my experience researching and organizing in oppressed countries on three continents, offered observations on key human rights covenants and treaties, and the conceptual foundations behind them and the lack of enforcement mechanisms within the current global socio-economic model. The seminars that followed focused on {2} Sexual Violence and Strategies of Resistance – A Case Study of the Dominican Republic, {3} the screening of an anti-trafficking documentary and a critique of the structural inequalities that give birth to the reality of sex work and {4} The Landless People’s Movement in Brazil: The Right to Organize.

In the fifth {5} seminar, I analyzed human rights questions closer to home, my home. I spoke on “The U.S. Occupation of Iraq: Violations of Iraqi Human Rights and Sovereignty.” I showed a poignant documentary called “The Hidden Wars of Desert Storm” which offered a view of the war through Iraqi eyes. I also invited two International Relations professors and five student leaders from FEUCA (Federacion de Estudiantes Centro Americanos) to share with them the reality of two decades plus of U.S. devastation of Iraqi infrastructure and life. This was consistent with my open-door teaching style, whereby any members of the community were invited to participate in the classes. The seventy participants were moved by the course’s content. Students wanted to know: “With what authority does the U.S. government preach human rights, when it is the biggest violator of these rights in other countries?” “Of what use is International Law, if it is not respected?” “How can we oppose this war?”

These pivotal questions echoed the very questions I posed as a graduate student at SIPA, questions to which I never received satisfactory answers from my professors.

When I arrived in Nicaragua and up until this point, I was treated like royalty. The Human Rights department was proud to host an American “expert.” I had a small entourage of students and department assistants who traveled with me everywhere in Leon & Managua. If I had parroted mainstream human rights discourse, I would have continued to enjoy this status as “a visiting scholar and expert.” I did not, and the contradictions rapidly intensified within the department.

II. Imperial Double Standards

At the heart of the fifth seminar was the question of terminology. Why does the human rights field apply the term genocide to the death of 800,000 Rwandans in 1994 and the massacre of 200,000 East Timorese over the course of 15 years of Indonesian occupation but ignore massive Iraqi, Afghani & Palestinian deaths? What term do we use for the 27,000,000 people of Iraq who have lost family members since 1991? Why is the liberation of language important?

The first six weeks of U.S. bombing in 1991 killed 150,000 people.[1] After the latest invasion of Iraq, the most reliable sources placed the number of Iraqi casualties at over a million. Officials within the United Nations such as Denis Halliday, former United Nations humanitarian coordinator in Iraq, estimated the number of Iraqi casualties between 1,000,000 and 1,500,000 spanning the 15 years of invasion, occupation and sanctions.[2] Wide-spread sources documented the U.S. military’s illegal use of depleted uranium, the destruction of the desert ecosystem, the use of napalm against trenches, and radiation poisoning.[3] The full spectrum of Iraqi resistance today—from ISIS to secular expressions of nationalism—flows from the West’s ignoring of the barbarous effects of the U.S. war on the civilian population. We ignore Iraqi suffering at our peril.

“Holocaust,” “sanctions,” “humanitarian intervention,” “dictatorship,” “failed state”…all of these terms have been politicized. They are strewn about or withheld depending on imperialism’s relationship with a particular country. Saudi Arabia – with its 20,000 princes – is not defined as a dictatorship because it functions as an attack dog for U.S. interests in the region. Israel—with its apartheid system in effect against the natives of this land—is the number one recipient of US aid in the world. In contrast, the international media vilified Syria and Libya—which had much sounder social, economic and political rights for its citizens—solely because they stood as the last vestiges, despite whatever contradictions, of a self-determining Middle East. The American public—hypnotized by the anti-Assad, media war drums—became overnight “experts” in the histories of nations they had scarcely heard of. Regardless of Assad’s human rights record, the U.S. government has a sordid history of manipulating the truth and is no position to decide who the human rights violators are.

III. Opening up Dialogue across Central America

The universities in Nicaraguan had a one week break for national holidays. Student organizations and Political Science departments invited me to present conferences on “An Alternative View of Human Rights” to other public universities in Central America. It was a wonderful opportunity to travel the region via the “Tica” bus and build up more contacts who were of like mind and heart.[4] I facilitated seminars in Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Panamá over the course of the semester. I was honored to trek through the lands of Farabundo Marti, Rigoberta Menchu, Omar Torrijos and so many other epic fighters. It was a spiritual sojourn through countries I first learned about through Noam Chomsky and Eduardo Galeano’s writing which documented the horrific civil wars the U.S. oversaw in the 1980’s to keep these countries “in their place.”[5]

On July 28^th, I showed “The Hidden Wars” to large seminars of political science students in Guatemala City. At 9 pm, after the second seminar I went out for dinner with the elected student leadership body and two indigenous Guatemalan professors. Through these conversations, I felt the tangible shock and anger on the part of the students, learning about the reality of U.S. invasion beyond the mainstream headlines. A handful of Nicaraguans and other Central Americans felt so impacted by the relentless assault on the Iraqi and Afghani homeland that they asked me in private how they could cross international borders in order to support the Iraqi resistance. As veterans and survivors of decades of resisting U.S. proxy forces in their homeland, they understood all too well the pain and devastation visited upon these occupied lands. The veterans of U.S. intervention understood that Syria was today’s Nicaragua and Libya was today’s El Salvador or Mozambique. Their sincere inquiries were symbolic of the solidarity they felt and the universal feeling—in the words of Friedrich Engels—that “no human pain is foreign to us.” If only our organizations were sophisticated enough to facilitate this level of internationalism, reminiscent of the Spanish Civil War.

As we exited a restaurant adjacent to San Carlos University at 10:30 pm, a group of ski-masked individuals robbed us with guns and machetes. They sped off on motorcycles with my collection of documentaries from Cuba, Haiti, Palestine and beyond. I felt crushed. The use of these visual resources across Central America, backed by a historical contextualization of western interference in the Middle East, had motivated many students and professors to take a more active stance against U.S. imperialism. The masked men also took my passport. I was not leaving Guatemala anytime soon. My plans to do outreach in Honduras and Belize were cancelled. Guatemala City was in the midst of massive protests against the latest U.S. “free-trade” agreement CAFTA-DR. I could not make an appointment at the embassy to apply for a passport with hundreds of thousands of protesters surrounding the embassy. After a week of waiting for a replacement passport, I returned to Nicaragua.

IV. Silencing Intellectual Dissent

For the sixth {6} seminar back in Nicaragua, I planned to examine what forms global resistance took in a unipolar world. I did not want to feed any more sand to the desert without highlighting the many times oppressed people have stood up, fought and won against the neo-colonial barbarism that I had previously highlighted. Up against such overwhelming devastation, it was important to find hope and a reason to believe and organize.

As was typical with my syllabi, after identifying the problem, I then focused on the massive entrance into history of the toiling people of Cuba, Grenada, Venezuela & elsewhere. I left Nicaraguan politics and history alone; the students came from different class backgrounds, and revisiting the horrific U.S.’s proxy Contra war would have been traumatizing and divisive for the students.[6]

On August 3^rd, I met with Professor Francisco Porra and two student leaders to preview the documentaries Zapatista and The Revolution will not be Televised, a film about a U.S. sponsored coup in 2002 against the democratically elected government of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. This was to be the last occasion during which I was formally allowed to meet with any member of the course.

On August 5^th, in front of the human rights course the director of the institute, Dr. Paguaguá, stood up and announced that all activities under my coordination were to be suspended until further notice. She had not previously contacted me about this decision. I was caught off guard.

After Dr. Paguaguá, my attention shifted to an event scheduled for the next day. In consultation with a group of students, I had planned a series of gatherings and workshops in the oppressed and peripheral neighborhoods of Leon. I stood up and told the group of 70 students that Saturday’s event would go forward regardless of her instructions because this was bigger than politics and bureaucracy. I refused to sacrifice the students’ credibility in a neighborhood where we had invested time and resources to build up trust so that the university could contribute something positive to historically neglected areas. I explained that if we could not do it in the name of the HR institute we would organize it under the banner of an international anti-war coalition. The students were visibly confused by the conflicting instructions. Dr. Paguaguá was flustered. She interrupted me again and said I was not authorized to speak.

V. “Western Rights”

Dr. Paguaguá preemptively dismissed the students and told me to go to her office. She stated that there was a major problem with the way I was teaching. She accused me of not being “objective” and of having a “political agenda.” I understood all too well what she meant by “objectivity.” When one’s ideas expose inequality and its origins one is accused of “taking sides” and “having an ideological agenda.” When one is largely silent and remains “neutral” before the big questions, one is regarded as objective.

The accusations were that I was anti-American and had a leftist agenda. Her exact accusation was “proselitismo político,” or “political proselytizing.” She instructed me to stay within the traditional parameters of Human Rights. I responded, articulating the following thoughts:

“Human Rights, in order to be truly “human,” must be taught through diverse historical lenses, otherwise they are Western Rights. All educators have an agenda; I was forthcoming with mine. The concerns, views and experience of the vast majority of the world’s people, who live in abject poverty, form the only true basis of “objectivity.” The war “on” terror is a war of terror and the intentional polarization of humanity into two warring factions – Muslim and Christian – is a necessary illusion to secure the US-dominated $950 billion dollar arms industry.[7] If the Human Rights discipline had real intellectual integrity, the practitioners would question their Eurocentric prioritization of non-European/American (white) HR violations & highlight the state crimes of “the greatest purveyor of violence” that humanity has ever known, the U.S. government.”[8]

Dr. Paguaguá refused to budge from her position. She told me she respected my convictions, confirmed that they were intellectually valid, but stated that this was not the correct forum for them. I told her I could never sacrifice everything I believed in and deliver token seminars that do not even scrape the surface of everything that is wrong in this world. As long as I only highlighted the symptoms of an unequal social order—sex tourism, violence and gangs, street crime, South-to-North migration patterns, the trafficking of children—I was allowed free rein. It was when I began to question the structural roots that give birth to these phenomena that suddenly I was accused of “not doing my job.”

I asked her, “Am I being censored?” The director—her posture visibly shaken—said that she had “a job to do and was not about to alienate the program because of a visiting scholar’s political agenda.” I was not officially fired because I continued to be the coordinator of the law students’ Internship/Community Service requirement. However, the director instructed me to limit myself to a narrow understanding of individual rights and to steer away from an overarching analysis of international politics, specifically in the Middle East and Venezuela. Until I agreed to this point, I was not allowed to have further contact with the students.

VI. Dependency

The Human Rights institute received the bulk of its funding from the U.S. embassy. I visited the embassy on one occasion on July 15th, 2005. I had a meeting with the cultural attaché, the functionaries in charge of releasing grant funds, and several other State Department employees. I submitted a proposal for human rights education within Nicaragua’s most impoverished neighborhoods and the insertion of 70 human rights law students into the infrastructure of this project. This was the only contact I ever intended to have with the embassy.

The Human Rights Institute within UNAN is a microcosm of the brutal dependence that characterizes life in Latin America. Funding is almost exclusively from NGO’s and embassies in the North and is inevitably conditioned on carrying out the powerful government’s priorities. James Petras’ writing demonstrates how NGO funding is used to push US interests abroad and to win over young talent that could be used to build up the liberation movement. The Revolution will not be Funded is an apt title for a book that excavates this very subject.

VII. The Insurrection of Subjugated Knowledge

I reflected on the impact these critical seminars could have on the law students. The majority of the students were in their 5^th or 6^th year at one of Nicaragua’s most prestigious universities. I had struck a critical nerve in Nicaraguan politics.

How would the students interpret the situation? A core group of ten students emerged who had an accurate understanding that there were bigger forces at play. They commended me for having the courage to illustrate the moral double standards at play. They told me they would rebel and protest the course until I was reinstated. I advised them that this might not be the proper tactic, depending on the position of the other students, and as it turned out, the majority, while curious about what was happening, were not willing to take a stand against the director.

I went ahead with one brigade, the Carlos Fonseca Brigade.[9] We organized the first community event in one of Leon’s most impoverished barrios. The event was well-organized and well-attended. Out of a brigade of 18 students, 15 participated. The three who were absent did not want to participate in an event that was not sanctioned by the director. Some fifty members of the community participated in the event, an event which proved rich in dialogue about human rights, crime, policing, unemployment, and gangs. There were also cultural performances and traditional pinol, a corn porridge drink, typical in Nicaragua.

My next task was to try to meet with various groups of students to measure their commitment to protesting against the censorship. When I called meetings with them, only a few from each brigade responded. A week passed. It was time to reconsider my next step. I was on the outside looking in.

I approached the director and agreed that it would be impossible under these circumstances for me to continue teaching. I explained however, that my priority was to set up the students’ interventions in marginalized areas of Leon. I would limit myself to that role and set up gatherings on my own time for anyone in the community to participate in. She welcomed the reconciliation and invited me to speak to them at the next lecture about the upcoming phases of the project.

VIII. ‘Incandescent with anger’

On the morning of August 12^th, I sat before the class waiting for my turn to speak. I was curious about how Dr. Paguaguá would explain away the scuttlebutt that was circulating. The tension was ever-present. I felt emasculated sitting there without the opportunity to clarify what had occurred. As she spoke about unrelated subjects, I couldn’t tell if she was merely buying time and ignoring me.

Finally and to my surprise, she launched into her interpretation of what had transpired. She began by saying that she commended me for my talents and my experience organizing in different countries. She indicated that I was a solid fit for this position but that she considered it entirely inappropriate that I would use this venue to promote a left-wing ideology. There was a collective gasp among the students. The vast majority were witnesses to the fact that while I had indeed been critical of U.S. foreign policy I had never mentioned the forbidden words the US government fears—socialism, Marxism, class struggle or Cuba.

She granted me the opportunity to reply. I called on the group of fifteen students who had participated in the first community event to stand before the class. The students had organized a critical reflection and each student reflected on the successes and weaknesses of the event. They related their field work back to themes of community-organizing, selflessness, and a long-term vision of de-politicizing human rights. One student spoke for the group:

“Daniel taught us that human rights are not just something written in fancy books. He took us there. We were afraid to go into our own neighborhoods. We said those kids are gangbangers. They have knives. They will stick us little spoiled brats up. And they probably would have. But Daniel went right to them. He extended his hand to them. He said, ‘no that’s not the enemy. That’s the future of Nicaragua.’”

The students were polarized. The exchange that ensued was a microcosm of the ideological and intellectual divisions that have riddled university and political life in Nicaragua. The misnamed “Cold War”— which was in essence a Global Class Struggle—had yet to write its final chapter. In the words of one student, Mariam;

“The director and the few students who backed her position were incandescent, glowing bright red like the lava of the volcano Masaya. I thought they were going to explode when we came to your defense.”

This forgotten land—battered and brutalized by a government that claimed to act in my name, under a flag that I am supposed to be proud of— had stood up again. I thought of Ben Linder. I thought of S. Brian Wilson. Arlen Siu. Leonel Rugama. Sandino. There were so many heroes and not enough memory.[10] Meanwhile, two students following the director’s lead, kept referring back to my alleged connection with the Venezuelan government. It was like a page out of McCarthyism. I thought of the hundreds of thousands of Nicaraguans who have been pitted against one another like the Crips and the Bloods and African Americans and poor whites. There was nothing left for me to say. The bond with this group of students was the true victory. They didn’t need the university to do the work that needed to be done.[11]

IX. Cold War Politics: 2005

I also sought out allies within the University. I contacted Mauricio Carrión, the Dean of Academic Affairs. I explained to him the dynamics of the situation. He was a veteran Sandinista and had fought the U.S.-led Contra invasion for six years. He heard out my perspective. Reading his body language, it was clear there was no love lost between the dean and the director of the HR department.

He intervened immediately. He called Dr. Paguaguá into a meeting. He reprimanded her for bringing politics into the university, the very charge leveled at me. Professor Carrión opened up other channels within the law school through which I could freely express these sentiments.

Representatives from the US embassy asked to meet me. They left messages at my residency at La Casa del Protocolo (professors’ housing). On August 16^th I received a call from Marcia Bosshart, The Director of U.S. Public Affairs. She asked me why I had ignored the embassy’s phone calls, then requested that I visit the embassy the next day to speak about my performance within the institute.

Mrs. Bosshard then spoke about “the fragility of politics in Nicaragua, left-wing tendencies that would manipulate me with ulterior intentions and the importance of a non-politicized take on human-rights.” She invited me to take part in some basketball clinics the embassy was hosting with professional players from the U.S. What a grand contribution to a country U.S. foreign policy plunged into civil war and decimated with unexampled brutality! Token, feel-good, donate-to-poor-Nicaraguan children’s’ programs! This brick-in-the-wall functionary thinks that the U.S. can wipe its hands clean of the past and gloat over its giving spirit before the media’s cameras! And she wants me to be a part of this P.R. charade?

I nodded passively and cordially, seeming to be in agreement with her take on things. I had nothing to say. Careerists were not going to be swayed by my worldview. I told her that if they wanted to meet with me in person they should come visit me at my housing or wait until I was back home in the Bronx but that I did not see any need to go to the embassy. The embassy’s cultural attaché, Rafael Foley, then contacted Columbia University, the institution that sponsored and funded my stay in Nicaragua and registered a complaint that I was not “fulfilling my teaching duties.”

I asked the director why it was necessary for the U.S. embassy to get involved. She claimed that they had sent functionaries to investigate my performance and that they had witnessed “my slanted discourse.”

I refused to respond to their inquiries. They called one of my colleagues, Professor Franscico Porra to a meeting in Managua to comment on my performance. What follows is this professor’s testimony:

“When I entered the embassy and cleared security I was called into a room where five agents were gathered around a long rectangular table. I sat down and they immediately asked me about Mr. Shaw’s teaching performance. I asked more specifically what they were referring to. They indicated that they wanted to know if Mr. Shaw had continued teaching and coordinating criticism of U.S. politics or if he had altered his opinionated style.”

“I felt trapped between two flames. My mind raced 20,000 kilometers per hour. I thought about my job and my future wife. I thought he will leave for the U.S. but I will stay. My gut spoke for me. Mr. Shaw understands his right within the university to “libertad de catedra,” or freedom of speech. They persisted with their questions. I told them that your posture had not changed.

The Director of Public Affairs spoke English. They asked me questions along the same line. She gave some instructions to several agents. I don’t speak English but it was clear their intention to remove you permanently from your position.”

When I returned to the casa de protocol, there were messages from the embassy expressing their wish to meet with me. I packed my bags. Two employees of the embassy went to the university and requested my immediate dismissal. Apparently the director considered my dismissal to be too harsh of a measure, perhaps because of the eyes that were on her within the University.

Upon my return to New York I received the following message from another embassy employee. who worked within the grant funding department: “During my evaluation at the Embassy my boss commented on what had happened with you. According to her, you were a headache. They put something in your record that would prohibit you from getting federal funding or federal employment in the future.”

In closing, I will again cite the primary human rights documents that the U.S. professes to uphold. Article 13 of the International Covenant of Economic, Social and Cultural rights states: “Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and the sense of its dignity, and shall strengthen the respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms.” Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Article declares: “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression: this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” The State Department acted to arrest the process of conscious-raising, with utter disregard for these covenants.

Through it all, the quest for the truth remains firm. The gift I most cherish from my experience was the bond I forged with those students in Nicaragua whose priority was not just to obtain the highest grades but to engage in a genuine quest for a critical education. The struggle continues until the vision of Augusto Sandino, Carlos Fonseca and Dora Astorga are a reality for all Nicaraguans and for all of humanity!

Danny Shaw

Managua, Nicaragua

September 2005

[1] Clark, Ramsey. The Fire This Time US War Crimes in the Gulf. New York: Thunder Mouth’s Press, 1994.

[2] Arnove, Anthony. Iraq Under Siege. Cambridge: South End Press, 2002.

[3] International Action Center. Challenge to Genocide. (New York: IAC, 1998).

Caldicott, Helen. Metal of Dishonor. How Depleted Uranium Penetrates Steel, Radiates People and Contaminates the Environment.

UN Food and Agricultural Organization. The Children are Dying. The Use of Sanctions as a Weapon of War. New York: World View Forum, 1996.

[4] Tica/o is a national nickname for Costa Ricans.

[5] Chomsky, Noam. What Uncle Sam Really Wants.

Chomsky, Noam. Deterring Democracy.

Galeano, Eduardo. Open Veins of Latin America.

[6] The example of Nicaragua reconfirms yet again what the US government has done in the name of “democracy.” Paul Dix and Pamela Fitzpatrick’s book Nicaragua: Surviving the US Legacy of Foreign Policy documents the lives of the survivors of the Contra War. In the words of survivor Coni Pérez: “It is terrible to think that in a country like the United States, the young people who live there don’t know anything about what their own country does in other countries.” Another victim of the Contras is quoted as saying: “I know who killed my mother. I don’t hate them. I blame the gringos who were the ones that made Nicaragua divide itself. . . . The gringos were behind all of this. The Contras were also victims of the gringos.” It is important to elevate these voices to inform the working people of the U.S. that the humble people of Nicaragua, Syria, Iraq, Palestine and beyond are not our enemy.

[7] See Huntington, Samuel. Foreign Affairs. “Clash of Civilizations.” 1993

And the brilliant rebuke by Said, Edward The Nation. “The Clash of Ignorance.” October 22, 2001.

[8] Genocide by Sanctions and What I’ve Learned about US Foreign Policy: The War Against the Third World are two informative documentaries which broach these questions.

[9] I assigned each team of students a name based on national heroes. Carlos Fonseca was the founder and ideological-motor of El Frente Sandinista who was assassinated in 1975.

[10] See Shaw, Daniel. 365 Days of Resistance. New York: Create Space. 2014.

[11] There was also a group of Spanish professors from the University of Alcalá in Madrid who invested their time in understanding the dynamics of this repression. On August 16^th they took the initiative and participated in a talk I gave concerning Venezuela, the nationalization of oil reserves, and the exit of Exxon, Royal Dutch Shell from the Venezuelan national scene.

Yugoslavia: A Blueprint for Imperialist Partition and Recolonization

March 13, 2016

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This past summer, I left Croatia to the north and mounted a bus that winded through the misty, majestic mountains of Bosnia into Sarajevo. As the sun rose over the historic valley, I saw pock-marked homes that still lay demolished, seventeen years after the war ended. Here I was, at the interface between great religions and empires, where a young Bosnian nationalist’s assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand, the maximum representative of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, supposedly sparked WWI. Respiring centuries of history, I began to question and dig in order to understand what brought imperialist aggression to this beautiful, sacred land, beginning long before 1991 and continuing through NATO and the U.S.’s bombing of Belgrade in 1999.

NATO’s War

Sixteen years ago, the forces of NATO, led by the United States and Germany, waged war on the people of Serbia. Over the course of 78 days in 1999 — from March 24^th to June 10^th— NATO dropped 79,000 tons of bombs and 10,000 cruise missiles on Serbia, causing enormous casualties to the civilian population and extensive damage to the economic infrastructure. The corporate media spoon-fed the world a false, facile explanation to justify its all-out assault on the nation’s sovereignty. They focused solely on what they portrayed as the sudden resurgence of ancient bloodletting feuds among the nations of Yugoslavia and the need for the West to come to the rescue. The mainstream media repeated this perspective ad nauseam because it reinforced a grim, generalized view that the nations within Yugoslavia were motivated by selfish, narrow interests and “needed” Western intervention. This article revisits what really lay behind the Western military powers’ flagrant violation of international law and what lessons anti-imperialists can draw today from the dismemberment of Yugoslavia.

Torn Apart at the Seams

The victors of WWII hoped to sink their fangs into the Balkans since 1946 when the Partisan Detachments of Yugoslavia, led by Marshal Josep “Tito” Broz, defeated the Nazis and established the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

The son of a Croat father and Slovenian mother, Tito grew up in deep poverty. He became a metal worker and worked for the German Benz car factory. He rose to the leadership of labor movement, the Partisan army, the revolutionary party and the workers’ state. What made him a special leader was his ability to unite the different nationalities of Yugoslavia behind the idea of a strong, peaceful multinational state.

tito che 1959 — Tito and Che Guevara, 1959

The profiteers of the West knew that it was only the Yugoslavian fortress —the idea of a strong, united people personified in the principled leadership of Marshal Tito — that protected the individual nations —Slovenia, Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Montenegro and Albania — from complete re-penetration by foreign capital. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990 and the socialist camp left the door wide open for Western maneuvers to rip apart one of the few self-determining and socialist countries left on the global map.

Yugoslavia’s demise was hastened by outside interference which dictated that this centrifugal force had to be smashed. Behind the scenes, foreign meddling stoked the flames of ethnic hatred by encouraging the independence of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro and Kosovo. In 1991, President George Bush and Congress passed the Foreign Operations Appropriations Bill which cut off loans, credit and trade for any part of Yugoslavia that did not declare its independence. Italy promised Montenegro $40 billion in “aid” if it went independent. Germany coddled the Croatian bourgeoisie, enticing them with investment promises. Albania was built up as “the capital of the Pentagon in the Balkans” and US, Turkish and Albanian joint forces trained and supported the Kosovo independence movement.[1] Meanwhile, Serbia —the most stubbornly independent republic with the deepest ties to non-Western countries, namely Russia— was subjected to sanctions. As a result, the per capita Serbian income was reduced from $3,000 in 1990 to $700 by 1993.

Yugoslavia & a Correct Evaluation of the National Question

The Yugoslavian economy was not classically socialist but it retained features of a planned economy unacceptable to international high-finance.

Slobodan Milosovic, the President of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and his leadership became imperialism’s principle obstacle. The other nationalities had brokered deals with their imperialist sponsors, retreated into their own fiefdoms and were open for business. Milosovic had to go. Consequently, he became the latest anti-Christ needed to validate the unleashing of a full scale NATO war. Milosovic’s intransigence before NATO was his true crime, far worse in the eyes of the West than the rapes, murders and massacres that occurred under his command and the command of every warring party in the 1991-92 conflict that saw over 200,000 killed and four million displaced.

Only under socialism was it possible to unite all of the nationalities on the basis of equality and common ownership of property. Serious efforts were made through Affirmative Action like programs to invest in the development of the historically more underdeveloped southern regions of Bosnia, Montenegro and Kosovo. The League of Communists of Yugoslavia in each republic forbid their leadership and rank-and-file from having a nationalist orientation. The ideals of internationalism and working-class unity were the bedrocks of the entire social system. For a more-in-depth evaluation of Yugoslavia’s history and economy, see Richard Becker’s article.

Socialists respect the right of every oppressed nation to self-determination. But we oppose those forces who claim to speak in the name of a nation but are really acting in conjunction with U.S. imperialism.

Hillary Clinton visits the mamouth, 12 foot statue of her husband in Kosovo.

The separatist claims of the NATO-supported, fascist Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) were in reality against the interests of the working class of all nations. As Kosovo —a region rich with mineral wealth—was pried away from Serbia, Serbia was subjected to a 78 day bombing spree. Gregory Elich —author of Killing Democracy: CIA and Pentagon Operations in the Post-Soviet Period— detailed NATO’s intentional targeting of auto factories, civilian infrastructure, and the Chinese embassy. Kosovo became the host of Camp Bondsteel the US and NATO’s largest base in the Balkans where 28,000 foreign troops continue, to this day, to oversee the colonial project.

Not surprisingly, Kellogg, Brown and Root, KBR Inc. —a military subsidiary of Halliburton— received the massive contract to build and supply the base. In the words of capitalist ideologue Thomas Friedman; “The hidden hand of the market will never work without the hidden fist —McDonalds cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15.”[2] Kosovo —like Tibet, South Sudan, & the Kurds of Iraq (but not Turkey) offer an example of imperialism’s sinister manipulation of the question of national liberation.

Srebrenica: Sorting through the propaganda

Nazi propagandist Joseph Gobbles infamously said “A lie repeated 1,000 times becomes the truth.” One-sided reporting simultaneously freed the US proxy forces of blame while vilifying any impediments to their underlying designs. The most glaring example in the case of Yugoslavia was what the West called “the Srebrenica genocide.”

There is no question that the siege of the majority Muslim, Bosnian town of Srebrenica was horrific. But was it any more or less grisly than the Croatian ethnic cleansing of Serbian families in the Krajina region or the massacring of Serbs by Muslim warlord Naser Oric in the days leading up to the Srebrenica massacre? All sides committed mass murder, rape and other war crimes. Imperialism needed Srebrenica and pure victimhood of Bosnia’s Muslims to justify their wanton destruction of the infrastructure and economy of Serbia. Scholars Michael Parenti and Diana Johnstone, among others, painstakingly documented the one-sided coverage to guilt trip the Western public into supporting the NATO war. As we have seen in Iraq, Libya and Syria, the pro-imperialist media is very adept at feigning concern for human rights. The U.S.’s wars of the 21^st century are justified under the guise of “humanitarianism.”

Lessons Learned

Studying and understanding the dynamics of the dismemberment of Yugoslavia teaches us valuable lessons that we can apply to the empire’s ongoing wars of conquest across the world today. As the godfather of all war criminals Henry Kissinger reminds us, the U.S. “has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests.”

Although the ruling class has whipped up islamophobia to justify its imperial adventures in Afghanistan, Palestine and beyond and to rationalize the repression of dissent here at home, imperialism is not anti-Muslim across the board. They are far too cunning for this. In the case of Yugoslavia, one of their main proxies was the Muslim president of Bosnia, Alija Izetbegovic.

Izetbegovic served three years in jail for his support of the Nazi occupation of Croatia during WWII and later became an extremist advocate of Sharia law. Today it is common knowledge that the U.S. conspired with extremist, jihadist forces from Saudi Arabia, Iran, Albania and beyond to wage their proxy war in Bosnia. Professor Peter Dale Scott documents the West’s use of al-Qaida in Bosnia. He argues that the training of some KLA units in terrorist camps run by Osama bin Laden followed a long pattern also used by National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski in Afghanistan in 1979 to defeat the secular government of President Najibullah and the Progressive Democratic Party of Afghanistan. Not a word was uttered against the honor of the Muslim Bosnians because they were the “good guys” in this conflict. They needed a pure victim and a totally evil aggressor (Serbia) led by Satan himself (Milosovic).

Through think tanks, academic conferences, professional analysts and paid experts, the warmongers constantly monitor dynamic situations. They shift alliances according to their interests. Imperialism has proven that it will renege on old partnerships and create new ones according to the moment.

Donald Rumsfeld meeting with ally Saddam Hussein during the Iraq-Iran war.

It is enough to remember that “bad guys” such as Manuel Noriega, Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden were all once stooges of the U.S., when the forces they oversaw did the U.S.’s bidding. When it no longer served their interests to support them, the empire turned on them and converted them into the latest boogeyman (i.e. ISIS). Their crimes and human rights records then became convenient excuses to bomb, invade and occupy Panama, Iraq and Afghanistan which were all steps in the recolonization of these regions.

When the non-aligned Yugoslavia functioned as a buffer zone between the Soviet Union and the US in the Global Class War, the IMF and the European banks were content to lend it money, drive another wedge through the idea of Soviet-Yugoslavian unity and keep it —even if only partially— in their sphere of influence.[3] With the rise of the unipolar world, this calculation changed. The US and EU countries did not stop their war drive until the country was completely under its boot again.

Yugo-Nostalgia

According to studies by historians and sociologists, a high percentage of people today —spanning across the different nationalities— yearn for the unity and social stability guaranteed in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.[4]

Tito meeting with the young Coronel Gadaffi — Tito meeting with a young Coronel Gadaffi

In Zagreb and Sarajevo I found responses consistent with this sense of Yugo-nostalgia. Many citizens of the former Yugoslavia bemoaned the stripping away of people’s right to health care, a home, a university education, a job and social peace —and the concomitant privatization of these services. In their opinion, these maneuvers represented the thirdworldization of the Balkans, a return to a position of servitude they had valiantly overcome. According to an article in The Economist entitled “Balkan’s Economies, Mostly Miserable,” 23% of Serbian workers are unemployed today and this number climbs to the 50% mark for younger workers. These statistics are representative of the struggles of the different nationalities of the region to make ends meet and resist the globalization forced upon them by NATO bombs.

A Template for Imperialist Wars Today and Tomorrow

interior ministry in Belgrade, bombed by Nato — The Interior Ministry in Belgrade, bombed by NATO

Karl Marx said that “History repeats itself first as tragedy then as farce.” The dynamics of the Yugoslavian situation repeat themselves again today and the American public is being duped again.

The mainstream media —as the spokesperson of the State Department—does not get it wrong. A key part of our training as anti-imperialists —dating back to the Zimmerwald Conference when socialists maintained that WWI was not fought in the interests of working people— is to read beyond the headlines and stay principled when imperialism goes into war drive. When our class enemies beat the war drums and pretend to appeal to Americans’ human compassion —as in the case of every US invasion— it is necessary to decipher what the empire’s true interests are. No matter how relentless, sensationalist and patriotic the barrage of propaganda, it is unacceptable to line up shoulder to shoulder as our oppressors at home relentlessly demonize inconvenient nationalist forces abroad. It is important to return to Malcolm X’s formulation: ““If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” Our defense of a nation’s right to defend themselves vis-à-vis foreign domination is not a blanket endorsement of their social systems. Surely every social system has its flaw and challenges, but this is no justification to dismantle the central state as we have seen in the countries aforementioned in this article.

As the billionaires run out of new markets to conquer, they are seeking to expand. China, Russian and the other BRICS nations are demonized because they have resisted deeper penetration. The wars of the 21st century will be ignited along these lines and will come packaged in human rights rhetoric. Any nation who resists capitalist re-enslavement —Zimbabwe, the Bolivarian camp in Latin America, eastern Ukraine, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Cuba and the DPRK— will be in the cross heirs. The hundreds of thousands of refugees who seek to cross the Mediterranean Sea into Europe are the very victims of these recolonization efforts. They have been defuturized by US/EU proxy wars. While the corporate media outlets lament the plight of the refugees, they do not utter an honest word about the source of this human conflagration. Libya, Syria, Yemen, Iraq and Afghanistan are today’s Yugoslavia. The greatest solidarity we can render to imperialism’s millions of victims is by challenging its power right here in the belly of the beast! Until then, in the words of the prophet of peace, Bob Marley, “Everywhere is war.”

[1] Dakovic, Mirko. The Center for Peace in the Balkans. March 22, 2001. “Destabilizing the Balkans: US & Albanian Defense Cooperation in the 1990s.”

[2] Cited in the New York Times, March 28^th 1999.

[3] The Soviet leadership was to blame for failing to unite with Yugoslavia on an anti-imperialist basis. This was due to the fact that post WWII, the Soviet Union agreed with the US and Britain to divide up Southern Europe between the three powers, with Greece and Yugoslavia falling into the US/British sphere of influence and Bulgaria and Hungary falling into the Soviet orbit. Stalin then unjustifiably expelled Yugoslavia from the Socialist Camp at 1948 Cominform meeting accusing the Yugoslavs, among other charges, of “Nationalism; and, ‘counter-revolutionary Trotskyism.” This was a huge gift to imperialism. With his back against the wall, Tito soon after moved into a military alliance with NATO. He was central figure along with Nasser, Sukarno, Nehru and Nkrumah in the non-aligned Bandung Conference of 1955, clearly an attempt to draw the newly decolonizing countries away from the Soviet-led socialist camp.

[4] Several studies are cited in Titostalgia: A Study in Nostalgia for Josep Broz by MitjaVelikonja.

The Gambia: The World We Live In

February 10, 2016

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The smallest of all African countries, The Gambia, is perhaps best known for the village of Juffereh, where the child, Kunta Kinte lived some 250 years ago until he was kidnapped by Portuguese slave traders. Kinte’s descendent ―the African American writer, Alex Haley― wrote the 1976 novel, Roots: The Saga of an American Family, based on the village griot (scribe), Kebba Kanga Fofana’s oral history of the region. He traced back his own roots over generations to the Serer and Mandinka people of Juffereh, who for generations resisted the slave trade and the European colonization of their land in Western Africa. According to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, of the 388,000 Africans abducted into slavery in America, roughly 92,000 (24 percent) were from the region of Senegal and Gambia.

Last month, I visited Juffereh and The Gambia to learn more from the descendants of Kunta Kinte.

He who would Rule for 1 Billion Years

The British sliced The Gambia out of Senegal, which was a French colony, as part of the colonial powers’ negotiations in 1885 at the Berlin Conference. In reference to the strange geographical phenomenon, the Senegalese joke that The Gambia —much smaller than the state of Connecticut— is the tongue of the Senegalese mouth. Like all colonial partitions, the border between the two countries divided peoples who had inhabited the region for thousands of years, namely the Mandinka, Serer and Wolof people.

For the past 22 years, his Excellency Sheikh Professor Alhaji Doctor Yahya A. James Junkung Jammeh Babili Mansa has presided over this nation. As if his lengthy name were not proof enough of the dictator’s megalomania, Jammeh vows to rule for “one billion years… if Allah says so.”[1]

Jammeh claims his seizure of power in 1994 in a military coup was a “revolution.” The conscious visitor is left to ask: a revolution by who and for who? Massive billboards depict him as the nation’s savior. But in a country where the average income is $502 per year, few feel saved surviving on an average of $1 to $2 U.S. dollars per day.

Jammeh’s rule is a portrait of what dictatorship looks like. There are military checkpoints every kilometer to protect his power. He claims to be able to cure AIDS with ancient potions. He has murdered would-be resistance leaders. When he leaves his palace, the army shuts down all traffic in order “to ensure his safety.”

The U.S. and Britain consider Gambia “a friendly nation” and have issued statements in support of Jammeh, condemning the opposition. As long as the toubabs (foreigners) and Gambia’s elites are happy, the global policemen are content with allowing the self-obsessed autocrat to preside over business as usual.

The Gate Keeper

Paradoxically, Jammeh added “Babili Mansa” to his name, meaning “Bridge Builder,” but has reneged on constructing a bridge that would connect the southern Casamance region of Senegal to the northern region. This guarantees the Jammeh government a steady stream of foreign currency from anyone desiring to traverse Senegal, because they have no choice but to go through Gambia. The four times I traversed the border, I was at the mercy of despot’s military border agents who arbitrarily named their price for a toubab to pass.

One agent —wearing a safari hat, sunglasses and civilian clothes— rudely and aggressively clasped my arm and told me I could not pass. I took him for an everyday hustler, trying to trick a foreigner into forking over money. When I yanked my arm away from his clutch, he accused me of resisting authority. He demanded my passport and escorted me to a small office where I was held with my companion. I was fuming with anger but I knew I was powerless. I remembered the innumerable times Dominican border officials —aka professional thieves— employed similar chicanery when I crossed the border to and from Haiti. If I lost my cool and didn’t play their game, I would only dig myself a deeper hole. Having been effectively “detained,” the corrupt agents had even more leverage over me to name the price of their bribe. After some arguing and haggling, I forked over $60 and I was on my way to Senegal. As I strolled off I thought of all the Gambians who were not as fortunate as me to come and go as they pleased with minor inconveniences. It occurred to me that “Gate Keeper” —instead of “Bridge Builder”— would be a much more accurate title to add to the name of the country’s dictator.

Senegambia

Senegambia was the name given to the potential confederation between the two countries in 1981. Today Senegambia is a tourist enclave on the Atlantic coast of Gambia, only a half an hour ride from Banjul, the nation’s capital. The heavily patrolled area is a reminder that the system of colonial rule never ended. A laborer from Manchester or Liverpool is instantaneously propelled to celebrity status in Senegambia, in possession of a currency worth exponentially more than the Gambian Dalasi. The military diligently keeps toubabs in and the locals out. Just enough Gambians are allowed in to serve the foreigners.

Luxurious, private resorts monopolize large tracts of the coveted Atlantic coast. The tourist district —replete with every Western restaurant and accommodation— was a piece of the West transplanted to the heart of The Gambia. Due to the region’s consistently warm temperatures, there is a steady parade of tourists oblivious to the social reality that surrounds them. The patronizing attitudes of the Western tourists and their participation in this shuck-and-jive show was evidence of capitalism’s spiritual void. The only connection between the tour-ers and the toured was the cash nexus. Whisky-guzzling old men walked with young Gambian girls at their arm, employing them for the night. Crimson-colored Australian and English women —overexposed to the punishing sun— rented out dreadlocked, athletic local striplings to entertain them for the night.

The young working women and men —roughly the same age as Kunta Kinte when he was chopping wood for his family outside of Juffereh and was abducted— sought to earn in pounds what it would take them months to earn in Dalasis. The forced, recurrent smiles of 15-year-old Gambian teenagers was a snapshot of the validity of “Dependency theory” and the pressing need for another way forward for humanity.

Dependency Theory

In graduate school, I studied political science which explored Modernization theory versus Dependency theory. The “modernizers,” led by Lyndon B. Johnson’s National Security Advisor Walter Rostow, argued that the “third world” merely had to imitate the West in order to develop and catch up. They ignored outside factors that dominated the economies of “third world countries” and assigned blame solely to native corruption and the internal dynamics of “undevelopment,” very conveniently ignoring five centuries of unfettered theft. This school of thinking informed the Structural Adjustment Programs and austerity policies of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.

The other pole of economic thinking was Dependency Theory and World Systems Theory. Fierce critics of Modernization theory —such as Andre Gunder Frank, Walter Rodney and Immanuel Wallerstein— argued that there was a direct relationship between the development of the colonizing countries and the underdevelopment of the colonized countries. The accumulation of wealth in the colonial center came from the extraction of wealth in the colonial periphery. Until this pattern was interrupted —these Marxists thinkers contended— the world would be divided into exploiter and exploited countries.

The Gambia, like so many other exploited countries, was living proof of the bankruptcy of the first model and the ongoing relevance of the latter model. The visitor whose eyes are open feels the consequences of centuries of foreign exploitation.

Gambians’ gazes are focused overseas. Many marriages are arranged according to who has a coveted visa to the West. There is a Western Union on every block to remind the populace where the money comes from, remittances from the U.S. The Gambians, who can, escape mainly to Harlem, Minnesota & London — the metropole —in order to support their families and pursue the dreams denied to them in their homeland.

Reimagine the Future

My guide and colleague, Gambian University lecturer, Bakary Baye,[2] reflected on the reality:

Even proximity to a toubab represents hope. Just the thought of linking up with a foreigner is the closest some of us will ever get to freedom. In Wolof we say toubab. It comes from the English “two bobs,” a nickname for the old English currency. It was also the Wolof word for missionary.

The normal behavior of a prostitute is to “turn a trick,” spring up and move on. Not here. In Gambia, the sex worker has a different line of thinking. He or she sticks around. They are affectionate. They don’t just want a night with a toubab, they want a ticket out of here.

Have a look for yourself. Young men and women. Some are teenagers. This is all they can aspire to, to latch on to an old woman or man from Britain, he motions to a sprawling five-star hotel in front of us, teaming with Westerners.

This is it. This is what we have, an economy based on pleasing toubabs. Look how far we’ve come.

Centuries after Juffereh was sacked, we have yet to restore the spirit of our ancestors.

Just last week, I brought the food to my sister’s wedding. It was a woman’s program. But these foreign tourists wandered in. In flip-flops and shorts. From Holland and Britain. The men were drunk. No one said anything. They have been doing as they please since they first arrived in the 17^th century.

Everything is in disarray. They have altered the very soul of this land.

Gambian reality may at first sight appear to be so distant from our own, but this is the world we live in. The privilege of the tourist in the Dominican Republic, Thailand or Western Africa is directly connected to the ongoing oppression of the native peoples of that region and is the surest proof that the current, dominant socio-economic model is unsustainable.

For the people of Kunta Kinte ―generation after generation― acquiescence before colonialism has never been an option. West Africa has been swept by waves of mass youth protest and varying national and Islamic insurgencies. The exiled Gambian community also plots for change. Their resistance and their victory will be a victory for all of us.

[1] “Gambia’s President Jammeh gets extra title of ‘bridge builder.” BBC. 18 June 2015.

[2] The professor’s name was changed to protest his safety.

Fitchburg: Understanding the Insidiousness

December 2, 2015

110

I came of age shaped by my sisters, grandmothers’ and mother’s pain and resistance. Their stories of struggle and survival were one of the principle factors that made me question this hell-on-earth capitalist system and how it came into existence. I will never forget when my sister clashed with the local townspeople one time. I wanted to share the story because my sisters, aunts, nieces, grandmothers and mother are my true anonymous working-class heroes. Certain biographical details have been changed to protect everyone’s privacy. December 2nd, 2015

“A working class hero is something to be
Keep you doped with religion, and sex, and T.V.
And you think you’re so clever and classless and free
But you’re still fucking peasants as far as I can see
A working class hero is something to be
There’s room at the top they are telling you still
But first you must learn how to smile as you kill
If you want to be like the folks on the hill
A working class hero is something to be
If you want to be a hero well just follow me”

-John Lennon

“I will not be part of Your Freak Show”

Some of the local town folks and “do-gooders” on the School Committee in Fitchburg invited my sister, Elizabeth, to speak to the high school about being a recovering drug addict. Fitchburg is a post-industrial town of 40,000 in Central Massachusetts, with a $22,000 family median income and a reputation for having “a bad drug problem.” One of my older brothers joked that he had moved to Snitchburg in reference to how shady the small city is. Back in my hustling days, we called Fitchburg “the little Bronx,” well, for many self-evident reasons.

Instead of asking to hear Elizabeth’s entire story, the School Committee pigeonholed her to meet their own agenda. They did not want the entire human story; they just wanted to “scare the kids straight.”

Their approach was odious. They wanted Elizabeth to parrot the usual clichés. They expected her to meekly appear and regurgitate a dead-end script that we have all heard over and over from this society’s disinformation outlets. It goes something like this:

Good morning children. Look at me. I was a poor, disgusting, good-for-nothing junkie. I did heinous things in the hunt. I have no history. I am not human. There is no context. Susie Q. and Johnny Appleseed: do you want to be like me? No! Don’t do what I, the mutant-monster, did.”

The mediocre school authorities wanted my younger sister to be part of a typical freak show, making a mockery of her life.

Flipping the Script

The bricks in the wall invited her last week to the high school auditorium to be a guest speaker. The naive bureaucrats had no no way of knowing what they signed up for. Elizabeth had her own independent ideas about what would leave an impact on the young minds. My sister was not going to be anybody’s mascot.

When she entered the auditorium, the high school classes were loud and disruptive. Most of them were playing on their phones and making fun of “Drug Awareness Day.” Elizabeth mounted the stage — appearing to be demoralized and broken — she refused to raise her voice in competition with the 350 students. She simply began to tell the truth:

My story is no different than most of us addicts. When I was five, I was sexually molested by my grandfather. I’m not sure how he became a demented, sick man. To this day, I hate him for what he did to us children. Where we come from, we were all abused.

There was a titanic shift in the atmosphere. Now there was only one voice. There was a background of deafening silence. The administrators shot quick, jittery glances at one another, Horrified. The students honed in on Elizabeth’s next words:

I’m not going to lie to you and tell you things will be ok. They never were for me. I never received the time, affection, hugs and patience I deserved. I was raised by an alcoholic, violently deranged mother. She blamed me for the abuse. It was strange. I never understood why she hated me. How do you hate a seven-year-old girl? Yet, she never hated her father-in-law? How was I to blame and not Chester the Molester? Our parents have a knack for rewriting history when the truth does not suit them. I guess in some ways, heroin abuse was payback to get her to notice me when I punctured my veins.

Though no one responded, it was as if there were a call and response. After some eternal seconds of reflection, Elizabeth vibed off of the students’ solemnity.

My own father ran away from the madness himself. There was only one problem. He forgot to take me with him. I found my own escape; lots of weed and then dope.

In his own way, dad was a great individual but he was too busy chasing substances and women, and being a man about town to prioritize us children.

When I was a preteen, my older sister’s husband raped me. That ignited more heroin abuse. I was not living, this was a living death. There was nothing that made the pain go away. It was only the needle’s penetration that finally calmed my mind. It was the first warm, comforting blanket I found. This led to a fifteen-year descent into lower rungs of Dante’s inferno.

Prostituting, thieving, double-crossing, mugging…I’ve known death. It is life I’m searching for.

Once we lured a taxi driver into the shadows of our despair. We knocked him, went joy riding and sold his taxi for a week of hits. Dehumanized, we acted the part. It appears surreal today to those of us who survived.

A Proud Older Brother

I was sitting in the back of the auditorium, thinking in our local Brockton and Fitchburg vernacular:

Got ’em! She horror-showed ’em! She homie-socked ’em! She Fitchburg’ed ’em!

Though I could not yell out in solidarity, my sister always knew I had her back.

The School Committee representatives did not know how to respond. They looked around searching for a way to close the curtains. But the truth is stubborn. Elizabeth stared over at the representatives who invited her. Her piercing glance penetrated them and their judgmental inadequacy.

I reflected in the back, chuckling to myself because I had seen this all before.

Society wants to criminalize and judge the individual while ignoring their social plight that produces us down-and-out Shaws.

Well, the good, always-on-time professionals wanted her story? They got it!

We had joked and cried before over these dynamics: The double-dealing, insincere cowards! There it is, for all the children to see. Tell the children the truth.

I wanted to jump on stage too but this was not my hour.

My sister was dropping love-life lessons on the youth so they could chart a different path:

Heroin abuse, burglary, prostitution, shoplifting, hustling, AIDS…none of it happens in a vacuum. It has its triggers. Until we come to grips with those triggers, and the social terrain that triggers the triggers, we will be impotent before the realities of drug abuse, alcoholism and every other escape mechanism. Pitiful, patriotic pricks! Teach the children the truth. You wanted a freak show? Well, you got one. Our society is a freak show!

Imagine their faces! She “grossed them out,” meaning that she gave them a tongue lashing, as my older brother was fond of saying, every time he ruthlessly tormented people with his vitriolic tongue. Elizabeth broke every taboo. She then played Trent Reznor and the 9 Inch Nails song “Hurt” for everyone to digest together:

I hurt myself todayTo see if I still feelI focus on the painThe only thing that’s real

The needle tears a holeThe old familiar stingTry to kill it all awayBut I remember everything

What have I become?My sweetest friendEveryone I know goes awayIn the end

For us daughters of Fitchburg and sons of Brockton, the abuse was the original sin. Our parents’ denial was the knife that plunged the sin deeper into our chests and souls. Elizabeth’s message was a beam of light for those who had been sheltered from the truth:

What can be done, can be undone. My trauma is mine. It not longer belongs to the rapists, abusers and denialists. I own my trauma. It is what made me. It is far too late for regret, guilt or self-doubt. None of this was my fault but it is now my path. I have to embrace it or it will destroy me. My name is Elizabeth and I am an alcoholic and addict. My middle name is denial and I am a professional escape artist in recovery. God: Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.

A Societal Shift & Transformation

From the perspective of the school administration, both here in Massachusetts and across the United States, it was ok for the students to gawk at my little sister’s pain, but not for them to understand the source of it.

How much easier to blame individuals than to ask the deeper questions: Why are so many of our children subjected to generational trauma? Why do all experts indicate that upwards towards 90 percent of addicts come from traumatizing childhoods like us? Why do the admins promote failed “scared straight” tactics but always ignore the childhood trauma staring them in their faces?

Elizabeth walked off the stage and calmly handed the mic to Principal McMahon, stealing the last word off his forked tongue.

The principle and AP’s — functioning as sub-oppressors, a microcosm of the larger forces acting on society — feared the truth. They felt secure, pushing their own version, blaming the individual. Generation after generation, they preach from pulpits of American hypocrisy:

There are no excuses. You could have done it. Pull yourself up by the bootstraps. You can be whatever you want to be.

I learned from my big sister that denial and silence is part of the insidiousness. The status-quo fears & rejects anything that calls into question the true causes of our hurt. We all form part of the collective social fabric. No one can edit our stories. No one can censor our pasts.

My sister — wielding a machete of truth — blazed forward with ferocity and fire, creating a path for all of us survivors to follow. The administrators tried to prevent the Q&A from happening but some 100 students stayed behind to direct their questions to Elizabeth and gave her a standing applause. Here finally was somebody they could trust and relate to.