Remember the Peterloo Massacre!

Dallas Darling writes at World News (click the title of this post for the original):

"Schools are an important indicator of the well-being of a democratic society. They remind us of the civic values that must be passed on to young people in order for them to think critically, to participate in power relations and policy decisions that affect their lives, and to transform the racial, social, and economic inequities that limit democratic social relations." —Henry A. Giroux

A glorious revolution is unfolding in Britain. It is a revolution that consists of students demonstrating against university tuition hikes, and it is a revolution that just clashed with a royal procession. While a convoy of limousines and security vans were driving Britain's Prince Charles and his wife Camilla to an expensive and illustrious dinner theater production, several students attacked the Rolls-Royce carrying the two royal highnesses. It was an unscripted moment in Britain's imperial mythology, and it was reminiscent of the Peterloo Massacre.

The Peterloo Massacre is a popular name for a catastrophic human disaster symptomatic of the unrest and repression in Britain immediately after the Napoleonic Wars. It also occurred during the height of the Industrial Revolution. At a time of massive unemployment, unabated recession, and high food prices, a demonstration was held in Manchester on St. Peter's Fields (where the Free Trade Hall now stands). It was also one of the first protests against corporatization, which was actually initiated long before the age of Thatcherism and Reaganomics.

Crowds of workers, which at this time included women and children, had gathered to demand reform of the English Parliament. Not only had the government supported legislation in allowing large landowners to seize properties from small farmers, forcing them to become either landless or tenant farmers, but the English Parliament also favored the banking industries and wealthy owners who operated the Mills of Manchester and vice versa. Working together, their goal was more profits at the expense of the working poor.

Around the Mills of Manchester that were built on stolen property, steam engines filled the air with pollution from coal-burning factories. As precious water was diverted and food became scarce because it was exported, the working poor and oppressed found themselves thirsty, hungry, and living in squalid tenements. Neither were there sanitary or building codes. While unemployment increased, whole families crowded into dark, dirty shelters. Sickness and epidemics were common.

Working conditions were horrendous. Wealthy factory and large land owners and their bosses and security details treated workers just like their machines, to be cast away when worn out or broken. The average worker spent 14 to 16 hours a day at the job, 6 days a week. Factories were not well-lit and were unclean. Boiler explosions, machinery accidents, and other work-related injuries were frequent, costing laborers hands, legs, arms, eyes, and sometimes their lives.

The Mills of Manchester themselves, though, were treated much like Buckingham Palace — a bygone symbol of absolute power and riches. Factories were given enormous sums of money for research, innovation, sanitation, roads, transportation, and were built on the choicest lands. Not only were factories subsidized by the sweat and blood of the working-classes, but so too were the kings Summer and Winter palaces, along with their entourages. Vital resources were literally taken from the mouth of children workers to feed these ravenous beasts and to support their frivolous and uncaring lifestyles.

When magistrates observed 60-80,000 peaceful and unarmed citizens and workers amassing on St. Peter's Field next to the Manchester Mills, they became alarmed. While the Industrial Revolution was accepted and worshiped, Workers Revolutions were not. The authorities overacted and ordered armed troops and cavalry to clear St. Peter's Field. It is estimated that 11 unarmed people were killed and 500 more injured, including women and children. The name Peterloo was a parody taken from the recent carnage at Waterloo when the British routed Napoleon's forces.

Therefore — and regarding protesting and demonstrating university students who attacked a symbol of lavish wealth, a limousine, carrying the Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall as they drove through London's busy West End and as they were heading to another subsidized event and photo-op — it was uplifting to witness a kind of a reverse Peterloo. It was actually empowering to observe royalty and their security detail under pressure and in chaos, for a change, instead of the working poor and oppressed youth.

It was also courageous of the students to show restraint, especially after experiencing years of dehumanization, economic existence, and perpetual military interventions that are causing an empire to collapse. The real "thugs" are the financial bankers, chief executive officers, and prime ministers who supported unjust wars that were subsidized by the poor. The real "thugs" are highnesses that stood aloof and remained silent in the midst of banking and corporate corruption and rising economic disparity. These are the individuals that need to be investigated.

Those who support the corporatization of colleges and favor tripling tuition fees, like Prime Minister David Cameron and his Conservative-led government, are the real criminals too. The lapse in security was not committed on Thursday at London's West End, but the thousands of unregulated events and crimes that preceded and then allowed corporate profits and educational injustices to take priority over student development and learning. When students cannot learn in the classroom, they will seek their education elsewhere, namely in the streets.

When Prime Minister Cameron stated that those involved should be "arrested and severely punished," it was eerily similar to the Six Acts which were immediately passed after the Peterloo Massacre. The Six Acts were parliamentary laws aimed against potentially worker-centered progress, betterment, and empowerment. They were designed to suppress the rights of assemble and the rights of freedom of speech and press. Since education is also a fundamental and God-given right, by tripling tuition rates, is Prime Minister Cameron enacting the Six Acts?

Even more sinister, by criminalizing such mass protests is Prime Minister Cameron doing the bidding of a corporate culture that no longer views public education in terms of its civic function; but rather a commercial venture in which the only form of citizenship available for young people is consumerism, and where the free exchange and flow of ideas becomes another product to be bought and sold to the highest bidder?

Thankfully, these civic-minded students are resisting the corporatization of public and university education. They understand that free and equal access to learning is for the public good and the betterment of an innovative society. They are rejecting the corporate market place of monopolized ideas that only train people for low-paying jobs. Challenging the encroachment of corporate and royal power is essential if democracy is to remain a defining principle of education and everyday life.

The Crimes of Wikileaks

Wikileaks did nothing. Its crime is revealing what others said and did. That is a crime only because those others are the ones who write and enforce our laws. In our name. In other words, they speak and act for us. Their words and actions belong to us. Their secrecy is the real crime. Which is why they must so forcefully (violently) prove that it is opening up their secrets to the public they nominally serve that is criminal. Or that at least it will be punished. Which only clarifies why their secrecy — in the service of power — is so dangerous.

Take a Stand for Peace

Stop These Wars!

Veteran-Led Resistance to U.S. Wars

Dec. 16, 10:00 a.m., Lafayette Park, Washington, D.C.

March to the White House for civil resistance action

Also sign this open letter to the left establishment to protest the policies of President Obama.

"[The Obama administration] has advanced repeated assaults on the New Deal safety net (including the previously sacrosanct Social Security trust fund), jettisoned any hope for substantive health care reform, attacked civil rights and environmental protections, and expanded a massive bailout further enriching an already bloated financial services and insurance industry. It has continued the occupation of Iraq and expanded the war in Afghanistan as well as our government’s covert and overt wars in South Asia and around the globe."

Further Notes on Nature-Guilt

By Eric Rosenbloom

We carry inside us a persistent guilt. We are aware that the fulfillment of our needs is made at the expense of other animals and our environment. Religion serves primarily to relieve that guilt, either by expiating it via sacrifice and prayer or by separating our lives from the other lives around us. Other means follow the example of religion: nationalism, professional identity, marketing.

Religion, along with its imitators, raises a proxy of our intrinsic guilt, some quotidian anxiety, for which it offers relief. Like junk food carefully designed to not quite satisfy, we must keep returning for more in this endless distraction from the real issue. The interest is indeed to not truly satisfy, to keep the circle feeding on itself: more material reward, more guilt, more means of relieving its stand-ins, more material reward . . . Our desires are now called needs.

Christianity's perfection of religion is the promise that you can have your cake and eat it, too: The necessary sacrifice has been made for all humanity for all eternity, and we are thereby liberated. Of course, nothing has actually changed, and Christianity's absolution serves to enable greater crimes, and thus greater guilt, and thus greater devotion to the church and greater opportunities for political and consumerist demagoguery. From the premise that our guilt has been washed away, only more defiant denial of its persistence is possible.

When our continuing crimes are acknowledged, they are blamed on others: We can not be perfectly free (from our guilt) until those others are expunged from us. They are marked as outsiders, threats, traitors. With increasing mistrust, people choose up sides as in a sporting contest and blame each other for the discomfort they still sense in themselves.

The denial of our guilt from knowing the consequences of our life, namely, that it takes from other life, ultimately requires seeing nature itself as our enemy. Nature is made to pay ever more as proof of our freedom (from guilt). This, too, is a vicious cycle, as greater depredations require ever more strenuous denial of guilt by greater depredation (even while denying it as such, by insisting it is to nature's benefit, remedy for the other team's depredations) . . .

This pattern, which dominates our relationship to ourselves and to our world, is the model for all challenges to our worldviews and lifestyles: the discomfort of the other team's evidence that your truth is not absolute, and the response to try harder to make it so — reward eludes you until you eliminate all that denies you its comforts. Something else we must deny is the example of history, which shows us that every effort to purge our lives of its nonconforming elements only makes things worse, increasing the need for the agents of distraction and flattery — religion and its imitators.

To stand against this is lonely indeed. Your effort to resolve your guilt yourself, to come to terms with it, to separate needs from desires and live in a way that does not exacerbate the reasons for your guilt — it is not looked upon generously by the social and economic machine that depends on your looking instead to its established systems for relief. You are an enemy. You are selfish, you think you're better than everyone else. That selfishness, that egocentrism, that pride, however, is a problem of definition.

Pride is indeed self-satisfaction, the pleasure of reshaping desires, urges, even needs, to fit the demands of reality and the outside world. But there are two kinds of pride. One is infantile, the other is what we should expect, but rarely see, from adults. Infantile pride is in pleasing external authority, even when internalized to the extent that it seems of one's self. The adult learns to separate his or her self from that authority and to replace it with his or her own means of balance and relief. The pride of pleasing one's self as thus created is the pride that is condemned by those whose pride remains infantile. It is, however, a pride that is justified. In contrast, infantile pride serves the external authority; it is about replacing the self, the pride of sacrificing one's self to the atoning power. Those whose pride is infantile hate the naysayers, those who take on the ambivalences of life in themselves and disdain the treadwheel and pabulum of institutionalized comfort and distraction. The infantiles' heros are those who follow orders most ardently. The adults' heros are those who think for themselves, expect others to think for themselves, and communicate in terms of reality rather than self-serving dreams.

The infantiles reverse not only reality and dream but also maturity and infancy. They believe it is their “adult” sacrifice, their submission to the “real world” of their psychological miasma, that makes it possible for the “naive” and “immature” to disdain them. Their pride tells them that they have grown to control their desires, but they have only transfered (or delivered) them to a higher authority.

Click here for original essay "Nature-Guilt".

Wikileaks mirror finder

Click on the title of this post for wikileaks.antiwar.com, which will redirect to a nearby working mirror of the Wikileaks web site.

As of this morning, there are 1,559 mirror sites.

Wikileaks itself is at http://213.251.145.96.

Also:  Search the cables that have been released at http://cablesearch.org.

Secrets and the Illiteratization of Society

Jimmy Johnson writes at Counterpunch (click the title of this post for the entire piece):

State secrecy is generally thought of as a matter of national security, or perhaps governmental transparency, but we should also view it as a matter of literacy. ...

The Roman Catholic Church in the 14th century held rigid control over the rituals designating legitimate pathways to salvation and the clergy had significant sway over secular officials, whose legitimacy was largely dependent upon clerical approval. The Church rituals - mass and communion - were conducted in Latin, a language in which almost all were illiterate, mitigating any challenge to Church authority. A key element leading to the Protestant Reformation and the subversion of Roman Catholic dominance was the efforts to translate the bible into the vernacular led by John Wycliffe, William Tyndale and others. By translating the bible into the vernacular they declassified the bible, which had been effectively a state secret up to that point. ...

For his efforts Tyndale was strangled then burned as a heretic, and the Church was so horrified about Wycliffe's radical legacy that his remains were dug up and he was burned at the stake posthumously. They saw, accurately, that the revealing of previously secret knowledge to the masses would make the clergy's social and political positions progressively less powerful. In exposing today's privileged knowledge, Wikileaks may indeed threaten the perpetuation of certain practices of the powerful. The reactions to Wikileaks, its editor-in-chief Julian Assange, and alleged source PFC Bradley Manning are certainly indicative of a perceived threat of that magnitude.

Feinstein and the crimes of secrecy

Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, writes in the Wall Street Journal:

When WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange released his latest document trove — more than 250,000 secret State Department cables — he intentionally harmed the U.S. government. The release of these documents damages our national interests and puts innocent lives at risk. He should be vigorously prosecuted for espionage.

The law Mr. Assange continues to violate is the Espionage Act of 1917. That law makes it a felony for an unauthorized person to possess or transmit "information relating to the national defense which information the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation." ...

Just as the First Amendment is not a license to yell "Fire!" in a crowded theater, it is also not a license to jeopardize national security.

First, Wikileaks at the time of this writing has released fewer than 1,200 of the more than 251,000 cables it received. All of them include redactions as made by other media outlets, such as The Guardian in the U.K., Der Spiegel in Germany, Le Monde in France, and El Pais in Spain. (CNN and the Wall Street Journal were offered the cables but were too scared to take them, and the New York Times got them from The Guardian.)

Second, it is falsely yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater that you don't have the right to do. As is evident by the U.S. war machine's desperate reaction, Wikileaks has revealed that there is indeed a fire.

Feinstein herself has said she voted for the invasion of Iraq on the basis of lies from the G. W. Bush White House (which she apparently lacked the common sense to question). Would she not have welcomed a leak of the facts in that case? Secrecy serves only the lazy bureaucrats and venal opportunists of armchair empire, who are the only ones complaining about Wikileaks, about their secrets being revealed.

The people of the world and of the U.S. itself are only harmed by secrecy. Secrets and lies ensured Feinstein's support for invading Iraq, which has killed some 900,000 people and seriously injured more than 1,500,000. Instead of repeating this crime, what future atrocities might we avert with our eyes open to what our governments are actually doing and thinking?

Finally, about that Espionage Act: As Feinstein quotes, it's about "information relating to the national defense", not to the tawdry everyday dealmaking, strongarming, and occasionally criminal information gathering revealed in the cables being released by Wikileaks. The honor or trust of diplomats is not a matter of national security. If they act honorably or in a trustworthy way, then there is no need for secrecy. It is because they don't, because American empire and corporatism require otherwise, that secrecy is necessary. And why violating that secrecy is so necessary.