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“The Palestinians have to be hit hard. Now they have to be beaten. If they aren’t badly beaten, there won’t be any negotiations.” Ariel Sharon’s statement should have drawn major headlines. I mean the Prime Minister of a nation exclaiming that an entire people must be “hit hard.” Notice he did not say terrorists or militants, no he was talking about all Palestinian people, and he came through with his promise.  With March a little more than half over, the Palestinian body count had already exceeded 150 of whom most were innocent bystanders, bringing the total Palestinian death toll in the last 18 months to over 1200; this in a population barely over 3 million. Israel especially should realize that dehumanizing, humiliating, and “beating” a people into submission will never bring peace. For peace is not brought about by violence and force, but by justice and acceptance. As Thomas Friedman once said, “Israeli’s will never feel at home in Israel until the Palestinians feel at home too.”
How can the Palestinians feel at home after 35 years of a brutal Apartheid military occupation? A situation so inhumane that South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu once claimed that the South African Apartheid was a picnic compared to the conditions the Palestinians live under. If anything this oppressive occupation has made Israel more perilous. It has produced an atmosphere of continuous violence; it has raised an entire generation of Palestinians that know nothing about Israel, except tanks, warplanes, helicopters, soldiers and death.

For if the occupation is for security measures, as is Israeli’s claim, then why have more Israeli’s died since the occupation has intensified? Why have 322 Israeli reservists refused to serve in what they say is an immoral occupation that serves only to dehumanize and oppress an entire people? A people by the way poverty stricken. How do we ever justify rich countries plummeting poor ones? The way to peace is not as Mr. Sharon claims to “hit the Palestinians hard”. It is to set them free. Free them to know a different Israel, a nation made not of guns and jet fighters, but of mothers, fathers and children; not a nation known for it’s own suffering throughout history, finally being given a home, yet has forgotten to love it’s neighbor. Two wrongs have never made a right.

We must all remember that the Holocaust was a grave, brutal, horrifying act in world history; but with this experience comes the responsibility to ensure that injustices do not come from the hand of previous victims. We must all also remember that Palestinian people are human, and have been forcibly displaced, birthing and dying in captivity for over fifty years, so that Israel can exist. One cannot refute the tragedy befallen the Palestinian people; peace is a result of one side willing to risk loss, to ensure justice for another.

by Radney Wood

THE TERRORIST ATTACK of 9-11 obliterated the prevailing fashion of cynical journalism. On TV, America saw the distance between witnesses and reporters, between sources and talking heads collapse in a hurricane of emotion. Reporters hugged those they interviewed, desk anchors struggled to avoid breaking down in tears. Correspondents became servants transmitting the unfiltered voices of people in search of the missing. The stark contrast between real-time reality TV and normal programming led some networks to suspend advertisements for several days.

The news was so important it could not be manufactured, and the networks went on a massive search for the raw video footage and photography produced by citizen eyewitnesses and freelancers. There was a 360 degree reversal of form: the cream of the media’s coverage came from-below. The radical shift in the framing of the message of the medium was so loud and clear, it was as if local unions had seized control of the cameras. Non-stop, round-the-clock coverage zoomed in on the firemen and policemen and women, and the doctors, nurses and medics evacuating the wounded, recovering the dead, and searching through the wreckage for survivors.

The Democratic Faith was rediscovered, if not resurrected, at the apocalypse of Ground Zero. America was able to see with a telephoto clarity the foundation of our civil society: people serving people, and people caring for people, for reasons having nothing to do with the selfish pursuit of private or illicit gain. We were living in a war zone where humble sacrifice was an ethical imperative, random acts of kindness flourished, and genuine human solidarity was everywhere present.

Not since the nonviolent protests of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s had the pure spirit of democracy-in-action been on display in such vivid form through the medium of American commercial television. In those days, corporate gatekeepers did not yet fully understand the impact of such images on the public mind. Later, through their coverage of the war in Vietnam, they learned that images of American soldiers sacrificing their bodies in defense of empire could operate as powerfully on the public imagination as those of an oppressed people seeking liberation from racism. Since then, the TV media have become more consciously selective in serving up visual food for the expansion of the popular conscience. (more…)

I just saw a commercial for Burger King that featured Matt Groening’s The Simpsons, those animated purveyors of American cultural criticism, shilling for just the sort of corporate leviathan that their show so often denounces. With a half-smile that transmitted awareness, sadness and acceptance, I thought aloud, “That’s the end of The Simpson’s doing legitimate cultural criticism!”

Wait a minute, what was I saying? I mean why would the fact that Groening doesn’t practice what he preaches nullify more than a decade of incisive commentary?At a time when populist documentarian Michael Moore gets slammed for living in a million dollar Manhattan apartment while Senator Jesse Helms is grudgingly complimented for being honest and unwavering in his retrograde tenets, it seems important to figure out how American popular culture changed from a country full of hard-core moralists on the left, right, and center to one where what matters is less what you believe and more whether or not you walk your respective ideological rants.

In my view, this shift from focusing on the soundness of one’s ideological convictions to the consistency of one’s worldly practices began a long time ago, and has continued to accelerate with the broader corporate commodification of American popular culture.

It used to be believed that the same powers of the mass media which could overwhelm the original and undermine the authentic could also help spread its own subversion and resistance. Radical ideas concentrated in metropolitan areas could suddenly nfiltrate the most remote and forgotten corners of the country. In the mid-1950s a cultural expression of this possibility emerged through the coming to fame of The Beat writers (Kerouac, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Burroughs et al.). While they were among the first to begin mining the cavern between on-the-ground lived experience and the broadcast ideal, they also understood a new mythology was being forged, and explored the nature of such an Americana of the dissident, alienated, and artistic self in their writings.

Unfortunately, the paradigm of the politicized young male setting out across America’s highways with a copy of Keroauc’s On the Road is by now a hoary cliché, thus easily dismissed by younger Americans. While some of its writers endured, the Beat movement was relatively short-lived. But it helped set the stage for another genre which has come to so permeate our national consciousness that we hardly register its presence: postmodernism.  (more…)

It is difficult to build a democratic movement to challenge elite power and privilege. So it is always something of a historical miracle when a radical social movement—like that led by the Workers Party in Brazil–can survive long enough, while hurdling seemingly impossible obstacles, to win political power without selling out its original mission and ideals.

But this is precisely what happened in Brazil at the end of 2002. There, Workers Party Presidential Candidate Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva–simply known as Lula–won the presidential elections with a landslide 60 percent of the votes in the final two-candidate runoff on November 7th, 2002. In his inaugural address on January 1st, Lula told the nation that he would consider “the mission” of his life “accomplished” if he could create a society where no Brazilian went hungry, where every Brazilian had access to three meals a day, every day.

After three prior unsuccessful bids as the Workers Party candidate, the former metal worker and labor organizer finally overcame the opposition of foreign bankers and the richest sectors of Brazil’s business class and media, bringing together a broad coalition of workers, small farmers, industrial unions, human rights activists, community organizers and sectors of business frustrated by neoliberalism’s failure. Lula’s election in a nation the power and size of Brazil is one more sign that a new social democratic movement is gaining ground in the Americas, and the most significant sign of all.

Lula’s efforts to lead his multiracial nation away from the hyper-exclusionary model of neoliberalism to a more inclusive social democratic model of economic development will be watched closely throughout the region, if not the world. Though Brazil’s nation of 175 million people is the largest and richest economy in Latin America, most estimates put the number of people living in extreme poverty (living hungry) at fifty million people. More generally, Brazil has one of the worst levels of economic inequality in the world.

The social democratic vision begins with the understanding that there is no shortcut to modernity: any nation seeking to build a more democratic and economically advanced society must invest heavily in the human capital of its people and the social and economic infrastructure of its communities. In the age of globalization, people need social capital in order to compete in modern markets and communities need well-educated citizens to build strong civil societies. Both require public investments of the society’s wealth to prosper. (more…)