Report from Al jazeera is once again more honest than the American and Canadian Mainstream Media and their coverage of the Occupy Movements protests
Protesters shut down huge Oakland port in US
AlJazeeraEnglish
UPdate added Sam Cooke video to make up for the Mavis Staple video-
A change is gonna come By Sam Cooke
Mavis Staples-Eyes On The Prize YOUTUBE : link http://youtu.be/0ZWdDI_fkns
Gandhi & The Protesters at the Salt Plant
and here's another Example of Real Civil Disobedience & Non-Violence
putting one's body and life on the line
Gandhi salt works -An Act of peaceful Non-Cooperation
The protesters willingly approach the gate of the Salt Works as if to enter but are beaten down in this case by fellow Indians working for the British Empire.
The protesters do not try to hide their identity because they are proud to take part in this protest.
They do not engage in name calling or trash talk .
They do not throw stuff at the soldiers
They accept the blows from these soldiers with as much equanimity as they can muster.
This form of courage seems of higher moral value than those who drop bunker buster bombs and Napalm from the air and those who push a button a thousand miles away to silence the people with an armed "Drone" .
These brave souls did not raise a hand against their oppressors. They stayed peaceful while being beaten and even killed.
They did not swear and trash talk against those minions the soldiers and police who beat and killed them.
We must regard them as victims of this current oppressive anti-democratic system which has been grinding the people down beginning with the Ronald Reagan Regime to the Bush and Obama Regimes respectively.
So my own view is that protesters in the Occupy Movement shouldn't antagonize the police when given the current system these otherwise decent people are merely an extension of this unjust system.
I also wish there were more discipline shown at these protest by the protesters. As you see in film footage of the clashes between the police and Civil Rights protesters they organize their marches as if they were a private army just as well disciplines, just as well behaved and remaining steadfast sitting on the ground waiting to be arrested.
The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. led the civil-rights non-violent non-cooperation movement in the United States.
Much of what he knew about taking such a difficult though noble and righteous path came from the example of Mahatma Gandhi in India in his fight to end the British Occupation of India.
Interestingly Gandhi borrowed the basic idea of non-violent protest and civil disobedience from the 19th century American essayist, philosopher and writer Henry David Thoreau.
To protest the Mexican American War which he believed to be unnecessary and immoral Thoreau simply refused to pay his taxes. He wrote the essay "On Civil Disobedience" and encourage others who believed as he did to do likewise.
Note as Martin Luther King and Gandhi realized that with an oppressive regime little changes until tens of thousands protest and are willing to fill the jails across the country .
It is al that the protesters when on an organized march should not be just look like their just wandering around -you are either on the Bus or you are not-that is if you take part in a protest march then stick with the other protesters and don't go off sight-seeing or treating the situation as some sort of casual social gathering.
The current growing Occupy Movement or #99% Movement is committed we are told to non-violent peaceful occupation and non-cooperation with authorities when it is necessary to make a point and draw attention to the movement and its central goals of economic, social and political Justice.
This movement is part of an historical American tradition of "Civil Disobedience" from for instance the Boston Tea Party in which citizens of the British Colonies in protest about taxes imposed on them by the British Government went to the docks in Boston and threw a number of tons of Tea into the harbor destroying thereby "the private property "of the corporation or individuals who owned the tea.
If some American citizens took part in a similar protest today the authorities would have them clapped in irons for a number of years or to paraphrase Ann Coulter's so called reasoned response has said "They are a mob and so shoot them". She has been making similar statements for years now and now calls for discrimination , incarceration and summary executions of in her view "Demonic Liberals". These days since she can't call for killing blacks, Hispanics and other non-whites or the poor she feels safe in condemning all liberals and progressives in the US as evil and working for the Devil or Satan -she borrows a great deal from the nasty crude twisted logic of anti-Semitism as in the notorious forgery "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion". Or as our learned friend David Neiwert (The Eliminationists" 2009) would point out these fanatical anti-liberals use the language of "Eliminationism" which extremely dangerous because it is a form of Hate Speech which some people will at some point act upon if it doesn't eventually become policy.
And yet the same conservatives who belittle and mock the Occupy Movement are the ones who are always going on about the War for Independence and characterize the Boston Tea Party gang as heroes rather than hooligans who wantonly destroyed private property.
The people who took part in the Civil Rights Movement were fighting for their basic human rights and civil rights not just the right to vote but also the right to education , medical care the right to sit at a lunch-counter with white people to no longer be confined to the back of the bus literally and metaphorically.
They were fighting for equality and justice and freedom which were denied to black Americans throughout the USA since the end of the American Civil War- they exchanged the chains of slavery for the chains of Jim Crow and injustice.
Black Americans could lynched by the mob and this was considered a form of White America's notion of "Rough Justice"
Martin Luther King was also a critic of the corrupt system in America in which millions of blacks and whites were doomed to lives of want and poverty.
Martin Luther King felt it was a moral imperative that he not only speak out about civil rights racial equality and poverty of whites and Blacks in America but also he spoke out against an unnecessary immoral war that is the Vietnam War.
President Obama and others who claim to admire and see themselves as taking up the same fights Dr. Martin Luther King took part in but in reality President Obama like others in positions of power and authority are too busy glad handing the wealthy elite and their toadies or quislings who for a little praise and a slice of the American economic and social and political pie as it were.
For instance those in the Mainstream Media are so in awe of the wealthy that they refuse to see the injustices that are carried out in their name.
Their allegiance is not so much to America and the American people as it is to the status quo which protects and even increases the wealth of the elite.
One should realize that given the way for instance the talking heads on Fox News continue to grovel before the rich and others whom they believe are in fact better than the mass of American citizens it is no wonder they mock those who are out in the streets trying to bring some sanity to the political and economic discourse in America.
One could easily see how these uberconservative folk if they were around in the 1950 & 1960s they would be condemning the Civil Rights movement and calling Martin Luther King and all his followers of being unAmerican or anti-America and of course hard core communists. Of course at that time conservatives in both parties were against the Civil Rights movement as was J. Edgar Hoover who headed the FBI and often during the Kennedy administration would refuse to carry out the orders of the Attorney General Robert Kennedy .
Many of these conservatives in the US even today call into question the whole Civil Rights movement as being they believe unnecessary and as the endeavor of of the Communist Fifth Column in the USA.
They further argue that Blacks in America exaggerated the extent of their oppression.
Coulter and others even erroneously argue that slavery wasn't that bad for Black Americans because they were brought to a superior civilization and were blessed by hearing the Christian Gospel and therefore might find redemption.
These uberconservatives such as Ann Coulter for instance defend Senator Joe McCarthy and his anti-Communist Witch hunt as being the actions of a true patriotic American since he was in their view engaged in exposing in their view the wide spread infiltration of all levels and all departments of the US government.
This is just a glimpse at their re-writing and re-interpreting American history.
For instance they erroneously argue that America lost the Vietnam war because of the anti-war demonstrators at home in the USA. But even after carpet bombing the country after napalming a thousand villages and killing some 2,000,000 two million Vietnamese the US was forced out of Vietnam as were the French before them.
Many of the current frothing at the mouth uberconservives in either party are represented in the media and the public by the likes of Ann Coulter, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh ,Michelle Bachmann etc. who even now claim that the part of the downfall in their view of America was the Civil Rights Movement, The Feminists Movement to end gender discrimination and injustice and they also blame the Anti-war movement and of course Lyndon Johnson's reforms and legislation he backed and made sure were enacted as law.
Even today as we see from the Bush administration to the Obama administration there is a lack of political and moral will to help out the poor and to insist that the rich pay their fair share in taxes etc.
And both administrations have backed the notion of Perpetual unending bloody brutal war ie Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya and next Syria and Iran.
President Obama like President Bush has abandoned International Law and the Geneva Conventions regaring the restrictions and obligations on nations when involved in a conflict.
The US government and the Pentagon have no regard for civilians who are wantonly killed by the US War Machine which they euphemistically refer to as "collateral damage".
In similar fashion the US has redefined the meaning of "torture " to suit their own agenda so now Torture is referred to as Enhanced Interrogation Techniques.
The US has committed various war crimes and crimes against humanity in its Perpetual War .
The US for instance has refused to maintain an official "body Count" of those Iraqis and Afghans etc. who have been killed since October 2001 to the present.
Even this according to International Law is a crime since belligerents are obligated to gather up and count and to try to identify those whom they have killed.
Even dead Iraqi citizens deserve better than this.
Shouldn't their families be notified when a relative is killed.
Don't they deserve a proper funeral .
While Americans weep over the 6,000 or so Americans killed they appear to shed few tears for the over a million Iraqis killed or to even inform the Red Cross of those Iraqis killed and their identities whenever possible.
To the American people as in all America's wars the enemy or even civilians in enemy territory are merely an abstraction or the US resorts to demonize all enemy combatants and any who dare give them aid.
The Iraqis are just a more modern replacement for Native Americans who were also demonized and then slaughtered till only a small remnant remains.
and so it goes,
GORD.
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