10.29.2005
Bush: Crippled by his own liesIt could have been worse for the Bush White House, but not very much worse.
Karl Rove has not been charged for leaking intelligence, but he remains the subject of an investigation that will continue to gnaw away at the administration’s weakest point: its justification for going to war in Iraq.
Meanwhile, Lewis “Scooter” Libby has been indicted and will face trial for perjury, making false statements and obstruction of justice. He is no mere extra in this drama. He is the right-hand man of the most powerful vice-president in modern American history, and he got himself in trouble trying to protect his boss over the critical issue of US pre-war intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.
Libby told the grand jury he had learned the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame from journalists. It turned out, according to Friday’s indictment, that he had been told about her in June 2003 by Dick Cheney, who had discovered that her husband, Joseph Wilson, a former ambassador, had been telling journalists the administration had “twisted” the WMD evidence to sell the war to America and the rest of the world.
At the same time, Rove was also talking to journalists about Wilson and his secret-agent wife in a concerted White House effort to rebut his WMD allegations. The continuing investigation into the president’s closest adviser will inevitably explore what the White House had to hide about how far it went to make the case for an invasion.
So will Libby’s trial. Libby is a top neo-conservative. The witness list at his trial could well include CIA and state department officials who did battle with him over WMD
intelligence.
It could become a forum in which CIA officials, who feel they were made a scapegoat for the intelligence debacle, try to focus attention back on the White House’s role in shaping the evidence.
Every investigation of the Iraqi WMD fiasco so far has avoided directly tackling the politicisation of intelligence in the run-up to the war, when Cheney and Libby visited the CIA headquarters in Langley several times to chivvy analysts who were sceptical about tales of banned weapon systems told by Iraqi exiles.
A trial could fill that gap. Cheney would almost certainly be a witness in the Libby case. His cross-examination could be extremely uncomfortable for the vice-president and the White House. “We're likely to move to a trial of the war in Iraq and how we got into that war,” David Gergen, a former adviser to Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, told CNN.
“The trial would inevitably bring a lot of witnesses who would have to explain what the administration was doing from one day to next. If you’re in the White House you profoundly do not want that to be occurring when you are trying to keep a focus on the war itself, on how to win the war.”
It adds up to a serious distraction for an administration that has already lost its way. Its second-term agenda, supposed to focus on pension and tax reform, has been shelved as the White House struggles to deal with the tenacious insurgency in Iraq, the resounding rejection of its Supreme Court nominee by its own political footsoldiers and the rising tide of scandal lapping at the White House door.
The president’s two top allies in Congress — Bill Frist, the Senate majority leader, and Tom DeLay, the House of Representatives majority leader — are both in legal trouble. DeLay has been charged with laundering campaign donations to bypass Texan election laws.
Frist is being investigated for a suspiciously lucrative sale of stock in his family’s medical corporation just before it announced bad financial news.
In fact, all the major players who would otherwise be expected to drive the administration’s programme in the last three years of the Bush presidency will be spending more time with their lawyers, leaving a vacuum at the inner circle around the president.
The whole affair will also hack away another plate of the administration's armour.
And Bush minus Rove would be an unknown quantity. He has been there from the genesis of the Texan’s political career.
Before throwing their hat in for the Texas governorship election in 1994, Rove sequestered his protege for weeks, drilling him on public policy and instilling the discipline of picking a simple message and sticking to it.
Rove was clearly relieved on Friday. “I'm going to have a good Friday and a fantastic weekend,” he told journalists.
THE BACKGROUND
The Plame scandal is about the Iraq war and the US justification for it.
In 2002 Joseph Wilson, a former ambassador, was sent to Niger to check Intelligence reports that Iraq was trying to buy uranium there. He found scant evidence, and was surprised to hear President Bush repeat the claim when addressing the nation in January 2003.
After complaining privately to no effect, Wilson wrote an angry article in the New York Times in July 2003, alleging the administration had “twisted” the intelligence.
A conservative columnist, Robert Novak, then quoted “two senior administration officials” as saying Wilson was sent to Niger by his wife, Valerie Plame, a “CIA operative”.
Whoever leaked the name of an undercover agent might have committed a serious felony.
The 22-month investigation led by Patrick Fitzgerald sought to find out who, and whether there was a government conspiracy to discredit Wilson and his mission.
Copyright: 2004 The Printers (Mysore) Private Ltd., 75, M.G. Road, Post Box No 5331, Bangalore - 560001
From: Deccan Hearld http://www.deccanherald.com/deccanherald/oct302005/foreign17514420051029.asp
10.24.2005
Will the French Indict Cheney?by Doug Ireland
October 22, 2005
Yet another sordid chapter in the murky annals of Halliburton might well lead to the indictment of Dick Cheney by a French court on charges of bribery, money-laundering and misuse of corporate assets.
At the heart of the matter is a $6 billion gas liquification factory built in Nigeria on behalf of oil mammoth Shell by Halliburton--the company Cheney headed before becoming Vice President--in partnership with a large French petroengineering company, Technip. Nigeria has been rated by the anticorruption watchdog Transparency International as the second-most corrupt country in the world, surpassed only by Bangladesh.
One of France's best-known investigating magistrates, Judge Renaud van Ruymbeke--who came to fame by unearthing major French campaign finance scandals in the 1990s that led to a raft of indictments--has been conducting a probe of the Nigeria deal since October. And, three days before Christmas, the Paris daily Le Figaro front-paged the news that Judge van Ruymbeke had notified the Justice Ministry that Cheney might be among those eventually indicted as a result of his investigation.
According to accounts in the French press, Judge van Ruymbeke believes that some or all of $180 million in so-called secret "retrocommissions" paid by Halliburton and Technip were, in fact, bribes given to Nigerian officials and others to grease the wheels for the refinery's construction. These reports say van Ruymbeke has fingered as the bagman in the operation a 55-year-old London lawyer, Jeffrey Tesler, who has worked for Halliburton for some thirty years. It was Tesler who was paid the $180 million as a "commercial consultant" through a Gibraltar-based front company he set up called TriStar. TriStar, in turn, got the money from a consortium set up for the Nigeria deal by Halliburton and Technip and registered in Madeira, the Portuguese offshore island where taxes don't apply. According to Agence France-Presse, a former top Technip official, Georges Krammer, has testified that the Madeira-based consortium was a "slush fund" controlled by Halliburton--through its subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root--and Technip. Krammer, who is cooperating with the investigation, also swore that Tesler was imposed as the intermediary by Halliburton over the objections of Technip.
Tesler is a curious fellow: A veteran operator in Nigeria, he was the financial adviser to the late dictator Gen. Sani Abacha and controlled his personal fortune, while at the same time working for Halliburton. Abacha's former Oil Minister, Dan Etete--who is suspected of having used some of the alleged bribe money to buy himself fancy apartments in Paris and a chateau in Normandy--was deposed by Judge van Ruymbeke in December. According to the Journal du Dimanche (a large Sunday paper), Etete's testimony seemed to confirm the judge's suspicions that Tesler laundered the $180 million through offshore and other accounts, and that part of the money wound up in dictator Abacha's coffers. Tesler's bank accounts in Monaco, Switzerland and elsewhere have been subpoenaed in an effort to find out where the money went.
Judge van Ruymbeke's authority for his transnational investigation comes from a law France passed in 2000 against "bribing foreign officials," following its ratification of a convention adopted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development prohibiting bribe-giving in the course of commercial transactions. The notion that the judge's targeting of Cheney might be in part retaliatory for the Bush Administration's exclusion of France from Iraq reconstruction contracts is unlikely: Van Ruymbeke is notoriously independent, and his previous investigations have been aimed at politicians and parties of both right and left. He's also no stranger to the unsavory world of oil-and-gas politics, having previously investigated bribe-giving by the French petrogiant Elf--indeed, it was in the course of his Elf investigation that van Ruymbeke stumbled upon the Nigerian deal.
The suspected bribe money was mostly ladled out between 1995 and 2000, when Cheney was Halliburton's CEO. The Journal du Dimanche reported on December 21 that "it is probable that some of the 'retrocommissions' found their way back to the United States" and asked, did this money go "to Halliburton's officials? To officials of the Republican Party?" These questions have so far gone unasked by America's media, which have completely ignored the explosive Le Figaro headline revealing the targeting of Cheney. It will be interesting to see if the US press looks seriously into this ticking time-bomb of a scandal before the November elections.
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Doug Ireland, a longtime Nation contributor, has been a columnist for the Village Voice, the New York Observer and the Paris daily Libération. He is also a contributing editor of POZ, the monthly for the HIV-positive community.
The original article was posted on December 29,2003:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20040112/ireland
Reposted on October 22, 2005
http://www.uruknet.com/?p=17058&hd=0&size=1&l=e
10.20.2005
Do No Harm:A Doctor's Hypocritical Oath
by Ray Boyd
18 Oct, 2005
Take your medicine, as long as it's not marijuana?
Take your medicine, as long as it's not marijuana?
Compassionate conservatism in the world of modern medicine:
If your gut wrenches, vomit.
If you can't absorb nutrients through your defective digestive system, get your nutrients intravenously.
If you have chronic pain so severe you want to die, suffer.
If you have arthritis so bad that your arms and legs are turning into mummified pretzel shapes, take a warm bath with Epsom Salts.
If you are starving to death because your cancer chemotherapy or AIDS drugs have stolen your appetite, force yourself to eat.
Or take prescription drugs that make the conditions worse. Or have surgery. Or die.
That's the Bush administration's message to the sick and dying people of the United States: suffer, endure pain, and perhaps even die, but whatever you do, don't use medical marijuana, not even in a state where the majority of your fellow citizens approve of you using it.
If you want to use medical marijuana, you break federal law, and you know what happens if you break federal law – you live in fear, you risk losing your family, assets, and freedom.
If you break an American federal marijuana law, you risk prosecution, even if you break the law while you live in Canada.
Just ask Canadian marijuana seed seller Marc Emery. He broke Canadian marijuana laws for years, but the worst that ever happened to him was 90 days in jail for passing a joint. He broke Canadian laws on television. He broke them in front of Parliament and police stations. He advertised illegal seed sales on the Internet. He gave illegal seed sale money to prominent politicians. The Canadian government investigated him a couple of years ago and decided not to bust him for selling seeds. But the US government decided to bust him for selling seeds, and the DEA wants to kidnap him from Canada (they call it "extradition").
If you are an American in America, should you use and/or grow medical marijuana? It's a hard choice. If the government catches you using, growing or advocating medical marijuana, you could lose your life. Like Steve McWilliams, the San Diego medpot activist who killed himself earlier this year after the feds took away his right to use medical marijuana and created an unbearable situation of pain and illness for him by doing so.
In most countries, if you want to use pot, you have two clear choices: help yourself with the relatively harmless healing herb and thus make yourself a federally-designated cannabis criminal, or take prescription drugs.
There are of course other choices, such as surgery, suicide, death, alternative therapies. But let's just stay focused on the drug choice dilemma: the federal drug warriors say marijuana is not medicine; you have no right to choose medical marijuana even if you know it will help you. The federal drug warriors say a substance is not "a medicine" until the government says it's a medicine, but the government won't say something is a medicine unless the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) says it's a medicine first. The FDA won’t say a substance is a medicine unless a pharmaceutical corporation pays off researchers, who then write a study or two saying that the substance is a medicine. The researchers and physicians who tell the FDA and federal government that a substance is or is not a medicine are as believable as the researchers and physicians who used to testify under oath to Congress, claiming that cigarettes were actually good for people's health.
The process involved in creating "legal prescription drugs" causes more harm than illegal marijuana, and verges on criminal negligence. Consider a report titled "Uneasy Alliance: Clinical Investigators and the Pharmaceutical Industry" written by Dr. Thomas Bodenheimer. The report says many medical researchers, physicians and academic institutions are funded by the prescription drug industry.
Bodenheimer interviewed researchers who told how pharmaceutical companies halted publication or altered the contents of prescription drug studies, so they could cover up negative information that would interfere with FDA product approval.
One researcher who found problems with a company's drug was told by the sponsoring pharmaceutical company that funded the research that he would not get hired as a contract researcher again, unless he falsified his findings to present the product in a more favorable light.
The FDA, supposedly a watchdog protecting the public from bad prescription drugs, is implicated in numerous scandals involving bad research and deadly drugs.
Recently, FDA safety officer David Graham stated that the FDA is "the single greatest obstacle to doing anything effective" regarding Vioxx, a drug reported to cause severe side effects and death.
Graham said the FDA could have prevented the deaths resulting from Vioxx.
"Nearly 60,000 people probably died from Vioxx," Graham lamented. "The FDA had the opportunity, the responsibility, to stop that, and didn't."
Graham said the FDA was in "a collaborative relationship" with the pharmaceutical industry, and that FDA had financial incentive to "to approve new drugs and approve them more quickly."
"The pharma-FDA complex has to be dismantled," Graham warned, "and the American people have to insist on that, otherwise we're going to have more disasters like Vioxx happen in the future."
Guess what happened to Graham after he admitted that the FDA had wrongly handled the Vioxx situation? Graham was subject to a smear campaign by FDA Commissioner Lester Crawford. But there is some justice in the world: Crawford, who was only following Karl Rove's example regarding how you handle a critic (attack the critic, endanger the critic's family, etc.), was forced to resign recently.
He joins FEMA boss Michael Brown, who resigned after it was discovered that his qualifications for doing hurricane relief consisted of being a lawyer for owners of Arabian race horses.
Crawford was a political hack who opposed women's reproductive rights. He ran an agency that was all about government regulation, but he opposed government regulation.
Crawford believes, as does Bush's new female Supreme Court nominee, that as soon as a sperm and egg get together, a baby exists.
That's why, despite two FDA advisory committee votes approving the "morning-after contraceptive pill," Crawford overruled his own experts and prohibited the drug from being provided. He said he was very concerned about womens' health.
But Crawford wasn't concerned about the health of people who used the painkiller Vioxx. According to Graham, "a study of patient insurance records showed that Vioxx users had a 50 percent greater chance of heart attacks and sudden cardiac deaths." Crawford knew about the study Graham had cited.
What did Crawford do to protect the American people from Vioxx? He helped Vioxx manufacturer Merck hide the negative Vioxx study.
He tried to force Graham to stop criticizing Vioxx. Graham resisted, so Crawford started slagging him. In December 2004, the Government Accountability Project, a whistleblower support group, described Crawford's actions against Graham as "rabid bureaucratic backlash." Several Congressmembers wrote a report telling Crawford that his attacks on Graham were "out of line and may very well be illegal."
"Your treatment of Dr. Graham," the Congressional report said, "undoubtedly has had a chilling effect on the willingness of FDA employees to speak up and disagree when they believe the public's health is at risk."
Why would Crawford "whore" for Merck? Could it be because Merck is one of the largest pharmaceutical company donors to the Republican Party? It gives hundreds of thousands of dollars directly and indirectly to Repubs every year.
Crawford isn't just loyal to Merck. He also allegedly sold himself to the Bush 2004 campaign team. Before the election, Bush opposed allowing Canada to export prescription drugs to the USA, and the policy was costing Bush votes because elderly voters wanted Canadian drugs because they're cheaper and better than US versions of the same drugs. Just before the election, then-FDA head Crawford falsely stated that Osama bin Laden was planning to attack America by putting poison in Canadian drugs, giving Bush political cover for opposing importation of Canadian drugs.
The importation of Canadian marijuana, and the approval of marijuana as a medicine by the FDA, has been similarly handled. The FDA and DEA say marijuana has no medical value and is deadly. The DEA and the White House describe Canadian marijuana as a deadly drug killing America's youth.
Perhaps we will soon be told that Osama bin Laden is going to poison US-bound BC bud? Or that he is poisoning Afghani hashish sold in Dutch potshops?
The prescription and over the counter drugs that medical marijuana competes with are often certifiably deadly, but there has never been a certifiably recorded incident wherein somebody died from a marijuana overdose or marijuana side effects.
It is important to prove the relative harmlessness of marijuana when compared to prescription drugs, so forgive me the following list of pharmaceutical drug side effects. These drugs are prescribed for people who would rather use medical marijuana. Pharmaceutical drugs commonly prescribed for conditions that medical marijuana has been found to safely alleviate include the following drugs. We are also including a list of some side effects said to be associated with the drug:
Megestrol acetate (Megace). Can cause high blood pressure, diabetes, inflammation of the blood vessels, congestive heart failure, seizures, pneumonia, nausea, vomiting, impotence, urinary frequency, urinary incontinence, urinary tract infection, vaginal bleeding and discharge, heart disease, chest pain, lung disorders, rapid breathing, insomnia, headache, weakness, numbness, seizures, depression, and abnormal thinking.
Metronidazole (Flagyl), is carcinogenic. Patients treated with Metronidazole have reported convulsive seizures and peripheral neuropathy. Ironically, this medicine is prescribed for digestive problems but it causes nausea that is sometimes accompanied by headache, anorexia, and occasionally vomiting; diarrhea; gastric distress and abdominal cramping.
Sulfasalazine (Azulfidine) -Common adverse reactions associated with sulfasalazine are anorexia, headache, nausea, vomiting, gastric distress.
Chlordiazepoxide/Clidinium (Librax) - Drowsiness, ataxia and confusion have been reported in some patients, particularly the elderly and debilitated. Adverse effects reported with use of Librax are those typical of anticholinergic agents, i.e., dryness of the mouth and blurred vision. Withdrawal symptoms, similar in character to those noted with barbiturates and alcohol (convulsions, tremor, abdominal and muscle cramps, vomiting and sweating), have occurred following abrupt discontinuance of chlordiazepoxide.
Hyoscyamine Sulfate (Levsin) - Adverse reactions may include dryness of the mouth; urinary hesitancy and retention; blurred vision; tachycardia; palpitations; increased ocular tension; loss of taste; headache; nervousness; drowsiness; weakness; dizziness; insomnia; nausea; vomiting; impotence; suppression of lactation; constipation; bloated feeling; allergic reactions or drug idiosyncrasies; speech disturbance; mental confusion (especially in elderly persons); and decreased sweating.
Mesalamine CR (Pentasa) - Common side effects are diarrhea, headache, nausea, abdominal pain, dyspepsia, vomiting, and rash.
Phosphorated carbohydrate (Emetrol) - Side effects include: fainting; swelling of face, arms, and legs; unusual bleeding; vomiting; weight loss; yellow eyes or skin, stomach or abdominal pain.
Dicyclomine (Bentyl) - Can cause blurred vision, dry mouth, heart problems, seizures, impotence, difficulty urinating.
Ciprofloxacin (Cipro) - The most frequent side effects include nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pain, rash, headache, and restlessness.
Methotrexate (Rheumatrex, Trexall) - Is very toxic, depending on dose. The most frequent reactions include mouth sores, stomach upset, and low white blood counts. Methotrexate can cause severe toxicity of the liver and bone marrow, which require regular monitoring with blood testing.
Diphenoxylate and atropine (Lotomil) - Bad effects include drowsiness, dizziness, and headache, nausea or vomiting, and dry mouth. Euphoria, depression, lethargy, restlessness, numbness of extremities, loss of appetite, and abdominal pain or discomfort has been reported less frequently. Side effects of atropine (including dryness of the skin and mucous membranes, increased heart rate, urinary retention, and increased body temperature) have been reported, particularly in children under two years of age.
Prednisone (Delatasone). This is a steroid drug that can have serious adverse musculoskeletal, gastrointestinal, dermatologic, neurological, endocrine, and ophthalmic side effects. These include: congestive heart failure in susceptible patients, potassium loss, and hypertension. Muscle weakness, steroid myopathy, loss of muscle mass, osteoporosis, tendon rupture, vertebral compression fractures, and pathologic fracture of long bones; peptic ulcer with possible perforation and hemorrhage; pancreatitis; abdominal distention; ulcerative esophagitis. Impaired wound healing, thin fragile skin. Increased intracranial pressure, usually after treatment, convulsions, vertigo, and headache. Menstrual irregularities; decreased carbohydrate tolerance; diabetes mellitus, cataracts and glaucoma.
Doses of these medicines are often huge. Some patients take thousands of milligrams of aspirin per day in continuous doses, which can cause stomach pain and damage; aspirin causes at least 1,500 deaths annually in the United States.
Pain killers prescribed against chronic pain (for which cannabis is known to offer especially effective relief) include codeine (Dolacet, Hydrocet, Lorcet, Lortab); morphine (Avinza, Oramorph); oxycodone (Vicodin, Oxycontin, Roxicodone); propoxyphene (Percocet, Darvon, Darvocet) and tramadol (Ultram, Ultracet). These medicines are serious drugs with severe side-effects that cannot be avoided. Problems include psychological and physical dependence, addiction, constipation, dizziness, lightheadedness, mood changes, nausea, sedation, shortness of breath, vomiting, depression, and death.
Doctors also prescribe NSAIDs (non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs) and COX-2 inhibitors. All these substances can cause serious side-effects. Corticosteroids (Cortisone), prednisone and similar medications cause bruising, cataracts, elevated blood sugar, hypertension, increased appetite, indigestion, insomnia, mood swings, muscle weakness, nervousness or restlessness, osteoporosis, infection and thin skin.
People who take overdoses of these drugs, or who use them while also using alcohol, can suffer fatal consequences.
These prescription drugs are often prescribed in groups, and that creates a synergistic effect that potentiates the harmful effects.
These are just some of the prescription drugs that are given to people to alleviate conditions that marijuana can alleviate. The side effects of these and other prescription drugs can objectively be said to be far worse than the side effects of marijuana.
But let's give the devil his due. Just to let the drug warriors know we aren't liars, let’s list the "worst" side effects that could legitimately be proposed for marijuana: respiratory problems; being high; memory lapses; dependency; loss of energy; fatigue; impaired coordination; inability to concentrate; possible risk of triggering instability in people who already have a mental illness.
Even drug warriors admit that these are the only real side effects of pot, and that these side effects disappear if a person stops using marijuana.
Compare these marijuana side effects with those of pharmaceutical drugs that marijuana competes with. It’s undeniable that marijuana is safer, more effective, and less dangerous than any corporate drug it competes with.
And that’s why it’s illegal.
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From: http://www.cannabisculture.com/articles/4560.html
10.19.2005
Historical and contemporary life fuses on the Great PlainsOctober 10, 2005
CODY, Wyo. - The Creator brought everything together - earth, water, fire and air; ''this is Crow country.''
These were the words of Crow Chief Arapooish to fur trader Robert Campbell in 1843, as spoken by Crow elder Joe Medicine Crow at a recent seminar in Cody.
''You can take fur, but don't overdo it. You can eat buffalo, but don't overdo it. While you are here, don't hurt our land. Go now and catch the beaver, but don't overdo it; eat buffalo, but only what you need. So long as you do this, you are welcome in Crow country,'' were the words of Arapooish.
Medicine Crow spoke during the Plains Indian Museum Seminar at the Buffalo Bill Historic Center. The subtitle of the seminar was ''Native Land and the People of the Great Plains.'' Seminar participants, scholars, lecturers, historians and others heard story after story about how today's American Indian makes contact with the past so that they can maintain the culture today.
A fusion of history and contemporary life on the Plains brought to light why the Plains Indians so strongly protect their ancestral homeland and sustain the culture. From the Black Hills of South Dakota to Yellowstone and north to the Missouri River in Montana, then south into the Powder River country of Wyoming. American Indian participants at the seminar related stories and personal opinions about why the people are still there and why they intent to stay and grow even stronger.
''We are the earth people,'' Medicine Crow said. ''It is very challenging trying to preserve our land and keep it sacred. A lot of times you abuse our land,'' he said.
Medicine Crow said that non-Indians may acquire land and claim they can do anything they want on it.
''We don't own the land; we belong to it. Father Sky is getting mad at us. There are tornadoes and hurricanes, and it goes on and on,'' Medicine Crow said.
''While we are here we can enjoy; here we can sustain the Indian beliefs,'' he said.
The Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara on the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota, like other tribes along the Missouri River, lost much of their homeland - including villages and allotments - to the creation of lakes behind a series of Missouri River dams that were part of the Flood Control Act of 1944.
''Native lands of the Great Plains seemed to be speaking to Fort Berthold. We are irrevocably tied to the land; physically, it is the land which nourished us,'' said Marilyn Cross Hudson, of Fort Berthold.
The loss of homeland by Plains tribes meant the loss of lands rich in nutrients for sustenance and a loss of sacred sites used for ceremonial purposes, sites that include burial places as land was broken up to allow non-Indians to settle and the dams that created lakes put sites permanently underwater.
Cross Hudson spoke about the lost village of Elbowoods, where she grew up. The community was completely inundated by Lake Sakakewea in the 1950s. Many elders today speak of that community that was rich in life, ground where crops were grown and wildlife was abundant enough to ensure a sustained community.
Elbowoods was moved to where New Town, N.D. is now located. The houses were moved across the frozen Missouri River.
Fighting to protect sacred places
Sustaining the culture and spiritual connection to the land takes plenty of resilience and determination. Sacred places are harder to protect.
Bear Lodge (or Devils Tower) in Wyoming is a sacred site for the Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho. Rock climbing on the tower is a major sport that conflicts with ceremonies conducted every year in June. The National Park Service asks for a voluntary prohibition on climbing in June, but many climbers, guides especially, do not respect the ceremonies - and have even taken the issue to court when the park service asked for a complete June prohibition.
A move is under way to change the name to Bear Lodge, or at least add it for place-name recognition. All tribes, in their own languages, refer to the monolith with similar stories as the lodge of the bear.
Bear Butte, on the north edge of the sacred Black Hills, is now a state park, controlled by South Dakota with help from an American Indian advisory board.
The Black Hills are sacred to many tribes who called the area home for centuries. The land was taken from the Lakota after it was retained by the Treaty of 1851.
The U.S. Supreme Court, in 1980, ruled the Black Hills were illegally taken from the Lakota. ''A more ripe case of dishonesty may never have been seen,'' the Supreme Court stated.
Congress offered $81 million for the Black Hills. The current value is now, accounting for compounded interest, approximately $500 million.
''Lakota people have refused the money, asserting the [Black Hills] are not for sale. Eighty percent of the Lakota are absolute in non-receipt of money. The government thinks the case is closed; the Indians know the case if open,'' said Linea Sundstrom, archaeologist.
Sundstrom said there is always the question about how a people with the nation's most extreme poverty refuse one-half billion dollars.
It's not about the money; the land isn't for sale, according to tribal elders. The land was taken because those who did the taking said the American Indian did not use the land properly. But the land provided sustenance and a spiritual value, Sundstrom said.
''It's not about the money. I think the prevalent thought on that is that the money will not fix what's wrong. It won't bring things back into balance,'' she said.
''Also I think the Oglalas [of the Pine Ridge Reservation] and Sicangu [of the Rosebud Reservation] in particular witnessed a lot of money poured in and gone up in smoke. It hasn't fixed the problem. I think they want to get back into relationship with the land.''
The archaeological sites referred to by Sundstrom range from stone drawings, medicine lodge sites and campsites to other sites such as springs and rock outcroppings that were used and are known by elders today as sacred or ceremonial sites; or sites where something significant had taken place.
An area called Cave Hills in South Dakota, a circle of caves that is sacred to the Lakota, is the site of former uranium mining. Today the tailings continue to drain into the Grand River and eventually into the Missouri. Work is under way to award more mining licenses for the area to explore for oil and other materials. The tribes want a reclamation process to take place.
Stone drawings that elders assert are communications from the ancestors that give instructions on how to live with the land are destroyed by chalk, tools and graffiti.
''Religions and spirituality reference both space and time. Christianity references place and American Indian spirituality references the past, present and future simultaneously,'' Sundstrom said.
''Lands of the Indians were inherent property from time immemorial and not given to them by human power,'' Cross Hudson said.
© Indian Country Today . All Rights Reserved
10.16.2005
Marijuana may spur new brain cellsby Steve Mitchell
WASHINGTON, Oct. 13 (UPI) -- Scientists said Thursday that marijuana appears
to promote the development of new brain cells in rats and have anti-anxiety
and anti-depressant effects, a finding that could have an impact on the
national debate over medical uses of the drug.
Other illegal ! and legal drugs, including opiates, alcohol, nicotine and
cocaine, have been shown to suppress the formation of new brain cells when
used chronically, but marijuana's effect on that process was uncertain.
Now, a team led by Xia Zhang of the department of psychiatry at the
University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon may have found evidence the drug
spurs new brain cells to form in a region of the brain called the
hippocampus, and this in turn reduces anxiety and depression.
Marijuana appears "to be the only illicit drug whose capacity to produce
increased ... neurons is positively correlated with its (anti-anxiety) and
anti-depressant-like effects," Zhang and colleagues wrote in the November
issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation. The paper was posted online
Thursday.
In the study, rats were given injections of HU210 -- a synthesized version
of a cannabinoid chemical found in marijuana -- twice per day fo! r 10 days.
Zhang told United Press International this would be "a high dose" of smoked
marijuana, but he added he is not certain how many equivalent joints it
would take or whether patients now using the drug typically would be getting
this much HU210.
Although HU210 was injected, Zhang said there would be no difference if it
was obtained by smoking marijuana.
The rats showed evidence of new neurons in the hippocampus dentate gyrus, a
region of the brain that plays a role in developing memories.
Zhang's team suspected the new brain cells also might be associated with a
reduction in anxiety and depression, because previous studies had indicated
medications used to treat anxiety and depression achieve their effect this
way.
To find out, they treated rats with HU210 for 10 days and then tested them
one month later. When placed in a new environment, the rats were quicker to
ea! t their food than rats that did not receive the compound, which suggested
there was a reduction in anxiety behaviors.
Another group of rats treated with HU210 showed a reduction in the duration
of immobility in a forced swimming test, which is an indication the compound
had an anti-depressant effect.
Asked how he thought the findings might impact the debate over using
marijuana to treat medical conditions, Zhang said, "Our results indicate
cannabinoids could be used for the treatment of anxiety and depression."
He added that his view is "marijuana should be used as alcohol or nicotine,"
noting "it has been used for treating various diseases for years in other
countries."
Last June the U.S. Supreme Court voted 6-3 that the federal ban on marijuana
supersedes the laws of certain states that allow the substance to be used
for medicinal purposes, such as the treatment of pain, nausea in cancer
pa! tients and glaucoma. Eleven states have passed laws legalizing marijuana
use by patients with a doctor's approval, including California, Alaska,
Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Vermont and Washington.
The Bush administration, through the Department of Justice's Drug
Enforcement Agency, began conducting raids in California in 2001 on patients
using marijuana. Two of those arrested by the DEA -- Angel Raich, who
suffers from brain cancer, and Diane Monson, who used the drug to help
alleviate chronic back pain -- sued Attorney General John Ashcroft,
requesting a court order to be allowed to grow and smoke marijuana, which
led to the Supreme Court decision.
Paul Armentano, senior policy analyst with the National Organization for the
Reform of Marijuana Laws, told UPI he thought the findings "would have a
positive impact on moving forward this debate, because it is giving ... a
scientific explanation that! further supports long-observed anecdotal
evidence, and further lends itself to the notion that marijuana, unlike so
many other prescription drugs and controlled substances, appears to have
incredibly low toxicity and as a result lacks potential harm to the brain
that many of these drugs have."
The DEA Web site, however, contends that "marijuana is a dangerous,
addictive drug that poses significant health threats to users," including
cancer and impaired mental functioning.
Armentano said this is a distortion of what scientific studies actually
show. Studies in animals indicate marijuana actually may protect against
many forms of cancer, rather than cause the disease, he said. In addition,
studies in marijuana smokers have found little evidence of cognitive
deficits, and even when they do, the defects disappear if the person stops
smoking for 30 days.
E-mail: sciencemail@upi.com
Copyright 20! 05 by United Press International
From: http://about.upi.com/products/health_business/UPI-20051013-024854-9860R
10.09.2005
Compliments of Government of the USA in Exile (GUSAE): Free Americans Resisting the Fourth Reich on Behalf of All Species.“A Flaming Arrow Aimed at the Circled Wagons of American Injustice!”
Reviewer: Come Again Moon
This is an important CD
Available at http://cdbaby.com/cd/harveyarden --Listen Free!
How can we rate this CD, it is like trying to rate the experience of the heart beat of GrandMother Earth.
This album is important. Leonard invites you into his cell, with the care and grace of a loving, holy spirit and Harvey Arden's riveting, narration carries us through the journey of Leonard's Sun Dance as we are all, accompanied to new levels of understanding, by Rev. Goat and the New Orleans Light. Ordering more than one copy of this CD really is a good idea and Little Eagle, thank you for the excellent suggestion.
One of my copies will be given to my Congressperson.
Mitakye Oyasin Moon
Leonard Peltier in His Own Words
My Life is My Sun Dance: Prison Writings of Leonard Peltier
Read by Harvey Arden, music by Reverend Goat and New Orleans Light
Mi Abuelo Records
Review by Norm Dixon
Leonard Peltier is one of the United States’ longest-serving political prisoners, jailed in 1976 in a blatantly rigged trial, during which the US government and the FBI refused to put any limits on the depths they would stoop to see this militant leader of the Native American people silenced for life. Almost 30 years later, Harvey Arden has done his bit to break that silence with the release of My Life is My Sun Dance, a series of readings from Peltier’s prison writings.
Arden’s expressive voice creates an emotional connection between the listener and the author of the words, who has been bricked up in high-security prisons and kept isolated from his people and his many supporters. Through Arden, accompanied by the smooth jazz moods of New Orleans Light, Peltier talks directly to us and you can feel and share his humanity, defiance and fears. Peltier’s writing is conversational and poetic, it is hopeful and inspiring. One listen of this CD and you will really care about this humane and gentle, but fierce warrior for social justice.
Peltier tells us about the terrors and uncertainties of prison life, about the history of Washington’s long oppression of the Native American people and how his individual oppression is simply a continuation of it. He discusses his people’s spirituality and how it is bound to the struggle to end the oppression of all peoples. And Peltier outlines the specifics of the events that landed him in jail, and the details of what must be one of the most outrageous frame-ups in US history.
In the early 1970s, the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota was the scene of a serious conflict between the corrupt, pro-government, assimilationist reservation authorities and militant reservation residents who were demanding that Native Americans control their own affairs. The residents were also demanding that they be permitted to continue to practice their traditional culture without hindrance.
It emerged that uranium had been found on the reservation land, and the federal government and its Indian puppets were determined to crush the militants in order to get their hands on it. Rich ranchers were also being allowed to graze the sensitive semi-arid country for minimal or no fees.
In 1973, the residents sought the assistance of the radical American Indian Movement (AIM) and together they occupied the village of Wounded Knee (the same site where, less than 100 years earlier, a horrific US Army massacre of 300 Native Americans had taken place). The response of the US government was to launch a paramilitary attack in which two residents were killed. The stand-off lasted 71 days, before the government promised to investigate the residents’ complaints. It was another promise made to Native Americans that was never kept.
In the aftermath of the Wounded Knee occupation, the reservation authorities outlawed the AIM and banned traditional ceremonies and practices. A reign of terror was instigated, in which thugs known as Guardians of the Oglala Nation (literally spelled GOON), attempted to drive out all opponents of the pro-government reservation leaders. Between 1973 and 1976, more than 60 “traditionalists” were murdered. The FBI refused to investigate these deaths and continued to arm the GOONs with weapons and information in order to prevent AIM again gaining a foothold at Pine Ridge.
In desperation, Pine Ridge residents again appealed for AIM activists to help them defend themselves. Leonard Peltier was among the dozens of militants who responded. The traditional people, many of whom were elderly, feared for their lives. AIM provided support such as cutting fire wood, collecting water and preparing meals, as well as offering protection from attacks by GOONs. AIM activists were armed for their own protection.
On June 26, 1975, two unmarked cars chased a red truck onto the Jumping Bull ranch at Pine Ridge, the home of a number of families being defended by AIM. It later emerged that the cars were driven by FBI agents, who were supposedly chasing a person accused of the heinous crime of stealing cowboy boots. The agents opened fire on the ranch and its residents, who fired back in self defence. Within minutes, more than 150 FBI SWAT team members, Bureau of Indian Affairs police and GOONs had surrounded the ranch and a fierce, largely one-sided fire-fight erupted.
When the smoke cleared, AIM member Joe Killsright Stuntz and two FBI agents were found shot dead. Miraculously, Peltier and the other people in the camp escaped. Following the largest hunt in FBI history, three AIM activists — Dino Butler, Robert Robideaux and Leonard Peltier — were charged with the murder of the agents. However Robideaux and Butler were tried in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and the jury found them not guilty of murder because they had simply returned fire in self-defence when fired upon by unknown assailants.
Meanwhile, Peltier had escaped to Canada knowing that he would never get a fair trial in the US — that is if he wasn’t gunned down by the FBI first. He was captured in Canada on February 6, 1976. The US government presented the Canadian court with affidavits signed by a woman claiming to be Peltier’s companion, who claimed that she had seen Peltier shoot the FBI agents. This was a blatant lie. The woman had never met Peltier and she was not present at Pine Ridge during the shoot-out. She later revealed that the FBI forced her to sign the lies written for her by the FBI.
Peltier was tried before an all-white jury in North Dakota, before a hostile judge who refused to allow use of the self-defence argument. The FBI created a climate of fear around the proceedings in an attempt to convince the jurors that Peltier was a terrorist. The government withheld evidence that pointed to his innocence. This evidence was finally released from FBI files seven years later under the Freedom of Information Act.
Prosecutor Lynn Crook failed to produce a single witness who could identify Peltier as the shooter, and concealed ballistics reports that showed that Peltier’s rifle could not be linked to shell casings found near the scene. Yet in his summation, Crook accused Peltier of firing the fatal bullets that killed the agents. The jury found him guilty and he was sentenced to two consecutive life terms. Seventeen years later, in November 1992, Crook admitted to the court reviewing Peltier’s case, “We don’t know who killed the agents”.
Despite Crook’s admission, and even though the appeals court found that Peltier may have been acquitted had evidence not been improperly withheld by the FBI, a new trial was denied.
In 2000, US President Bill Clinton stated that he was considering Peltier’s request for clemency. However, the FBI launched a massive disinformation campaign, which included a march by more than 500 FBI agents outside the White House in December 2000. Peltier’s name was not among those granted clemency by Clinton a month later.
Peltier may become eligible for parole in 2008, but it will be fought tooth and nail by the FBI and other powerful forces who want to keep this inspiring liberation fighter silent. The US authorities continue to make life difficult for Peltier and his supporters. On June 30, he was suddenly transferred from Leavenworth prison in Kansas to Terre Haute in Indiana. His lawyers were not informed and he has been kept in solitary confinement for more than month.
Yet no matter how hard they try, such repression cannot keep Peltier silent, as Harvey Arden’s brilliant tribute shows.
If you’d like to know more, visit
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From: Green Left Weekly, September 21, 2005
10.07.2005
Deconstructing the Columbus Myth
Was the "Great Discoverer" Italian or Spanish, Nazi or Jew?
by Ward Churchill
Copyright © 1995 by Ward Churchill. Reprinted with permission from Ward Churchill, Since Predator Came (Littleton, CO: Aigis Publications, 1995). This essay originally appeared in Indigenous Thought, Vol. 1, Nos. 2–3 (March–June 1991).
Christopher Columbus was a genuine titan, a hero of history and of the human spirit.... To denigrate Columbus is to denigrate what is worthy in human history and in us all.
-- Jeffrey Hart, National Review, October 15, 1990
It is perhaps fair to say that our story opens at Alfred University, where, during the fall of 1990, I served as distinguished scholar of American Indian Studies for a program funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Insofar as I was something of a curiosity in that primarily Euroamerican staffed and attended institution, situated as it is within an area populated primarily by white folk, it followed naturally that I quickly became a magnet for local journalists seeking to inject a bit of color into their otherwise uniformly blanched columns and commentaries. Given our temporal proximity to the much–heralded quincentennial celebration of Christopher Columbus' late fifteenth–century "discovery" of a "New World" and its inhabitants, and that I am construed as being in some part a direct descendant of those inhabitants, they were wont to query me as to my sentiments concerning the accomplishments of the Admiral of the Ocean Sea.
A Mythic Symbiosis
Meanwhile, I was captivated by certain commonalities of argument inherent to the positions advanced by my correspondents. Both men exhibited a near–total ignorance of the actualities of Columbus' career. Nor did they demonstrate any particular desire to correct the situation. Indeed, in their mutual need to separate the topic of their preoccupation from rational scrutiny, they appeared to have conceptually joined hands in a function composed more of faith than fact. The whole notion of the "uniqueness of the Holocaust" serves both psychic and political purposes for Jew and German alike, or so it seems. The two groups are bound to one another in a truly symbiotic relationship grounded in the mythic exclusivity of their experience: one half of the equation simply completes the other in a perverse sort of collaboration, with the result that each enjoys a tangible benefit.
For Germans to embrace a corresponding "unique historical guilt" because of what was done to the Jews during the 1940s is to permanently absolve themselves of guilt concerning what they may be doing now. No matter how ugly things may become in contemporary German society, or so the reasoning goes, it can always be (and is) argued that there has been a marked improvement over the "singular evil which was nazism." Anything other than outright nazification is, by definition, "different," "better," and therefore "acceptable" ("Bad as they are, things could always be worse."). Business as usual—which is to say assertions of racial supremacy, domination, and exploitation of "inferior" groups, and most of the rest of the nazi agenda—is thereby free to continue in a manner essentially unhampered by serious stirrings of guilt among the German public so long as it does not adopt the literal trappings of nazism. Participating for profit and with gusto in the deliberate starvation of much of the Third World is no particular problem if one is careful not to goose step while doing it.
By extension, insofar as Germany is often seen (and usually sees itself) as exemplifying the crowning achievements of "Western Civilization," the same principle covers all European and Euro–derived societies. No matter what they do, it is never "really" what it seems unless it was done in precisely the fashion the nazis did it. Consequently, the nazi master plan of displacing or reducing by extermination the population of the western USSR and replacing it with settlers of "biologically superior German breeding stock" is roundly (and rightly) condemned as ghastly and inhuman. Meanwhile, people holding this view of nazi ambitions tend overwhelmingly to see consolidation and maintenance of Euro–dominated settler states in places like Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Argentina, the United States, and Canada as "basically okay," or even as "progress." The "distinction" allowing this psychological phenomenon is that each of these states went about the intentional displacement and extermination of native populations, and their replacement, in a manner slightly different in its particulars from that employed by nazis attempting to accomplish exactly the same thing. Such technical differentiation is then magnified and used as a sort of all–purpose veil, behind which almost anything can be hidden, so long as it is not openly adorned with a swastika.
Given the psychological, socio–cultural, and political imperatives involved, neither correspondent, whether German or Jew, felt constrained to examine the factual basis of my analogy between Himmler and Columbus before denying the plausibility or appropriateness of the comparison. To the contrary, since the paradigm of their mutual understanding embodies the a priori presumption that there must be no such analogy, factual investigation is precluded from their posturing. It follows that any dissent on the "methods" involved in their arriving at their conclusions, never mind introduction of countervailing evidence, must be denied out of hand with accusations of "overstatement," "shoddy scholarship," "stridency" and/or "anti–semitism." To this litany have lately been added such new variations as "white bashing," "ethnic McCarthyism," "purveyor of political correctitude," and any other epithet deemed helpful in keeping a "canon of knowledge" fraught with distortion, deception, and outright fraud from being "diluted."3
Columbus as Proto–Nazi
It is time to delve into the substance of my remark that Columbus and Himmler, nazi lebensraumpolitik, along with the "settlement of the New World" bear more than casual resemblance to one another. It is not, as my two correspondents wished to believe, because of his "discovery." This does not mean that if this were "all" he had done he would be somehow innocent of what resulted from his find, no more than is the scientist who makes a career of accepting military funding to develop weapons in any way "blameless" when they are subsequently used against human targets. Columbus did not sally forth upon the Atlantic for reasons of "neutral science" or altruism. He went, as his own diaries, reports, and letters make clear, fully expecting to encounter wealth belonging to others. It was his stated purpose to seize this wealth, by whatever means necessary and available, in order to enrich both his sponsors and himself.4 Plainly, he prefigured, both in design and by intent, what came next. To this extent, he not only symbolizes the process of conquest and genocide which eventually consumed the indigenous peoples of America, but bears the personal responsibility of having participated in it. Still, if this were all there was to it, I might be inclined to dismiss him as a mere thug rather than branding him a counterpart to Himmler.
The 1492 "voyage of discovery" is, however, hardly all that is at issue. In 1493 Columbus returned with an invasion force of 17 ships, appointed at his own request by the Spanish Crown to install himself as "viceroy and governor of [the Caribbean islands] and the mainland" of America, a position he held until 1500.5 Setting up shop on the large island he called Española (today Haiti and the Dominican Republic), he promptly instituted policies of slavery (encomiendo) and systematic extermination of the native Taino population.6 Columbus' programs reduced Taino numbers from as many as 8 million at the outset of his regime to about 3 million in 1496.7 Perhaps 100,000 were left by the time the governor departed. His policies, however, remained, with the result that by 1514 the Spanish census of the island showed barely 22,000 Indians remaining alive. In 1542, only 200 were recorded.8 Thereafter, they were considered extinct, as were Indians throughout the Caribbean Basin, an aggregate population which totaled more than 15 million at the point of first contact with the Admiral of the Ocean Sea, as Columbus was known.9
This, to be sure, constitutes an attrition of population in real numbers every bit as great as the toll of 12 to 15 million—about half of them Jewish—most commonly attributed to Himmler's slaughter mills. Moreover, the proportion of indigenous Caribbean population destroyed by the Spanish in a single generation is, no matter how the figures are twisted, far greater than the 75 percent of European Jews usually said to have been exterminated by the nazis.10 Worst of all, these data apply only to the Caribbean Basin; the process of genocide in the Americas was only just beginning at the point such statistics become operant, not ending, as they did upon the fall of the Third Reich. All told, it is probable that more than 100 million native people were "eliminated" in the course of Europe's ongoing "civilization" of the Western Hemisphere.11
It is entirely likely that more than 10,000 Indians were killed in this fashion, on Española alone, as a matter of policy, during Columbus' tenure as governor. Las Casas' Brevísima relación, among other contemporaneous sources, is also replete with accounts of Spanish colonists (hidalgos) hanging Tainos en mass, roasting them on spits or burning them at the stake (often a dozen or more at a time), hacking their children into pieces to be used as dog feed and so forth, all of it to instill in the natives a "proper attitude of respect" toward their Spanish "superiors."
No SS trooper could be expected to comport himself with a more unrelenting viciousness. And there is more. All of this was coupled to wholesale and persistent massacres:
A Spaniard ... suddenly drew his sword. Then the whole hundred drew theirs and began to rip open the bellies, to cut and kill [a group of Tainos assembled for this purpose]—men, women, children and old folk, all of whom were seated, off guard and frightened.... And within two credos, not a man of them there remain[ed] alive. The Spaniards enter[ed] the large house nearby, for this was happening at its door, and in the same way, with cuts and stabs, began to kill as many as were found there, so that a stream of blood was running, as if a great number of cows had perished.17
Elsewhere, Las Casas went on to recount:
In this time, the greatest outrages and slaughterings of people were perpetrated, whole villages being depopulated.... The Indians saw that without any offense on their part they were despoiled of their kingdoms, their lands and liberties and of their lives, their wives, and homes. As they saw themselves each day perishing by the cruel and inhuman treatment of the Spaniards, crushed to earth by the horses, cut in pieces by swords, eaten and torn by dogs, many buried alive and suffering all kinds of exquisite tortures ... [many surrendered to their fate, while the survivors] fled to the mountains [to starve].18
The butchery continued until there were no Tainos left to butcher. One might well ask how a group of human beings, even those like the Spaniards of Columbus' day, maddened in a collective lust for wealth and prestige, might come to treat another with such unrestrained ferocity over a sustained period. The answer, or some substantial portion of it, must lie in the fact that the Indians were considered by the Spanish to be untermenschen, subhumans. That this was the conventional view is borne out beyond all question in the recorded debates between Las Casas and the nobleman, Francisco de Sepulveda, who argued for the majority of Spaniards that American Indians, like African blacks and other "lower animals," lacked "souls." The Spaniards, consequently, bore in Sepulveda's estimation a holy obligation to enslave and destroy them wherever they might be encountered.19 The eugenics theories of nazi "philosopher" Alfred Rosenberg, to which Heinrich Himmler more or less subscribed, elaborated the mission of the SS in very much the same terms.20 It was upon such profoundly racist ideas that Christopher Columbus grounded his policies as initial governor of the new Spanish empire in America.21
In the end, all practical distinctions between Columbus and Himmler—at least those not accounted for by differences in available technology and extent of socio–military organization—evaporate upon close inspection. They are cut of the same cloth, fulfilling precisely the same function and for exactly the same reasons, each in his own time and place. If there is one differentiation which may be valid, it is that while the specific enterprise Himmler represented ultimately failed and is now universally condemned, that represented by Columbus did not and is not. Instead, as Sale has observed, the model for colonialism and concomitant genocide Columbus pioneered during his reign as governor of Española was to prove his "most enduring legacy," carried as it was "by the conquistadors on their invasions of Mexico, Peru, and La Florida."22 The Columbian process is ongoing, as is witnessed by the fact that, today, his legacy is celebrated far and wide.
The Emblematic European
This leaves open the question as to whom, exactly, the horror which was Columbus rightly "belongs." There are, as it turns out, no shortage of contenders for the mantle of the man and his "accomplishments." It would be well to examine the nature of at least the major claims in order to appreciate the extent of the mad scramble which has been undertaken by various peoples to associate themselves with what was delineated in the preceding section. One cannot avoid the suspicion that the spectacle bespeaks much of the Eurocentric character.
Was Columbus Italian?
The popular wisdom has always maintained that Christopher Columbus was born in Genoa, a city–state which is incorporated into what is now called Italy. Were this simply an historical truth, it might be accepted as just one more uncomfortable fact of life for the Italian people, who are—or should be—still trying to live down what their country did to the Libyans and Ethiopians during the prelude to World War II. However, there is much evidence that draws Columbus' supposed Genoese origin into question. For instance, although such records were kept at the time, there is no record of his birth in that locale. Nor is there reference to his having been born or raised there in any of his own written work, including his personal correspondence. For that matter, there is no indication that he either wrote or spoke any dialect which might be associated with Genoa, nor even the Tuscan language which forms the basis of modern Italian. His own writings—not excluding letters penned to Genoese friends and the Banco di San Grigorio, one of his financiers in that city—were uniformly articulated in Castilian, with a bit of Portuguese and Latin mixed in.23 Moreover, while several variations of his name were popularly applied to him during his lifetime, none of them was drawn from a dialect which might be considered Italian. He himself, in the only known instance in which he rendered his own full name, utilized the Greek Xpõual de Colón.24 Still, Genoa, Italy, and those of Italian descent elsewhere in the world (Italo–Americans, most loudly of all) have mounted an unceasing clamor during the twentieth century, insisting he must be theirs. Genoa itself invested considerable resources into "resolving" the question during the 1920s, ultimately printing a 288–page book assembling an array of depositions and other documents—all of them authenticated—attesting that Columbus was indeed Genoese. Published in 1931, the volume, entitled Christopher Columbus: Documents and Proofs of His Genoese Origin, presents what is still the best circumstantial case as to Columbus' ethnic identity.25
Spanish?
Counterclaims concerning Columbus' supposed Iberian origin are also long–standing and have at times been pressed rather vociferously. These center primarily on the established facts that he spent the bulk of his adult life in service to Spain, was fluent in both written and spoken Castilian, and that his mistress, Beatriz Enríquez de Arana, was Spanish.26 During the 1920s, these elements of the case were bolstered by an assortment of "archival documents" allegedly proving conclusively that Columbus was a Spaniard from cradle to grave. In 1928, however, the Spanish Academy determined that these documents had been forged by parties overly eager to establish Spain's exclusive claim to the Columbian legacy. Since then, Spanish chauvinists have had to content themselves with arguments that The Discoverer is theirs by virtue of employment and nationality, if not by birth. An excellent summary of the various Spanish contentions may be found in Enrique de Gandia's Historia de Cristóbal Colón: analisis crítico, first published in 1942.27
Portuguese?
Portuguese participation in the fray has been less pronounced, but follows basically the same course—sans forged documents—as that of the Spanish. Columbus, the argument goes, was plainly conversant in the language and his wife, Felipa Moniz Perestrello, is known to have been Portuguese. Further, the first point at which his whereabouts can be accurately determined was in service to Portugal, plying that country's slave trade along Africa's west coast for a period of four years. Reputedly, he was also co–proprietor of a book and map shop in Lisbon and/or Madiera for a time, and once sailed to Iceland on a voyage commissioned by the Portuguese Crown. Portugal's desire to extend a serious claim to Spain's Admiral of the Ocean Sea seems to be gathering at least some momentum, as is witnessed in Manuel Luciano de Silva's 1989 book, Columbus Was 100% Portuguese.28
Jewish?
The idea that Columbus might have been a Spanish Jew is perhaps best known for having appeared in Simon Weisenthal's Sails of Hope in 1973.29 Therein, Weisenthal contends that the future governor of Española hid his ethnicity because of the mass expulsion of Jews from Spain ordered by King Ferdinand of Aragon on March 30, 1492 (the decree was executed on August 2 of the same year). The logic goes that because of this rampant anti–semitism, the Great Navigator's true identity has remained shrouded in mystery, lost to the historical record. Interestingly, given the tenacity with which at least some sectors of the Jewish community have latched on to it, this notion is not at all Jewish in origin. Rather, it was initially developed as a speculation in a 1913 article, "Columbus a Spaniard and a Jew?", published by Henry Vignaud in the American History Review.30 It was then advanced by Salvador de Madariaga in his unsympathetic 1939 biography, Christopher Columbus. Madariaga's most persuasive argument, at least to himself, seems to have been that Columbus' "great love of gold" proved his "Jewishness."31 This theme was resuscitated in Brother Nectario Maria's Juan Colón Was a Spanish Jew in 1971.32 Next, we will probably be told that The Merchant of Venice was an accurate depiction of medieval Jewish life, after all. And, from there, that the International Jewish Bolshevik Banking Conspiracy really exists, and has since the days of the Illuminati takeover of the Masonic Orders. One hopes the Jewish Defense League doesn't rally to defend these "interpretations" of history as readily as it jumped aboard the "Columbus as Jew" bandwagon.33
Other Contenders
By conservative count, there are presently 253 books and articles devoted specifically to the question of Columbus' origin and national/ethnic identity. Another 300–odd essays or full volumes address the same questions to some extent while pursuing other matters.34 Claims to his character, and some imagined luster therefrom, have been extended not only by the four peoples already discussed, but by Corsica, Greece, Chios, Majorca, Aragon, Galicia, France, and Poland.35 One can only wait with baited breath to see whether or not the English might not weigh in with a quincentennial assertion that he was actually a Britain born and bred, sent to spy on behalf of Their Royal British Majesties. Perhaps the Swedes, Danes, and Norwegians will advance the case that Columbus was actually the descendant of a refugee Viking king, or the Irish that he was a pure Gaelic adherent to the teachings of Saint Brendan. And then there are, of course, the Germans...
The Specter of Hannibal Lecter
At this juncture, the entire planet is locked, figuratively, in a room with the socio–cultural equivalent of Hannibal Lecter. An individual of consummate taste and refinement, imbued with indelible grace and charm, he distracts his victims with the brilliance of his intellect, even while honing his blade. He is thus able to dine alone upon their livers, his feast invariably candlelit, accompanied by lofty music and a fine wine. Over and over the ritual is repeated, always hidden, always denied in order that it may be continued. So perfect is Lecter's pathology that, from the depths of his scorn for the inferiors upon whom he feeds, he advances himself as their sage and therapist, he who is incomparably endowed with the ability to explain their innermost meanings, he professes to be their savior. His success depends upon being embraced and exalted by those upon whom he preys. Ultimately, so long as Lecter is able to retain his mask of omnipotent gentility, he can never be stopped. The socio–cultural equivalent of Hannibal Lecter is the core of an expansionist European "civilization" which has reached out to engulf the planet.
Notes
1. See, for example, Irving Louis Horowitz, Genocide: State Power and Mass Murder (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Books, 1976); and Elie Weisel, Legends of Our Time (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston Publishers, 1968). The theme is crystallized in Roger Manvell and Fraenkel Heinrich, Incomparable Crime; Mass Extermination in the 20th Century: The Legacy of Guilt (London: Hinemann Publishers, 1967).
2. See, for example, Richard Falk, "Ethnocide, Genocide, and the Nuremberg Tradition of Moral Responsibility," in Philosophy, Morality, and International Affairs, Virginia Held, Sidney Morganbesser and Thomas Nagel, eds. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), pp. 123–37; Monroe C. Beardsley, "Reflections on Genocide and Ethnocide," in Genocide in Paraguay, Richard Arens, ed. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1976), pp. 85–101; and Robert Jaulin, L'Ethnocide à travers Les Amériques (Paris: Gallimard Publishers, 1972), and La décivilisation, politique et pratique de l'ethnocide (Brussels: Presses Universitaires de France, 1974).
3. Assaults upon thinking deviating from Eurocentric mythology have been published with increasing frequency in U.S. mass circulation publications such as Time, Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report, Forbes, Commentary, Scientific American, and the Wall Street Journal throughout 1990–91. A perfect illustration for our purposes here is Jeffrey Hart, "Discovering Columbus," National Review (15 Oct. 1990), pp. 56–57.
4. See Samuel Eliot Morison, ed. and trans., Journals and Other Documents on the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (New York: Heritage Publishers, 1963).
5. The letter of appointment to these positions, signed by Ferdinand and Isabella, and dated May 28, 1493, is quoted in full in Benjamin Keen, trans., The Life of the Admiral Christopher Columbus by His Son Ferdinand (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1959), pp. 105–06.
6. The best sources on Columbus' policies are Troy Floyd, The Columbus Dynasty in the Caribbean, 1492–1526 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1973); and Stuart B. Schwartz, The Iberian Mediterranean and Atlantic Traditions in the Formation of Columbus as a Colonizer (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).
7. Regarding the 8–million figure, see Sherburn F. Cook and Borah Woodrow, Essays in Population History, Vol. I (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), esp. Chap. VI. The 3–million figure pertaining to the year 1496 derives from a survey conducted by Bartolomé de Las Casas in that year, covered in J. B. Thatcher, Christopher Columbus, Vol. 2 (New York: Putnam's Sons Publishers, 1903–1904), p. 348ff.
8. For summaries of the Spanish census records, see Lewis Hanke, The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1947), p. 200ff. See also Salvador de Madariaga, The Rise of the Spanish American Empire (London: Hollis and Carter Publishers, 1947).
9. For aggregate estimates of the pre–contact indigenous population of the Caribbean Basin, see William Denevan, ed., The Native Population of the Americas in 1492 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976); Henry Dobyns, Their Numbers Become Thinned: Native American Population Dynamics in Eastern North America (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983); and Russell Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History Since 1492 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987). For additional information, see Henry Dobyns' bibliographic Native American Historical Demography (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1976).
10. These figures are utilized in numerous studies. One of the more immediately accessible is Leo Kuper, Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1981).
11. See Henry F. Dobyns, "Estimating American Aboriginal Population: An Appraisal of Techniques with a New Hemispheric Estimate," Current Anthropology, No. 7, pp. 395–416.
12. An overall pursuit of this theme will be found in P. M. Ashburn, The Ranks of Death (New York: Coward Publishers, 1947). See also John Duffy, Epidemics in Colonial America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1953). Broader and more sophisticated articulations of the same idea are embodied in Alfred W. Crosby, Jr., The Columbia Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1972), and Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (Melbourne, Australia: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
13. One of the more thoughtful elaborations on this theme may be found in Bradley F. Smith, Reaching Judgement at Nuremberg (New York: Basic Books, 1977).
14. See Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1984).
15. Kirkpatrick Sale, The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf Publishers, 1990), p. 155.
16. Bartolomé de las Casas, The Spanish Colonie (Brevísima revacíon) University Microfilms reprint, 1966).
17. Bartolomé de Las Casas, Historia de las Indias, Vol. 3, Augustin Millares Carlo and Lewis Hanke, eds. (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1951), esp. Chap. 29.
18. Bartolomé de Las Casas, quoted in J. B. Thatcher, op. cit., p. 348ff.
19. See Lewis Hanke, Aristotle and the American Indians: A Study in Race Prejudice in the Modern World (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1959). See also Rob Williams, The American Indian in Western Legal Thought (London: Oxford University Press, 1989).
20. The most succinctly competent overview of this subject matter is probably Robert Cecil, The Myth of the Master Race: Alfred Rosenberg and Nazi Ideology (New York: Dodd and Mead Company, 1972).
21. The polemics of Columbus' strongest supporters among his contemporaries amplify this point. See, for example, Oviedo, Historia general y natural de las Indias (Seville, 1535; Salamanca, 1547, 1549) (Valladoid, 1557) (Madrid: Academia Historica, 1851–55), esp. Chaps. 29, 30, 37.
22. Kirkpatrick Sale, op. cit., p. 156.
23. On Columbus' written expression, see V. I. Milani, "The Written Language of Christopher Columbus," Forum italicum (1973). See also Cecil Jane, "The question of Literacy of Christopher Columbus," Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol. 10 (1930).
24. On Columbus' signature, see J. B. Thatcher, op. cit., p. 454.
25. City of Genoa, Christopher Columbus: Documents and Proofs of His Genoese Origin (Genoa: Instituto d'Arti Grafiche, 1931) (English language edition, 1932).
26. José de la Torre, Beatriz Enríquez de Harana (Madrid: Iberoamericana Publishers, 1933).
27. Enrique de Gandia, Historia de Cristóbal Colón: analisis crítico (Buenos Aires, 1942).
28. Manuel Luciano de Silva, Columbus Was 100% Portuguese (Bristol, Rhode Island: self–published, 1989).
29. Simon Weisenthal, Sails of Hope (New York: Macmillan Publishers, 1973).
30. Henry Vignaud, "Columbus a Spaniard and a Jew?" American History Review, Vol. 18 (1913). This initial excursion into the idea was followed in more depth by Francisco Martínez in his El descubrimiento de América y las joyas de doña Isabel (Seville, 1916); and Jacob Wasserman in Christoph Columbus (Berlin: S. Fisher Publishers, 1929).
31. Salvador de Madariaga, Christopher Columbus (London: Oxford University Press, 1939). His lead was followed by Armando Alvarez Pedroso in an essay, "Cristóbal Colón no fue hebero" (Revista de Historica de América, 1942) and Antonio Ballesteros y Beretta in Cristóbal Colón y el descubrimiento de América (Barcelona/Buenos Aires: Savat Publishers, 1945).
32. Brother Nectario Maria, Juan Colón Was A Spanish Jew (New York: Cedney Publishers, 1971).
33. A much sounder handling of the probabilities of early Jewish migration to the Americas may be found in Meyer Keyserling, Christopher Columbus and the Participation of the Jews in the Spanish and Portuguese Discoveries (Longmans, Green Publishers, 1893) (reprinted 1963).
34. For a complete count, see Simonetta Conti, Un secolo di bibliografia colombiana 1880–1985 (Genoa: Cassa di Risparmio di Genova e Imperia, 1986).
35. These claims are delineated and debunked in Jacques Heers, Christophe Columb (Paris: Hachette Publishers, 1981).
Copyright © 1995 by Ward Churchill.
