words of love and despair

October 8th, 2012

Columbus Day: A Celebration of Indigenous Genocide

The fact that Columbus Day is a national federal holiday in the United States is unbelievable.

It reminds us of a very ugly truth: The United States was founded on genocide.

This man, Christopher Columbus, never set foot on what is now part of the continental United States. He did, however, massacre thousands, initiating what was to become a holocaust of Indigenous Peoples.

Dennis Banks, co-founder of AIM, the American Indian Movement, speaks to Amy Goodman of Democracy Now and recounts how he was forcibly removed from his home as a 4 year-old to be raised in government boarding schools where he was beaten for speaking his Native language.

The United States federal government was still implementing this policy founded on conquest and genocide, “Kill the Indian, save the man,” late into the 1970’s.

In 2012, Leonard Peltier is in prison serving a life sentence for allegedly killing an FBI agent on the Pine Ridge Reservation in 1975. A prisoner of war.

Kill as many possible, destroy the language and culture of those who survive, criminalize the resisters.

That’s the plan.

Reconsider Columbus Day?

No, it’s time to abolish it!

(Source: democracynow.org, via thinkmexican)

March 13th, 2012

A 2010 article published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin that surveyed a sampling of Jews aged 17-81 from three communities in Canada showed a clear connection between Holocaust exposure and awareness, and the intensity of Jews’ fear of extinction. The researchers, Prof. Michael Wohl, Prof. Stephen Reysen and Prof. Nyla Branscombe, found that interviewees asked to write a composition on the Holocaust displayed greater angst and more collective solidarity than those who were not asked to write anything.
The researchers estimate that one of the effects of increased collective angst over extinction is the justification of violent acts against a rival group. They rely, among others, on a 2008 study by Wohl and Branscombe that found the Jewish subjects who were reminded of the Holocaust and of the Jewish people having been victims in the past tended to see the Palestinians as the root of the conflict more than other subjects did. In other words, the researchers concluded, in order to protect itself from extinction, the group legitimizes harming others.

Netanyahu uses Holocaust references to blur the injustices of the occupation (via mohandasgandhi)

(via mohandasgandhi)