British National Party Gets Run Off Street

So the conservative parties in Europe have won big in the recent elections. That fascist filmmaker Geert Wilders (his “films” are utter crap, actually) even won some seats in Holland.

In Britain, while the racist B.N.P. may have scored a few points, they still have strong enemies on the streets. Bravo to these protesters and let’s keep the nazi scum off the streets!

Video Of The Day

From Max Blumenthal comes this video of young people in Jerusalem heaping racist bile on Barack Obama during his tour of the Middle East. As usual, the most virulent right-wingers in Israel are from the U.S.A.

On This Day In San Francisco History

On May 21st, 1979, 30 years ago, The City exploded into riots.

Dan White had been given a mere five years in prison for murdering two men in cold blood, one the mayor of S.F. George Moscone, the other openly-gay Supervisor Harvey Milk.

After the verdict was announced thousands of protesters converged on City Hall and well, the rest is history….watch the above clip from the brilliant doco “The Life And Times Of Harvey Milk”….then as now, a white ex-cop gets treated slightly different than the rest of us when it comes to the justice system.

The “White Night Riots” as they were later christened also gave us the cover of the first Dead Kennedys album. God bless S.F. and people’s power worldwide.

The United States Continues To Be Cruel And Unusual

Way back in that long-gone decade called the 1990’s a whole bunch of us around the country were organizing and agitating against the U.S. prison system – its massive population of prisoners, its draconian sentencing rules, its horrific treatment of prisoners. We even felt like we were getting somewhere – there began to be national bi-yearly gatherings called Critical Resistance which specifically addressed what people began to call the Prison Industrial Complex, although that term even became a point of argument.

As importantly as the Critical resistance gatherings in New Orleans and Oakland was the fact that in January 2000 the governor of Illinois abolished that state’s death penalty. The advent of DNA testing had proven too many people to be innocent while they awaited execution .

And then came George W. Bush, the World Trade Center attack, and two full-dress wars, raging full-on. The prisons of the U.S. remained an invisible (to most folks) gulag but people forgot about them as the news filled with I.E.D.’s and air strikes.

But the prisons and the prisoners within remained a reality, and now it seems that folks are remembering again. This is a recent video about the thousands of people who live in solitary confinement every day. Among the interviewees is my old friend Robert “King” Wilkerson, who spent 27 years in solitary in Louisiana’s notorious Angola Prison as part of the Angola Three, before walking out of jail in 2001 a free man.

Jesse Rips Hannity

Sean Hannity is such a shithead … thus it is really great to see him get verbally trounced by a wrestler, albeit one who was once the governor of Minnesota. Somehow I can’t help but think of this as further evidence of the right wing losing its legitimacy … I mean, a talk show host getting whalloped by a guy who used to call himself “The Body”????

And Now For A Word From Our Sponsor

Just kidding. We have no sponsor…or as we like to say, the gods are our sponsor.

But seriously, watch this simple yet brilliant comercial for a Brazilian fruit drink company. It’s another example of how stop-action animation has become easier than ever before! As a sometimes-animator I have been planning to make a stop-action film for years, now that one can use digital photography and actually make sure everything is going smoothly during the filming….back in the “olden days”, i.e. ten years ago, we had to shoot a whole roll of film and then wait until it came back from the lab to make sure we’d even shot the thing right…..

Anyway this commercial is like I said simple, beautiful, and driven by the kind of spare electronic cumbia beats that are currently bumping throughout Latin America. Enjoy.

The Mexican Suitcase

This cardboard suitcase, along with two like it, was found in Mexico City over a year ago and contains unseen work by three photographers, most notably Robert Capa. The pictures were all taken during the Spanish Civil War and are well worth a look:

Happy Cinco De Mayo

Apologies to whoever reads this thing – I’ve been pretty slack about posting new items. Fear not! I’ll be back with videos of philosophers, critiques of the Mexican government’s …. ahem … mishandling of the flu outbreak, and more.

In the meantime, in honor of a Mexican holiday only celebrated by U.S. fraternities, I bring you some great Mexican music: Los Dug Dugs, an awesome 1970’s psychedelic band from Durango. This song is called “Smog”, which was apparently a problem back then as it remains today.

Right Wing Scraping Bottom Of Barrel

My new favorite right wing website is  the informative and highly entertaining Human Events. On it you can read writing by the likes of Pat Robertson, Oliver North and Ann Coulter.

Additionally there is also regular…ahem…commentary by Chuck Norris and Ted Nugent.

Here’s the Nuge on his recent trip to my hometown of San Antonio, and here is his take on the Red Sea pirates.

Along with the legitimization of Alex Jones, (i.e. Jones being openly endorsed by the likes of Glen Beck and Rush Limbaugh) this is just another step in the steady re-formulation of the U.S. right, with its most bizarre and craven representatives being placed front and center.

Explosion In A Cathedral*

On a tiny island in the Caribbean, a revolution is brewing. The people are risng against their colonial masters and demanding…. well, that’s the interesting part.

Sound like an old story? It is and it isn’t, or rather, it seems to keep happening. I. Wallerstien keeps us up to date:

Guadeloupe is a tiny island in the Caribbean, the size of greater London or the state of Iowa in the United States. It has a population of about 400,000 persons. The world press hardly ever mentions it. Since January 20, it has been the site of an ongoing general strike, which has managed to get 10% of its population actually marching in the streets, which must be a world record. The strike has been called by Liyannaj Kont Profitasyon (LKP), whose name translates from Creole as “Collective Against `Profitization’ (or outrageous profit).”
…..

The LKP issued a list of 126 demands addressed to four groups – three levels of the French state (the national government, the region, and the department) plus the employers. Most of these demands concerned economic matters. But as the French minister in charge of dealing with overseas zones of France, Yves Jego, said, beyond these economic demands there is a “societal” crisis. This is a polite way of saying that the strike is not merely about bread and butter. It is also a profoundly anticolonial movement. And it is this combination that makes what is going on in this small and obscure part of the world a key to the world crisis in which we all find ourselves.

And what the movement’s broadest demands are tells us a lot about the world today:

One historic mode of pursuing the anticolonial quest for dignity has been to demand formal independence. In Guadeloupe, the popular movements have been reticent to make this demand. They have seen the limited real power of the independent states around the world and above all those nearby. The fate of Haiti is not attractive. But they do want a profound social transformation – the end of the social and economic power of the small White minority, a practical form of equalization.

If one links economic demands with “societal” demands in the midst of a world economic disaster, one is launching a powerful whirlwind. It is one that a few nationalizations of a few banks in a few wealthy countries will do nothing to stop. So far, Guadeloupe (and elsewhere) have been relatively peaceful in their protests. But whirlwinds have a way of becoming far more severe.

Of course, this is only the latest in a long history of social movements in the region:

The French Revolution brought turmoil to France’s possessions in the Caribbean, and notably in Haiti and Guadeloupe. In both territories, there were slave uprisings. In both territories, the French plantation owners panicked, especially once the French ended slavery in 1794. The plantation owners turned to the British to save them. In both territories, the French ousted the British, quashed the rebellions, and in the process reinstated slavery. Unlike Haiti, however, Guadeloupe remained a French colony. Business as usual.

Then came 1848 and another revolution in France. And another end to slavery, whose great protagonist was Victor Schoelcher, a minister of the provisional government. Like Lincoln in 1863 in the United States, Schoelcher abolished slavery by decree, because he knew that he could not win a vote in the legislature. This time, however, the juridical abolition of slavery was not repealed, even though the provisional government of which Schoelcher was a minister was replaced by a much more conservative government.

And I have to mention that that particular colonial squabble was portrayed in a brilliant film by Gillo Pontecorvo and starring Marlon Brando, called Queimada! (Burn!). It tells the story of a British agent sent to a small island to foment a slave rebellion, but only to transfer the country away from French control and into the hands of the English.

It also features one of my favorite beginnings of any movie, with by an amazing optically-printed title sequence and an electric-organ-driven Ennio Morricone soundtrack:

It’s well worth reading the entire Wallerstein essay, which is only one page and you can find here.

And always interesting how these little countries continue to play important and unforseen roles in history.

* The English title of a fascinating book about the coming of the French Revolution to Guadeloupe, written by Alejo Carpentier in 1962 (original title: El Siglo de las Luces).

A film was made from the novel (I haven’t seen it) but I found the trailer.It looks like it would make a good double-feature with Queimada!, actually: