August 31, 2008 by Mirjam Hirch.

Bankers are celebrating a big corporate marriage today in Frankfurt. It is worth 9.8 billion euros (14.4 billion dollars). The deal is made between Germany’s second-largest and third-largest banks, Commerzbank and Dresdner Bank creating a company to rival Germany’s biggest bank, Deutsche Bank and leading to job cuts of up to 15,000.

Under the shadow of the tallest bank towers in Europe at the same time people are celebrating the Museumsufer Festival. The festival is one of the most important and biggest cultural festivals in Europe. It takes place on the Frankfurt museum riverbank, one of the most important locations for museums in Germany and Europe. For the people this time of the year in the city means celebrating and having fun. They do not want to think about certain business activities or what some call the dictatorship of the men in jackets.

During this weekend of celebrating arts and culture museums offer special programs and fees. Thousands of visitors are streaming to an interesting ethnographic museum at the Frankfurt riverbank, the Museum of World Cultures. The museum’s collection is of incredible value.
Many of the art items owned by the museum were taken from indigenous cultures throughout the decades and centuries of exploration. Two to three percent of the outstanding collection can be visited. The rest is stored somewhere. Only after the opening of the new museum (probably between 2010 and 2012), individual visitors, “upon condition of a provable professional interest and previous consultation of the responsible curator, may gain chargeable access.” This might prevent having to respond to questions of cultural repatriation.

While much of indigenous culture remains hidden in museum storage impossible for people to behold close to the Museum of World Cultures there is an energetic indigenous music group from Ecuador and Bolivia performing not on a stage but on the ground right on the side of the river Main. Words in Quechua are ringing beautifully, mixing with the sounds of flutes. Many people are passing by. But only very few want to listen. They want to eat and drink Luis the musician from Ecuador comments. Shortly after a festival supervisor asks the musicians to please go away. Soon the place is empty. The indigenous performers gone along with their words and music. And who wants to notice?

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August 31, 2008 by Jay Taber.

Raping the earth, like raping women, is an act of violence. Violent acts, in consumer society, are often mechanical reactions to other acts of violence; brutality begets brutality.

Breaking the chain of violence in consumer society means curbing demand, and curbing demand requires exercising restraint–learning to do without the commodities that require violence to obtain.

Exiting consumerism is a bold act of independence, requiring strength of character and self-discipline. Making ourselves strong enough to resist the propaganda of advertising is key to healing the earth, our society and ourselves.

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August 30, 2008 by Mirjam Hirch.

“Social injustice is killing people on a grand scale,” acknowledges a World Health Organization (WHO) report just issued. The study is entitled “Closing the Gap in a Generation: Health Equity through Action on the Social Determinants of Health.”
“The toxic combination of bad policies, economics, and politics is, in large measure, responsible for the fact that a majority of people in the world do not enjoy the good health that is biologically possible,” the report notes.

The political report also highlights some glaring inequalities concerning indigenous peoples’ health. An indigenous Australian male has a life expectancy that is 17 years shorter than all other men in Australia.

The study finally emphasizes that “Inequity in the conditions of daily lives is shaped by deeper social structures and processes; the inequity is systematic, produced by policies that tolerate or actually enforce unfair distribution of and access to power, wealth, and other necessary social resources.”

This reminds me of famous nineteenth century German pathologist, Rudolf Virchow, who in 1848, published a report on the typhus epidemic in Upper Silesia, a poverty-stricken region of Germany in which he said, “Medicine is a social science, and politics is nothing more than medicine practiced on a larger stage.”

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August 28, 2008 by Jay Taber.

Watching the Witness video on Real News recently, I was struck by the images of Fourth World people suffering brutal repression by Third World militaries. As stateless nations attempting to maintain their aboriginal way of life, these indigenous peoples worldwide suffer not only police and military brutality, but also the indignity of being maligned as misfits by corporate media. As First, Second and Third World states intensify their longstanding mission to rape the resources of the Fourth World, escaping the corporate narrative is the only means by which we can make sense of things. Producing and supporting independent news is thus a matter of life and death.

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August 27, 2008 by Jay Taber.

Genocide against tribal peoples involves more than just rape and murder. The practice of ethnic cleansing, for instance, entails forced removal of aboriginal nations from the lands and resources that give them their sustenance and identity. Once removed from their lands and resources, it becomes impossible to continue their indigenous way of life, thus rendering them something other than that to which they have evolved as collective societies.

Non-tribal people worldwide, having grown accustomed to the authority of the modern states that forceably displace tribal peoples for power and profit, are not only cognitively co-opted by this systematic crime against humanity; they are also largely oblivious to indigenous peoples’ existence as alternative systems of social organization. Despite there being over 500 million people living as tribal entities around the world, their non-aggression apparently makes them invisible.

It is perhaps the most tragic of paradoxes that in order to garner attention and respect, indigenous peoples are expected by dominant societies to behave as savagely as modern states. If we continue on this trajectory of relationships with aboriginal societies, we unfortunately might reap what we have sown.

(Jay Taber — recipient of the Defender of Democracy award — is an author, columnist, and research analyst at Public Good Project.)

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August 26, 2008 by Jay Taber.

One hears progressives promoting the melting-pot theory of social organization even today, long after that theory has been shown to undermine cultural diversity. The human dignity at the root of multiculturalism requires a respect for the sovereignty and self-determination of each unique people; while white supremacy denies different peoples equal rights as citizens, the melting-pot theory denies the human dignity of multiculturalism.

In the United States of America, we have equal rights as citizens, but we have unique rights as nations. As one country composed of many nations, our constitution recognizes these differences.

The Anti-Indian message of racist organizations like One Nation United is an attack on Native American sovereignty. The melting-pot theory of homogeneity unwittingly aids and abets that message.

(Jay Taber — recipient of the Defender of Democracy award — is an author, columnist, and research analyst at Public Good Project.)

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August 25, 2008 by Jay Taber.

When indigenous peoples organize to protect their rights, they are characterized by mainstream media as rebels, secessionists or guerrillas. When the settlers organize to protect their privileges, they are characterized as the opposition. The sanctity of the state — whether strategically promoted as part of a government’s psychological warfare, or merely assumed by thoughtless journalists — remains mostly unquestioned by consumers of corporate media.

The assumption of state sanctity — even in the face of spurious spectacle like the Olympics — is difficult to maintain when states like China murder minorities and imprison those who expose its inhumanity. An interesting test of the psychological sanctuary of state sanctity will come as the state of Canada — one of only four countries in the world to oppose the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples — faces off against indigenous peoples in British Columbia, the site of the 2010 Winter Olympics.

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August 24, 2008 by Mirjam Hirch.

What’s the secret of Jamaican’s sprinters success at the current Olympic Games? To reveal this mystery is the scientific community’s aim these days. There are many theories to explain the Jamaicans’ outstanding speed. Some think the key to the runners’ success lies in the clandestine giving of drugs. Others maintain it is the genes, or pristine water from Jamaica’s Blue Mountains, or the yams.

More scientific is the theory of actin A, a protein produced naturally in the body, responsible for aggression and vigor, found in the muscles of 70% of Jamaican sprint stars. This scientific muscle theory leads some researchers to the historical theory- brutal selection: When still in Africa only the strongest men and women were chosen as slaves. Only the most resistant of this select group survived the hellish passage on board the ships. Up to 18 hours a day they then had to do extremely hard work on sugar plantations, with the plantation owners allowing only the strongest men and women to have offspring. Thus breeding humans, breeding muscles. A horrendous history- maybe with golden Olympic after-effects?

The contemporary theory probably yields the simplest explanation for the sprinters’ success. The Jamaicans are running fast. They run for their lives to escape the poverty of the slums. And lucky they are if they do succeed without doping scandals.
It is a much better fate than that of other poor groups in the developing world. Some of who are no longer walking on the face of the earth for some other people’s purpose of making money. Again and again it happens that even children in “low cost” countries are intentionally exposed to mortally dangerous drugs. They are the world’s cheap human guinea pigs.

Currently Argentina’s National Medicine, Food and Medical Technology Administration is investigating a possible link between the deaths of 14 children and Synflorix, an experimental vaccine supposed to fight pneumonia. The youngsters were taking Synflorix in a clinical trial run by a major British pharmaceutical, GlaxoSmithKline in alliance with The Pan American Health Organization.
Irregularities and ‘poor ethical management’ of patient recruitment had been witnessed with participants, many of who were Quechua speaking and illiterate. Parents had not been made aware of the fact that their children were being given an experimental drug despite the cornerstone of ethical research on humans demanding that research subjects should give prior informed and voluntary consent.

Evidently human life is viewed as a commodity, not a right such that even the death of innocents is tacitly accepted in the interest of fast profits.
The world can no longer afford to run away from this absolutely unbearable brutality- soulless slavery of the Modern World.
What is quickly needed is open confrontation and a fearless fight for everybody’s inalienable human rights.

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August 23, 2008 by Jay Taber.

In a recent discussion on dichotomies among evangelicals, I made the remark that, “They’re not that different from their neighbors–they want to feel good about themselves. They’re just a little more misinformed about what it’s gonna take to pull off the total transformation of our society required to meet the pious goals they’ve set. Like many of their secular counterparts, they’ve yet to get their minds around the vast undertaking we’re faced with, and the courageous tenacity this is going to demand from us.”

In a reflective moment afterward, I recalled the economic panic and religious hysteria of the 14th century Barbara Tuchman wrote about in her book A Distant Mirror, and privately pondered what impact ten-dollar-a-gallon gasoline or an unstoppable TB pandemic might have on our ability to remain civil, rational people in the 21st.

Later that day, I came across a passage in Sleepwalking Land by Mia Couto: ‘the obsessions of people who live by what they can see, unaware of the future world, are well known.’ This reminded me of the adage that a warrior of justice must not only be circumspect about the current situation, but also anticipate the consequences of evil that lie ahead. In that respect, a warrior protector is one who has awakened to the truth of this, and thus cannot become an evangelical, because he knows the unaware — regardless of their pious sentiments — will not join him in battle.

(Jay Taber — recipient of the Defender of Democracy award — is an author, columnist, and research analyst at Public Good Project.)

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August 22, 2008 by Jay Taber.

Removal of the unusual and exclusion of the non-conforming is the primary purpose of state-sponsored education. Aboriginal knowledge centres, on the other hand, stress the importance of making a place for everyone and everything.

Promoters of superficial education like to pride themselves on the practicality of career-oriented institutions of higher learning, but one look at the world they created should give one pause to think.

As aboriginal cultures understand, knowledge cannot be fast-tracked; the path to wisdom is a slow, arduous undertaking. As more of us now realize, short cuts in learning are literally dead ends.

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