Date: Sat, 25 Apr 1998 10:58:01 -0400 From: Louis Proyect <lnp3-AT-panix.com> Subject: M-I: Pinch-hitting for Ward Churchill "Only Connect" --E.M. Forester The Brecht Forum asked me to chair the meeting for Ward Churchill last night which was to begin at 6:30. At 7pm, he still hadn't shown. So they told me to tell the audience that if he didn't show by 7:30, their money would be refunded. They also told me to give a little talk if I'd like. That was all I needed to hear. The words came pouring out of me. I spoke about the "stages" theory of 18th century social science which equated modes of production with racial inferiority or superiority. And how this seeped into Engels' "Origin of the Family" with its references to "speedy kaffirs." But that there was another side to Marx and Engels, who admired the egalitarianism and democracy of the American Indian, just as Benjamin Franklin and other revolutionaries of 1776 did. They consciously tried to apply the constitutional structure of the great Iroquois confederacy to the new American republic. I spoke about "energy tribes"--how more than 50 percent of American energy reserves are on Indian reservations and the relationship to nuclear power, global warming and the environment. I also spoke about the reading I had been doing over the past few days on the Ghost Dancing movement of 1890, which led to the massacre of Wounded Knee. I was haunted by one image in particular. The army had surrounded the Lakota Sioux, who were dancing in the hopes of ushering in a messianic era that would deliver them from oppression. For the white bourgeois state, this could only mean that the Indians were preparing for a new war, in other words, what psychologists call "projection." When the army opened fire, Sitting Bull's horse began to dance on his hind legs as his master lie dying of bullet wounds. It turns out that the horse had been trained to dance on cue at the sound of gunfire, when Sitting Bull was part of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. The Indians saw the dancing horse in the midst of the slaughter and interpreted it as a symbol of the power of ghost dancing, which even inspired Sitting Bulls' horse. I opened up the floor for discussion and there were obviously some very well-informed people in the audience. One guy in particular gave a fascinating explanation of how the British viewed the American Indian and the Irish in the same terms. In the early 1700s, one big landlord had overseen the violent expulsion of farmers from his newly purchased land in Ireland. He openly proclaimed the Irish as less than human. This landlord finally made his way to the New World where he busily went about the task of making war on the Indians, in order to create a vast plantation on their ancestral homeland. Again, the excuse was that it didn't matter since the Indian was subhuman. At some point, the Indian began to make the connection and understand that the Irish were their allies. The Choctaw people, who were not even in the cash economy, managed to raise $1000 for Irish revolutionaries in the 18th century. Later I spoke to a woman named Gloria, an attorney who was writing an article on Hawaiian land-claims. She was an expert on the legal definitions of genocide. I made a mental note to connect her with Jim Craven. She asked me what kind of name Proyect was. I told her that even though it was spelled like the Spanish word "Proyecto" which means project, that actually it was Yiddish for the counting-house of a tax-farmer. Tax-farmers collected taxes from the Christian peasants and turned the proceeds over to the nobility, for a percentage. In the mid-1800s, the first outbreaks of pogroms in Poland and Russia took place against the tax-farmers. I often wondered whether the rarity of the name Proyect has something to do with this. Gloria found this very interesting, since she was Jewish herself. She was wearing a t-shirt that proclaimed the glory of Yiddish, a language that like many of the American Indian languages is endangered because of assimilation pressures. I was reminded of the Nation Magazine for a new organization called "Jews Against Genocide" (www.tiac.net/users/jag) that quoted Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel: "In a democratic society, not all are guilty, but all are responsible. To be responsible, we must respond." Louis Proyect --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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