File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1998/marxism-international.9804, message 396


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







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