Leonard Peltier
In a recent letter (GLW #254) Native American activist Leonard Peltier sought support for the basic rights of all his fellow prisoners, never mentioning his own case. Leonard became known to many for his role in the 1973 American Indian Movement occupation at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, USA, where an infamous massacre of unarmed Sioux families had occurred a century earlier.
Two years later, in June of 1975, Peltier and friends happened to be camped at the Oglala Sioux reservation at Pine Ridge, South Dakota, when 2 FBI agents (and a young Sioux man) were killed there in an exchange of gunfire.
Peltier is serving a life sentence for the murders of these two government agents, despite overwhelming evidence of his innocence. Since Peltier's travesty of a trial, evidence that was crucial to his conviction has been disproven. A key witness against him has recanted her statements. And Peltier's attorneys have obtained prosecutor's documents showing that the government had withheld ballistics reports which proved that Leonard Peltier was innocent of the murders for which he remains imprisoned.
At tie time that Peltier wrote his letter of solidarity, he was reported to be in a weakened condition after excessive blood loss during surgery. And prison authorities refuse to transfer him to a less strenuous job, forcing him to continue heavy work in the Leavenworth prison factory.
Letters demanding executive clemency for the wrongfully imprisoned Leonard Peltier can be sent to President Bill Clinton, The White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, Washington, D.C., 20500, USA. Further info on the Leonard Peltier case is available through the Indigenous Rights Network, Sydney, tel. 9427 9489, or by writing the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee, PO Box 583, Lawrence, Kansas, 66044, USA. Leonard Peltier has devoted his life to the struggle and he needs and deserves our help.
Longueville NSW
Saddened
Every Australian must be saddened by the news that Federal MPs are about to lose their chauffeurs. I'm sure we're all proud to be paying 68.7 cents out of every dollar we earn so that our bureaucrats can live it up with limos, company cars and a million other costly lurks and perks!
It's unfair to expect our bureaucrats to suffer! These people are our superiors in every way and it's selfish of the unwashed masses to expect them to suffer the hardship of driving themselves! Because there might be some silly young copper who'll bust them, they won't be able to consume the copious amounts of top shelf, tax free booze while working on ways to get 99 cents out of every dollar you earn!
Canungra Qld
Ireland
Why is it that nearly all I read in the media about Northern Ireland is reports on IRA attacks, rarely anything on attacks on Catholics? Let me quote you something from a letter my father wrote to me recently from my home town in Northern Ireland.
"Having a lot of trouble in Ballymena these past 12 weeks with the protestants picketing Harryville (Catholic) church every Saturday evening, trying to stop people getting to evening mass and throwing rotten tomatoes etc at them. They wrecked the priest's car and damaged his house (he had to move elsewhere). This week they have set fire to two Catholic primary schools, three Catholic houses with people and children sleeping upstairs (no deaths, but one couple was attacked and badly beaten up). No police action of course."
Don't let the media brainwash you into thinking this is a one-sided campaign of violence by the IRA. Don't let them brainwash you into thinking this is a mindless religious war.
It's about a land that was invaded by the British, a land that was stolen from the Irish (who happened to be Catholic) who were forced into subjugation and starvation. It's about a people who remember that their forebears died with green stains around their mouths because they were left with nothing but the grass to eat. It's about a people who had to fight for civil rights in their own country in the 1960s. It's about a people betrayed by the politicians, the media, the propaganda machine. It's about a people still struggling in the '90s for justice, equality and self-determination.
Fremantle WA
Roger Douglas
It may interest your readers that (Sir) Roger Douglas shares an important distinction with a recent Australian ex-Prime Minister: he is a failed pig breeder. According to former employees, overambitious expansion caused effluent to overflow into a nearby Auckland bay incurring the wrath of the local authority. The company closed soon afterwards.
Together with previously managing a UK health food chain and later re-arranging the NZ economy, it is a strange background for a Director of Fairfax.
Or is there another agenda ?
Earlwood, NSW
A dare
All hope abandon, ye who enter here! — Dante Alighieri (1262 - 1321)
Taken from Dante's The Divine Comedy, the words above are applicable to every aspect of America's penal system — especially in the state of Georgia. Amid this vast institutionalized hopelessness, a new man says that there is hope to be found in outside friendships. In defying our stated cynicism, he has dared us to submit to the fate of friendship. Could someone really care about us?
Well, maybe he is right. After all, none of us have forgotten how to be a friend. So if you are willing to give real friendship a try then encourage seven people to write to the seven African-American men whose names and numbers appear below. All of us are at the same address. What can I say? We could not pass up a dare.
Johnny Harper # 153037; Ronald Anderson # 297360; Robert Orr # 322301; Loranzy Armstrong # 226898; Ronald Gallmore # 236357; Rodney Lingo # 198270; Lawrence Cooper # 214246. Address: Georgia State Prison, HCOI, Reidsville, Georgia 30453, USA.
Definition of Jews
Philip Mendes (Write on, GLW #258) described Mr Lorimer's reference to Jews as "a religious group" as "an old Stalinist definition of Jews" and he defines Jews as a nation, claiming that "99% of Jews today define themselves as a people and a nation as well as a religious group". Mr Mendes did not tell us from where he got his figures nor who conducted the survey.
The fact is that it is mainly Jews, including Jewish scholars and rabbis, who define Jews and Judaism as a religion, versus the Zionists who oppose this definition, and to which Mr Mendes clearly belongs.
Mr Mendes is trying to tell us that Jews are an oppressed nation but how could he then explain the fact that, to use his terminology, 99% of Jews are supporters of Israel's crimes committed against the Palestinian people and how could those oppressed oppress another nation and deny them their most basic human and national rights?
Finally, if Mr Mendes wants to present himself as a progressive Jew then he should have the courage to admit that the most anti-Semitic regime in the world today is Israel, given the fact that unlike the Khazar Jews, who are not Semites, all the Arabs are Semites.
Hall ACT
Zionism
Some simplification concerning the "Anti-Semitism 2" letter (GLW Dec. 11, 1996).
The author's statements 1): "Christians in 19'th century Europe were not subject to pogroms and massacres and allegations of ritual murder". And 2) " Marx was an anti-Semite..."
To number 1, between 1870 and 1920 one and a half million Christian Armenians perished under the Ottoman Empire, while Mr Theodore Herzl was occupied "buying land in Palestine" from the Ottoman Empire's Turkish Sultan.
And to number 2, it is an assertion of Zionism. Zionism maintains that, anti-Semitism is a built-in part of Socialism. Zionism attempts to distort the Marxist-Leninist attitude to the Jewish Question, pretending that anti-Semitism is ever lasting. In this, Zionism works hard at two aims: a) Strives to alienate those Jews from Socialism who believe Socialism has answers to vital issues, and could see that Marxism can help humanity find the path of true freedom and genuine democracy. And b) To fan anti-Semitic sentiment among the intellectuals in capitalist countries, where people are looking agonisingly for an explanation of the complications that are hounding humanity by imperialism.
The Zionist bourgeois philosophical schools of thought are trying to explain the world in their own way, giving no thought to the need for changing it, or, perhaps banishing that thought deliberately. This sets off Marx's thought in all its greatness.
As Lenin described it: "All powerful because it is correct"
Mt Druitt NSW
Capitalism
Greg Ogle's review of The End of Capitalism (as we know it) in GLW #257 was, in his usual academic style, very interesting. That style, however, is the problem. It necessarily gives some degree of credibility to academic bullshit, before academically and, Oh! so very gently, semi-refuting some part of it.
Early on he quotes from Gibson and Blackwell's book their "challenge": "... when people say that the US is a Christian nation, or a heterosexual nation, we see this as a 'regulatory fiction' — a way of erasing or obscuring difference and of reinforcing dominance." They might as well say, of the statement "Hitler was an anti-Semite", that it is a "regulatory fiction" — a way of erasing or obscuring difference.
Why should Greg have to pussy-foot around people who write trash like The End of Capitalism? Because they clothe their nonsense in academic style? Because they learnedly quote and obscurantly argue about the writings of other self-styled philosophers of the left? These, in turn, gain their own undeserved reputations by doing the same.
Why can't Greg just say at the start that all non- or quasi-capitalist forms of ownership, production and distribution everywhere, demonstrably exist only on the sufferance of the capitalist system? He could cite plenty of evidence to show that capitalism soon marginalises or co-opts them and , whenever they get seriously in the way of economic "rationalism", wipes them out. Housing co-operatives in Australia are about to become a good example. A more well-known one is the former USSR.
That's a quick end to all the arguments of Gibson and Blackwell. We should give the same short shrift to any others who try to persuade us by academic trickery that we can subtly undermine capitalism, hence need not make the effort to overthrow it. We should surely not recommend reading them. After all, we're not writing our Doctorate thesis in politics. We're trying to change the real world.
In doing so, we may encourage and support some alternative forms of ownership, production and distribution. We must, however, never lose sight of the only sure way to avoid their untimely demise.
Hawker SA
[Abridged.]