Bradley Manning, Not the Pride Committee, Embodies Spirit of Stonewall

In the spring of 2004, I got an email from an acquaintance asking if I wanted to be nominated for LGBT Pride parade grand marshal.  I was surprised, because I never thought of myself as grand marshal material. In point of fact, I've never been very much in tune with "marshals" - grand or otherwise.  "Marshal" sounds too much like "martial" for my taste, and the marshals at demonstrations are always telling me to stand inside the yellow line or something.

But I agreed because, first of all, I understood that it wasn't about me, it was a way of spotlighting the work of queer folks in support of Palestinian liberation, and more broadly, of anti-assimilationist queers opposing U.S. militarism in all its manifestations.  And second, I assumed I wouldn't win.  I was already back in Palestine when I got the notification that I'd been elected.  I ended up concluding that I couldn't afford to come back for the parade, but before I did, the mayor cancelled a scheduled reception at City Hall, apparently in fear of what I might do.

The Parade Committee came in for plenty of abuse for honoring a "terrorist" but they basically shrugged it off.  It didn't hurt them at all.  What it did do was make a lot of people who had been feeling less and less included in the mainstream queer community feel a little more connected.


Unfortunately, the rampant militarism and dissent-squashing of the last ten years has not spared our community. Yesterday, the Washington Post reported that the Parade Committee Board had voted to rescind the election of Bradley Manning as honorary grand marshal.

Manning recently admitted to leaking documents to Wikileaks including the "collateral murder" video showing an air assault on Iraqi civilians by a US helicopter crew.  The Parade co-chair cited a contention that Manning's actions had jeopardized American soldiers, which has never been proven.  We all know that the only way to protect US soldiers is to get them out of Afghanistan and all the other places where they commit atrocities like the ones Manning revealed.

Bradley Manning is openly gay and was bullied in the Army because of that.  As I discussed in a previous post, his sexual orientation and gender fluidity were exploited by the persecution and for a long time unacknowledged by his supporters, most of whom are straight.  For the last two years, though, there have been Free Bradley Manning contingents in the SFLGBT Freedom Day Parade, as well as in other Pride parades around the world.
I wrote the following letter to the Pride Committee and urge all of you, especially if you're queer, write your own (eek! looking at their website I just realized a friend of mine is board vice president now!). Send it to them at info@sfpride.org, ed@sfpride.org and feel free to call them as well at (415) 864-0831.

Dear Pride Committee,

As a former Community Grand Marshal, I am outraged that you have nullified the vote of the Electoral College to name military whistleblower Bradley Manning as an honorary grand marshal.

When I was elected in 2004, in recognition of my work in Palestine, there were plenty in the community who criticized the Pride Committee for that choice. I was really proud of the way that then-Executive Director Teddy Witherington stood up to those critics. He was no supporter of my politics, and I had been deeply critical of his efforts to commercialize and restrict the Pride celebration. But he wasn’t standing up for me or my politics. What he eloquently defended was the democracy of the process and the diversity of our community. He recognized that while I might not represent his ideals, I did represent those of many queer people, who had a right to be heard and honor whom they chose.

Your cowardly decision to cave in to pressure from militaristic and authoritarian forces betrays this legacy. It betrays the best in queer history, from Harry Hay to Harvey Milk to Stephen Funk, who were all anti-war activists. It betrays the very history that the LGBT Liberation Day Parade commemorates. The Stonewall Rebellion was made by gay people who fought back against injustice, not those who acquiesced and followed orders.

The modern queer liberation movement was inspired by the civil rights movement, the feminist movement and the movement to end the Vietnam War. Bradley Manning acted in the tradition of the soldiers who revealed the atrocities at My Lai and the sexual harassment at the Tailhook Symposium.

The queer community should be – and is – proud to claim him as a symbol of our continuing struggle for all liberation.
You have no right to silence our dissent and rob us of our place in Pride.

Please reinstate Bradley Manning as a honorary grand marshal.

Sincerely,

Kate Raphael

Too Many Martyrs and Too Many Dead*

A friend texted me the other day:

“Blog topic:  How the Sikh massacres managed to stay on yahoo news for one day compared to colorado days and days.”

It's a question a lot of people have been asking, actually.

Sikh temple shooting getting less coverage than Aurora theater tragedy: Why?

Two mass murders happened two weeks apart, but they get very different treatment by the media. Were the Dark Knight killings that much more important?

I thought, what can I say about that?  We all know why that is.

Racism.  Brown people don’t count as much.

Riddhi Shah, writing in the Huffington Post, knows it.

“On Sunday night I turned on the TV to find that only CNN was covering the Sikh temple shooting in Wisconsin that killed six. Fox News had a program about a prison in Latin America, and MSNBC, something else that was equally irrelevant [ed's note:  irrelevant?].

Compare this with the coverage of an incident that happened only two weeks ago, the shooting that killed 12 people in Aurora, Colo. Networks devoted themselves round-the-clock to the attack….

So, obviously, the question is: Why is it that the American people, and the American media in particular, care less about this attack?”

"This Is Your Brain on Violent Video Games”
is the title of the article this photo came from

Conor Friedsdorf, columnist on the Atlantic Monthly blog, has another explanation:  We don’t want to think about terrorist acts when the perpetrator is white, because of what it says about our social policy.

“Attacks like his are disconcerting to some white Americans for a seldom acknowledged reason. Since 9/11, many Americans have conflated terrorism with Muslims; and having done so, they've tolerated or supported counterterrorism policies safe in the presumption that people unlike them would bear their brunt. …What if white Americans were as likely as Muslims to be victimized by those policies? What if the sprawling national security bureaucracy we've created starts directing attention not just to Muslims and their schools and charities, but to right-wing militias and left-wing environmental groups (or folks falsely accused of being in those groups because they seem like the sort who would be)?

…[I]f the next terrorist attack on American soil looks like Oklahoma City?  How would President Obama or President Romney wield their unprecedented executive power in the aftermath of such an attack? Who would find that they'd been put on no fly lists? Whose cell phone conversations and email exchanges would be monitored without their ever knowing about it?”

Friedsdorf ignores – or presumably doesn’t know -- that white leftists, especially environmentalists have, in fact, been targeted by the post-9/11 security apparatus.  The Earth Liberation Front, made up almost exclusively of white activists, has been designated by the FBI as “America’s top domestic terrorist threat.”  Daniel McGowan, the subject of the excellent documentary “If a Tree Falls,” was one of a few non-Muslims incarcerated at the “Communication Management Unit” in Marion, Illinois, dubbed “Little Guantanamo.”  (If you missed the movie, it’s scheduled to be rebroadcast this Saturday on PBS’s POV.)  White antiwar activists, most associated with the little-known Maoist group Freedom Road, in Minnesota and Chicago were the targets of FBI raids and grandjury summons.

Friedsdorf also doesn’t seem to realize that many provisions of the PATRIOT Act were first put in place under the Clinton administration, immediately following the Oklahoma City bombing – and used exclusively against Muslims.

Nonetheless, he has a point in saying that we don’t like being reminded of inconvenient truths, such as that white supremacists are a bigger threat to “democracy” than either Islamists or anarchists.

But how’s this for a theory:  Incidents like the temple massacre, or the burning of the mosque in Joplin, Missouri (for the second time), don’t preoccupy us because we understand them all too well.  We wonder why the Aurora mall shootings occur – perhaps because we are in deep denial about how sick and alienated our society is.  We can’t really wonder why racist assaults happen.  As Rahiel Tesfamariam wrote, “the temple shooting … reflects the fact that racial hatred is as American as apple pie.”

In response to my blog about the Aurora shootings, another friend wrote:

“In SF this year there have been 130 gun shot victims. 50 of them died. It’s all bad but I have a hard time seeing the difference between one person shooting a bunch of people in one place and 130 people shooting 130 people in the streets, cars, homes, etc. And this is just stats for San Francisco.”

She’s right; we don’t call those 50 killings a massacre, but they’re just as dead as the 12 victims in Aurora and the 7 in Oak Creek.  But here are some other mass killings that don’t get days and days of coverage in our media:

• More than 3 women and 1 man are killed each day by an intimate partner – over 1200 women and over 400 men per year.  (As many as 75% of the men are killed in self-defense.)

• At least 58 people were killed Wednesday in Syria

• 120 or more African Americans have been killed by police or security guards (most by police) in the last six months – one every 36 hours.

• Car bombs targeting Shia pilgrims killed 66 people and wounded over 200 on June 13 in Iraq during a religious festival.  Iraq Body Count lists 91 civilians killed in August.

• Environmental activists in Brazil are being killed at the rate of one per week during the last year, according to the group Global Witness.  Total activists deaths in the last three years amount to 365, reported the UK Guardian.

So what’s my point?  We can’t think about it all.  We need to think about it all.  We need to find a way to look at all these mass killings, not as separate but as one huge blot on our collective conscience, and at the same time we need to acknowledge the different causes of each situation.

It is not completely true, though, that the “mainstream” U.S. has failed to make the connection between Aurora and Oak Creek.  A man named Cody Hickman, who survived the Aurora shooting, used the survivors’ facebook networks to create a group on Sunday called “Surviving Together.”  He wrote:

“For those who do not yet know, there was a shooting today at a Wisconsin Sikh temple. Lives have been lost, and many have been injured. In the wake of the Aurora Theater Shooting, we all now know what our neighbors in Wisconsin are about the go through. They will need support, and resources. The volunteers who run this page, as well as the Survivors of the Aurora Theater Shooting page are here to help in that effort. We would like to use our experience with this page to help those in Wisconsin, in whatever way we can.”

*The title is from the Phil Ochs song, "The Ballad of Medger Evers"

Who trashed Valencia Street?

Monday night, on the eve of big May Day protests signaling the hoped-for resurgence of Occupy, a planned “pep rally” in San Francisco’s Dolores Park turned into an ugly riot. Dozens of small businesses and cars on Valencia Street were trashed and smashed and painted with circle As.
Valencia Street is some of the mostly hotly contested territory in San Francisco. When I moved to the Bay in 1980, it was one of the first places in San Francisco that I ended up. It was at that time the hub of the lesbian/feminist community in the West Bay. Between Amelia’s women’s bar at 18th and Artemis Café at 23rd were Womancrafts West and Old Wives Tales, across the street from one another and right by Modern Times Bookstore, an anarchist collective that included a number of queer people. Osento women’s bath house was at 19th. Half a block up 18th Street toward Guerrero was and is the San Francisco Women’s Building, home to a dozen or more feminist organizations and one of the only wheelchair accessible spaces where you could hold a public event for not too much money. Next door to the Women’s Building, the Dover Club was one of the last vestiges of the time when the Mission was heavily Irish and German.

The white lesbians, feminists and queers who flocked to the Valencia strip knew we were the leading edge of gentrification in the primarily Latino neighborhood. We tried to be conscious and supportive to the Latino businesses and neighbors, while realizing that good intentions were not necessarily enough. It helped that the major focus of the left in the eighties was U.S. intervention in Central America, so there was some political crossover.

Lesbians and Gays Against Intervention in Latin America, which I joined in 1986, used to meet in the back of Modern Times, but when the group dwindled to eight or so, we moved to a restaurant called Puerto Alegre near 16th and Valencia. I always ordered the same thing: a veggie tostada with rice, beans and tortillas and a Dos Equis beer. The bill, with tip, came to $5 – a great deal, even then. The comfortable booths were never that crowded and they didn’t mind us sitting there for two hours. Since I lived in the neighborhood, I went there at other times too. The waiter-owner would recite my order for me. In the mid-nineties, as hipsters began to pour into the neighborhood for the clubs on 16th Street, Puerto Alegre suddenly started to have lines out the door. I’ve been there like twice in the last fifteen years. The last time was the day I got deported from Palestine in 2005. The food was neither as good nor as cheap as it used to be, not surprisingly.

courtesy @marymad

Since I could not spend much of Tuesday in the streets, I spent a little of it on Twitter. That’s how I got to see the armored personnel carrier roaming around downtown Oakland before many of the people who were actually in Oakland did.

It’s also where I ran across a link to a blog post from someone named Scott Rossi. He writes:

I don’t know who, the people I’ll dub as the ‘ringleaders’ of the march were exactly. Nobody did. Yeah some of the aggro people we always have to deal with were there, but these guys weren’t it. You remember those asshole jock bullies in high school? Well that was who was leading the march tonight. Clean cut, athletic, commanding, gravitas not borne of charisma but of testosterone and intimidation. They were decked out in outfits typically attributed to those in the ‘black bloc’ spectrum of tactics, yet their clothes were too new, and something was just off about them. They were very combative and nearly physically violent with the livestreamers on site, and got ignorant with me, a medic, when I intervened and reminded them that I was there to fix them from police violence, not protester on protester violence.

Now I’m not pointing a finger at SFPD, although it would not surprise me if certain elements were clued in on it. Generally, the officers seemed as upset and bewildered as we were. Remember that article that just came out about the banks cooperating against Occupy? They have hired Pinkerton, those fucking goons, the scourge of the labor movement from back in the day, to coordinate against us. It could be that they are the Feds, it could be that they are some corporate assholes or even some of our right wing blogger friends who stalk us at events. It very well could be SFPD, as apparently there were no arrests, yet several cruisers drove past myself and a few other people with what I assumed were protesters in the back seats. Bandanas still up over their faces.

The other thing that bothered me is the level of destruction and the targets.…Black Bloc goes after state or corporate property not that of the working class and poor. …This wasn’t directed against corporations or big banks, with the exception of one single ATM I saw smashed. This was specifically directed against mom and pop shops, local boutiques and businesses, and cars. Lots and lots of cars. I won’t weep for the hipster dives or the WASP nests for nouveau riche white trash, but the working class, poor and immigrant owned places I will. At first it was a few luxury cars, but as I followed the march down Valencia from a distance, it was all types of cars.

Okay, now there are some internal inconsistencies and leaps of logic there. I have to say that the theory about it being right-wing bloggers seems a lot more plausible than that it’s SFPD. Why? For one thing, the SFPD, of all the police departments around, has been one of the least gung-ho when it comes to busting Occupy. Not that they haven’t done their part, but they don’t seem nearly as personally invested as police in Oakland or even Santa Cruz. Participants in last week’s blockade of the Wells Fargo stockholders’ meeting talked about how downright friendly the cops were. Secondly, SFPD is not a small organization. A few angry cops couldn’t just decide to do something like that. An SFPD counterintelligence operation like that would, I assume, have to be okayed by the chief of police, and likely the mayor, and both of them I think would know that people are going to investigate and probably discover the truth and there would go their careers.

But if it was right-wing bloggers or other private forces, then that calls into question the story about seeing the masked guys in police cars, when they were not arrested.

Last night on my way out of work, I stopped by the Occupy SF General Assembly. They were discussing whether to fundraise for the Mission businesses that were damaged, which it seemed like they would agree to do. A guy named Carlos mentioned that Wells Fargo Bank has pledged $25,000 to help the shopowners repair the damage.  After saying, “I usually stay far away from conspiracy theories,” he suggested that Wells Fargo might have had a hand in hiring the people who did the damage in the first place, so that they could both discredit Occupy and show it up by offering to help. I have to say, I’ve heard crazier ideas.

If this all sounds like paranoid fantasy, consider a few things:

• We know that the Koch Brothers considered hiring thugs to infiltrate the crowds in Wisconsin last year
• We know that the biggest banks in New York were helping the police with surveillance in preparation for May Day, comparing themselves to "innocent elk hunted by wolves."
• Business and government interests have shown themselves willing to commit violence in order to frame activists in the past, as in the 1990 bombing of environmentalists Judi Bari and Daryl Cherney, where the FBI attempted to blame the victims
• We know the FBI has been setting up activists, including recruiting people to blow up a bridge in Cleveland
• We know that the tendency of some local Occupy groups to cover their faces and commit property damage provides a good opportunity for counterintelligence to move in and confuse casual observers

Like Scott Rossi, I am not saying I know who did this. Like Carlos, I am usually very reluctant to endorse conspiracy theories. What I am suggesting is that most of those businesses probably have video cameras. The city itself has video surveillance cameras on the street. Every ATM has a camera or two. Some intrepid investigative reporter or group of activists with more time and guts than I have should be able to go up and down Valencia Street and collect a ton of video which could prove or disprove this theory once and for all. I sure hope someone decides to do it. (If you want help, you know where to find me.)

Anarchism Part II: The Pacifist and the Black Masks

Didn't see Part I? Read it first.

It always surprises people who know little about anarchists that we believe in organizing and working together. As my last post explains, anarchists tend to be highly organized, and most of us have very coherent systems of thought. We can even be dogmatic, contradictory as that sounds, but what we don’t normally do, or should not do anyway, is try to regulate or control what others think. Anarchists probably have as many opinions per capita as Jews, and as for Jewish anarchists … well you do the math.

more results for "anarchist graphics"

When Emma Goldman was coming up as a young anarchist, her mentor was Johann Most, who believed in the liberatory power of individual courageous actions, including assassinations. After her lover, Alexander Berkman, went to prison for attempting to assassinate a union-busting industrialist and financier named Henry Clay Frick, Goldman changed her beliefs and became more a follower of Peter Kropotkin, who believed (by that time, anyway) in collective nonviolent action. At the same time, a guy named Benjamin R. Tucker was the main spokesperson for a libertarian anarchism, based on the premise that:

If … extortion from labor rest upon denials of liberty, plainly the remedy consists in the realization of liberty. Destroy the banking monopoly, establish freedom in finance, and down will go interest on money through the beneficent influence of competition. Capital will be set free, business will flourish, new enterprises will start, labor will be in demand, and gradually the wages of labor will rise to a level with its product. And it is the same with the other monopolies. Abolish the tariffs, issue no patents[,] take down the bars from unoccupied land, and labor will straightway rush in and take possession of its own. Then mankind will live in freedom and in comfort.

Some anarchists believe in a really radical form of autonomism, where no one ever has to be answerable to the collective, and presumably the collective bears no responsibility for the actions of the individual. I believe just the opposite – that in order for each of us to be free we must value the collective more than our individual desires, and that the collective must take responsibility for the consequences of any actions taken in accordance with its decisions.

By definition, anarchists reject hierarchy – the Greek word “archist” is long-disused, interestingly, but in the New Testament, I’m told, it’s translated as “ruler.” So even though I believe in sublimating my individual will to that of the collective, it has to be done freely and in every situation because every one of us believes that we are stronger within the collective. As soon as I feel that the collective does not serve my interest, I am free to leave it, regaining my autonomy but sacrificing the strength and protection of the community.

Though anarchists do not all reject violence, we all reject state violence. That means we do not use the power of the state, even against our enemies. If you are willing to demand that the cops arrest Zionists or anti-abortion protesters who assault you, you are not an Anarchist. As Anarchists, we have to find ways of defending our own communities, something that the various Occupy/Decolonize/Liberate camps had varying success with.

Slingshot #108, which was labeled “Extra Hella Occupy Edition” has some really excellent pieces about militancy, tactics, property damage, and the limits of collectivism and autonomy. One of the best, I thought, by Evan Buswell, reflects,

“Consensus depends on the fiction of an ‘outside’ in two respects: first, that each individual has the capacity to act autonomously outside the group, apart from the group, not affecting the group as a whole; second, that disunited elements can be merely ejected back into the already-existing society…Consensus is totally dependent on the presence of a larger state to which it can eject elements that its process has no other means to discipline.”

The mask-wearing, sometimes projectile-throwing or shield-wielding “anarchists” who have been most active and visible at Occupy Oakland do not, in my experience, use the label “black bloc” and I am not sure they all identify as anarchists. They seem to prefer the terms “militant” and “insurrectionist.” It’s completely inaccurate to call them “outsiders” or suggest that they are all or mostly “agent provocateurs.” Of course, some of them are. We probably won’t know who for many years, if ever. But that’s not limited to the insurrectionists. No doubt there are infiltrators or informers among medics, consensus facilitators and even pacifists. Many of the militants are long-term and even thoughtful activists, whom I’ve known for years. Some of them did a lot of the work to set up Occupy Oakland, and worked day and night to keep it running smoothly. They have beliefs I totally disagree with, but they are deeply held beliefs.

One thing that did surprise me is that many of them describe themselves is “nihilist.” Back in the day we used to use that term pejoratively – “don’t be nihilistic,” meant don’t be juvenile, just randomly lashing out at stuff. But like most pejoratives, it’s been reclaimed. An article on infoshop.org explains:

Nihilist anarchy is a collection of political theories, a growing tendency and influence within the anarchist movement. Nihilist anarchists approach society with skepticism and they attempt to avoid the pitfalls of speculation, even to the point of denying a future vision of society. Some focus on the need to address the problems of the present, but do so without subscribing to the models that are seen to hold back other radicals. By doing this, they reject "progress, evolution, the general strike, the insurrection to end all insurrections, or the supremacy of theory over action."

This form of nihilist anarchism, which the author distinguishes from “Nietzschean nihilism” and “Russian nihilism” is based in a “revolutionary skepticism” which holds:

• An ethical revolution does not necessarily create an ethical society.
• No future is as possible as any future.
• Reject the world as it is. It must be superceded before it can be valued.
• All attempts to inflict radical change have failed, giving legitimacy to the idea that action is not bound by moral restraint.
• There is no single method of revolt nor is there a grand scheme behind it. When these ideas are imposed is when we are promised more of the same (reaction and failure).
• Revolt is not found in moral living.
• Revolt despite the consequences is worth living.
• Revolt is without hope, but not without casualties.

The nihilists reject both “prefigurative politics,” which seek to create the new society we want to see at the same time that we struggle to overthrow the existing authoritarian institutions, and any effort to win immediate reforms while trying to create the conditions for revolution. Much like Berkman and Most, they believe visible attacks on corporate and state institutions help to show the system’s weaknesses. At an Occupy Oakland forum on nonviolence, one of the insurrectionists quoted Rudy Giuliani’s “Broken Windows Theory,” under which minor property damage is kind of a gateway drug leading to the collapse of the social order. All I can say is, if only it were so easy.

In January, a number of “anti-capitalist” tendencies in Seattle came together for a five-hour “Anti-Capitalist Smackdown: A Debate among Tendencies in the Occupy Movement.” Here’s the facebook announcement:

Participating tendencies (in alphabetic order)

• Anarcho-syndicalism
• Black Orchid
• Communization
• Insurrectionary anarchy
• Nihilism

Schedule

3-5PM: debates on

• The enemy (capitalism or civilization?)
• Revolution (ultimate goals and how to get there)
• Class & identity
• The role of revolutionaries

5-6PM: dinner break

6-7:15PM: debates on

• Unions & solidarity networks
• Prefigurative (anti)politics
• The Occupy movement

7:15-8PM: open discussion with audience

A report posted afterwards says: “Definitely successful! The venue was packed, a full house. Comrades stood outside to listen in on the debate.There was a lot of talk of future debates and open discussion on revolutionary politics between tendencies due to the success of this debate and discussion. I think it built a lot of comradary and understanding between the different tendencies.”

Wish I could have been there! Waiting breathlessly for the video.