xicanism

For students exploring the history of the Salvadoran Civil War:

According to this news article regarding the recent controversial election in Venezuela, the U.S.-backed opposition candidate Edmundo González has a sketchy past connected to the Salvador Civil War.

A report by the United Nations suggests that indigenous sovereignty and autonomy from the institutions of the global market (i.e. extraction and exploitation of natural resources in places like the Amazon), can save the planet.

fuckyeahradicalliterature:

Note: Digital Read

URL: http://www.mediafire.com/?d98s24jd2t09b2y

Quotes from book:

“The Indian Wars have never ended in the Americas.” -Leslie Marmon Siko, Almanac of the Dead

Translation of Arabic text: Love live Zapata, hero of the Mexican Revolution, 1915. Long live Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni, hero of the Palestinian Revolution, 1948.

Content Warning: Genocide

The images above are graphic 16th Century depictions of the aftermath of Christopher Columbus’ arrival, which was followed by the Spanish colonial genocide against the native peoples of the Caribbean.

The native people of the Caribbean islands that were invaded by Columbus and the Spaniards came to be known as the “Arawaks,” an accepted label derived from the 20th Century research by Swedish archeologist Sven Loven, who based his findings on the spoken language of the Amerindian peoples in the region. 

Today, many people with indigenous heritage in the Caribbean prefer to refer to their ancestors as the Taino, which was the name of the people on the island of Borikén (known today as Puerto Rico), who were also wiped out by the Spaniards after Columbus’ arrival.  

The Spaniards also attempted to eliminate the Taino population on the island that came to be know as Cuba.  However, descendants of the Taino people still live today in Cuba, where they are protected by the government.  Click this text to jump to an article on this topic by the BBC.

In discussing Cuba’s communist government and its treatment of the Tainos, the BBC article puts an “Orientalist” spin on the actual history described by an article in Smithsonian Magazine to make it appear as if the Castro government supported the “extinction” of the Tainos.

The Smithsonian article actually states:

According to research presented on the National Geographic website in 2018, researchers have found evidence of the survival of DNA strands from the original Taino people, who were thought to be extinct.

These findings also suggest what other scholars have contended, which is that the earlier ancestors of the Taino (i.e. their ancestors who lived in the Americas centuries before the arrival of the Europeans) may have been migrants from the continent of South America, in particular the region that is now the country of Venezuela.

The well-documented utter brutality of the Spaniards towards the Tainos became the basis of “the Black Legend,” which was exploited by other European colonial powers, such as the British and the Dutch, to justify their own incursions into the Americas to subjugate the natives and access (or basically take) the riches and resources of the land (i.e. European setter-colonialism). 

Ethnic studies and critical race theory have been saying this since the 1970s, but people weren’t listening until over 40 years later.

Kissinger was Secretary of State under US President RIchard Nixon and his successor Gerald Ford.  He was also instrumental in the implementation of Operation Condor in the 1970s.  Operation Condor was the U.S. and South America’s geopolitical policy for maintaining the Monroe Doctrine under the pretense of fighting the influence of Soviet communism.  However, left-wing activists, peasants, and indigenous communities were primarily targeted by the state and US-sponsored organizations to curtail popular social movements.

Dirty Wars, in which the state disappeared, tortured, or murdered the populace, were committed by governments against the people in Chile, Argentina, Mexico (see ROMA), and other Latin American countries.  These wars were sponsored by the US and supported by the CIA.  Some of the CIA assets became the drug lords of Latin America (see NARCOS).

Kissinger himself was raised in Bavaria in the 1930s as a German Jew and endured bullying by nazi youth until his family fled Germany.  But as a politician, his legacy and associations contradict the assumptions about his youth and character, or perhaps convey that he is very familiar with the methods of totalitarian fascist governments in quelling dissent.

He is now 97 years old.