Why are Navajos so Fascist? (written for the Navajo Times)

A perplexing question has confronted me for sometime now, “Why are so many Navajos so nationalistic and militaristic?” In fact the idea of Navajos demonstrating “patriotism” (which in the U.S. is akin to fascism) is an absurd contradiction that I can still not understand. For what reasons do Navajos need to be celebratory of the “idea” of the United States, an idea which not only directly cost the lives of their ancestors, (nearly half the existing 1868 Navajo population by some estimates-think on that next time you wave “Old Glory,”) but also cost the lives of many like people with whom they shared the continent, many nations that were completely obliterated in genocidal warfare in the manifestation of this supposed “great nation” that has brought in its most tangible results only a few, rich white people, but utter poverty and destitution for Navajos among other ethnic minorities.

And for what reasons do Navajos need to be militaristic? First off, the U.S. armed forces have always been a terrorist organization, usually employed against people who have something (e.g., land, mineral resources, wealth, etc.,) that the same rich white men who have thus far benefited in the creation of this country also covet in their perpetual and insatiable desire for increased prosperity and power. Navajos need but look no further than the experience of their ancestors for an example of this assertion, rounded-up like cattle and force-marched hundreds of miles into the U.S’s version of a concentration camp. What excuse can Navajos today conjure for serving in the same U.S. armed forces, that are carrying out the same type of atrocities in now different parts of the world for the same coveted mineral wealth?

Aside from being completely contrary to the purpose of survival for their much persecuted ancestors, (I’m sure the surviving elements of the Navajo population, when released from Bosque Redondo near Fort Sumner, New Mexico didn’t aspire for their descendants to join the same military forces in like military campaigns against almost as equally defenseless populations, but that’s my assumption of course) joining the military for Navajos is a complete waste of resources. The Navajo Nation doesn’t need dead “G.I.’s” in Iraq, or Afghanistan, or wherever the U.S. military wonders to next, but the Navajo Nation needs both physical and social development, (i.e., Navajo youth should go to school and learn skills to bring back to the Navajo Nation-since they have the opportunity to do so-rather than going off to war for some rich, white men’s oil.)

And so I return to the question of patriotism. How do Navajos come to believe in absurdities like their people have benefited from being cloaked and chocked by U.S. territorial ambitions? (I doubt they ever came to their praise of the U.S. by thinking, “Well, at least we are no longer part of Mexico.”) In real terms, Navajos have, basically been forced into a monetary and market economy in which they are at a severe-disadvantage, hence the poverty, social dissolution (e.g., gangs, drugs, petty-theft, domestic violence, alcoholism) and subsequent decline in health and well being, (e.g., depression, obesity, diabetes, low standards of living as well as a low-life expectancy.)

Problems for which the U.S. has assisted by providing a health care system that ranks worse than those found in its sprawling and bustling prison “industrial complex,” or by recruiting Navajo youth with seemingly no “real” opportunities into the ranks of its “few” and its “proud” as they annihilate villages in Indo-China or slaughter families whole in Iraq and Afghanistan. Possibly, then, it’s the reneging on treaty agreements that inspires patriotism in Navajos, as their water sources are compromised or their land is used first as space for rail, then highway with little to no say or oversight from the Navajo people, and which comes at an increased risk to Navajos living near these places. Or maybe it’s the puppet government that the Bureau of Indian Affairs created, which must still bow for approval from the U.S. Department of Interior on legislative matters it approves. Is this the “democracy” Navajos think they are defending when they are recruited to kill similarly brown-skinned people thousands of miles away? A genocidal legacy, limited sovereignty and instilled perpetual poverty, are these the facets of “American” democracy that inspires such fervor and, ultimately, fascist behavior in Navajos.

And if you didn’t understand some of the bigger words I used in this op-ed, then you shouldn’t vote Republican as this, the righter of the business-class parties, are uncaring about the comprehension of language and would see the U.S., as Arizona has attempted, become an “English-Only” nation. (The paradox being that most self-identified Republicans, though the biggest promoters of “English-only” governments, are the least skilled in the use of this language, just “play me a country song” for myriad examples of this fact.)

Viva El Frente Sandinisata de Liberacion Nacional!

Daniel Ortega, presidential candidate for the El Frente Sandinista de Liberacion Nacional [FSLN], or who are commonly referred to as the Sandanistas has won the presidency of Nicaragua after about 16 years “out of power,” as mainstream news sources like to characterize his absence. When he left the presidency of Nicaragua in 1990, the US and its Hondurian-based surrogates, “the Contras,” were engaged in a terrorist war against the Nicaraguan people, pressing death and misery as a threat from Washington against this already all too miserable population who had the audacity to rid themselves from the yoke of the US-backed dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza, threatening in effect absolute US supremacy over Central and South America.

Now Ortega faces a more matured threat, as the imperialist’s former violent thrust for obedience from this tiny Central American nation has blossomed into overt exploitation and has solidified into distorted trade agreements that stand to pillage the country and its people. What’s more, the US has, illegally, made explicit threats against Nicaraguans, claiming US-aid to the nation will be reconsidered in the event of an Ortega presidential victory-a form of blackmail that is, in essence, meddling in the domestic electoral affairs of another nation in a manner illegal under existing international law.

Much discontent in the country has accrued over the past decade as Nicaragua’s current centrist-right government has pursued an economic policy of “free trade,” culminating in its recent passage of the Central American Free Trade Agreement, or what is know as CAFTA last summer. This agreement guarantees, for example, that Nicaraguans must respect lucrative patent rights for drugs owned by US pharmaceutical firms, doubling or tripling for the second-poorest nation in the hemisphere (only the much US-abused half-island nation of Haiti ranks more destitute) the costs of medicines, specifically anti-virals, designed to combat new threats to the population like HIV/AIDS. Additionally importation of cheaper, but illegally US-subsidized crops such as maize and rice, inherent in these agreements, will threaten the livelihoods of local producers who otherwise depend on cultivation of these products for a livelihood.

(These provisions were ruled again illegal by the WTO after Brazil brought suit against the US last year specifically for cotton-related subsidies USDA annually gives to large, industrious cotton producers in the western and southeastern parts of the US that cover about 40 percent the cost of production for this crop, thereby artificially cheapening the price of US cotton against what is otherwise more efficiently produced cotton in places like Burkina Faso, a land-locked West African nation that has seen its economy wrecked in recent years as a consequence.)

In addition, coffee producers in Nicaragua have seen their yearly earnings drop and their nation’s primary source of livelihood and largest exported commodity cheapened as the international price for coffee, a capricious market anyway, suddenly and dramatically dropped in 2001, unleashing what has been termed “the Coffee Crisis” by non-governmental organizations like Oxfam and others.

I traveled there in the summer of 2004 with the United Students for Fair Trade, or USFT, to Nicaragua where I saw hung high above crumbling homes flags of black and red bars, the colors of the Sandinistas. The party’s acronym, FSLN, was painted on the sides of shops, bars, and homesteads similarly in black-and-red colorations. There I learned from Nicaraguans the oppression they faced at the hands of a well-financed US-trained and equipped terrorist militia. Visible still on the landscape were remnants of war, and after over a decade of an end to fighting, people still there carried emotional scars from that truculent time.

I learned that in 1979, after years of repression from the US-backed Samoza dictatorship, revolutionary forces exploded in Nicaragua. After Samoza’s corruption reached new heights in the wake of a1972 earthquake that leveled Nicaragua’s capital city of Managua, business elite joined in sympathy with guerrilla FSLN fighters in opposition of Somoza.

Landless workers in the countryside and students in the cities supported the movement. And by mid-1979, the Sandinistas were able to dispose of Somaza, who abdicated his power and fled to Miami (where many of the US’s Latin American reactionary clients call home.)

But a Sandinista victory didn’t resonate well with a rightist US, and soon the newly elected Reagan administration began sponsoring counter-revolutionary Contra forces. Violence began in 1982 when “Contras,” as they were popularly called, who had trained in Argentina and neighboring Honduras, destroyed bridges built through Sandinista work programs-in essence attacked the infrastructure of the nation to intimidate the population.

The US’s current threat to deprive aid to the country is, at face, outrageous and contemptible given the level of liability the US has for the shoddy condition in which the country now exists. For example, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled in 1986 against the US’s terrorist campaign, via “freedom fight[ing]” Contras, as the even then senile Regan characterized them, as outright illegal under international law and subject to retributive payments for costs in lives and property incurred;(though the US reactively claimed to be exempt from the ICJ’s jurisdiction and used its UN Security Council (SC) veto to void subsequent UN SC resolutions with wording designed to enforce the ICJ’s ruling.)

The entire Contra war, as it is now called, costs the lives of about 80,000 Nicaraguans, a country with a population of roughly 3 million at the time of the violence, not to mention the entire destruction to the economy and rural infrastructure.

I also heard from Nicaraguans how Contras used methods of terror, kidnapping and killing teachers who worked in Sandinista-established schools, attacking Sandinista-organized farming cooperatives with guns and ammunition and ultimately destabilizing the country to prevent any Sandinista reforms. Yet the Sandinista government was able to grant huge tracts of land to landless farmers who had been squatting and farming in rural mountainsides since Samoza’s disposal.

After the Sandanista’s lost power, the government again encouraged the production of cash crops, putting these farmers directly at risk to price fluctuations on the international coffee market. What’s more, sensing the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US no longer needed to appease Southern nations from turning to the USSR for support, and so unilaterally withdrew from the International Coffee Agreement in 1989, thereby destabilizing the international price of coffee.

Consequently, all this has resulted in the reemergence of the Sandanistas and, specifically, Daniel Ortega into the position of the presidency. It appears that Nicaraguans are discontent with neo-liberalist subterfuge designed to reap from them profits at the destruction of their livelihoods, and which has taken ever-greater tolls against their population in recent years with sequential “free trade” concessions. What’s more, Nicaragua’s recent presidential election is yet another indication of Latin America’s shift to the left in general, after enduring failed IMF and World Bank policies (e.g., Argentina, Chile, Haiti), rightist US-backed dictators (e.g., Guatemala in 1954, Cuba pre-1959, Brazil in 1964, Chile in 1973, Haiti pre-1989, etc.,) and US-terrorist campaigns that have left rural populations destitute and elites more empowered and enriched (e.g., Colombia and El Salvador-not to mention the outrageous invasion of the tiny Caribbean island-nation of Grenada in 1983 and Panama in 1989 causing thousands of deaths to both of these populations). With the recent elections of Eva Moralles in Bolivia and Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, Latin America is succeeding from its neo-colonizers, those only standing to benefit being the majority of the population.

Congress Further Erodes Basic Human Rights

The supposed “international war on terror” has many disturbing facets, the aggregate sum of which appears to be an uncontrollable beast bent on profit (for those who control it) and destruction (for those whom (a) oppose it or (b) happen to be in regions from where these benefits are expected.) Yet besides this nation’s outrageous use of war against societies whose only crime (one that cannot be excused apparently) was to be physically present on land that is flush with world-coveted natural resources, such as oil for example; and resources from which outrageous profits are made; is our nation’s treatment of indigenous resistance to military, economic and cultural domination, now dehumanized as “terrorists” though one can find in history many synonymous categorizations.

But probably an equally worse crime, and one that is arguably more morally compromising for those who condone it (our society) either by (a) inactive opposition against it or (b) overt support for it, is are military/government’s overall treatment of detainees, alleged as “enemy combatants,” treatment that is counter to the spirit of the Third Geneva Conventions, the international treaty that binds nations to decent and respectful treatment of enemy soldiers. As if this weren’t bad enough, Congress has passed recently (Sept. 28 & 29, the House and Senate respectively) legislation that will further erode detainees basic human rights as are outlined in these agreements, and legislation that will restrict detainees judicial appeals of their crass condition to only what are best described as “kangaroo courts,” adhoc military tribunals, rather than allowing them due process under previous provisions in the law (as was upheld by the Supreme Court in June, and to which the Bush administration has been consistently trying to thwart), and legislation that is counter the spirit of habeas corpus, one of the most lauded advancements in our collective human social conscience to result from Western Liberalism (not liberalism in Ann Coulter terms, but liberalism that includes ideas like “the rights of man” and from which our democratic system is descended.)

But first let us consider present conditions on Guantanamo. Detainees in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba have been subjected to some of the harshest and most cruel imprisonment conditions publicly disclosed by the US military. Reports of “sleep deprivation,” “waterboarding” (mock drownings) “hyperthermia,” as well as numerous reports of US military personal desecrating the Koran have all led other governments, non-governmental organizations and human-rights activists to censure, or in the very least openly question the US’s activities toward detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Interrogation techniques that would otherwise qualify as torture, illegal under the same Geneva Conventions, are euphemized rather as “aggressive interrogation techniques.” In response to detainees’ hunger-strikes, doctors at Guantanama Bay, despite ethical questions raised, have force-fed detainees by inserting tubes down their throats. Allegations then quickly surfaced of detainees being force-fed as a form of punishment, in which case they were fed to the point at which they either vomited or defecated in their seats. Such conditions have led some prisoners to suicide, and the International Red Cross has publicly raised concerns about the mental health of detainees as a result of their treatment in Guantanamo and their prolonged detainment there.

As a result of the recent legislation passed by Congress, detainees at Guantanamo will loose their right to habeas corpus, a right that would merely allow innocent detainees, reported to be as young as 14 and as old as 71 the right to challenge their imprisonment. Additionally, this legislation will, according to Kate Zernick of the New York Times, “…broaden the definition of enemy combatants beyond the traditional definition used in wartime, to include noncitizens living legally in the United States as well as those in foreign countries and anyone determined to be an enemy combatant under criteria defined by the president or secretary of defense.” And according to the Center for Constitutional Rights, the current legislation will “grant the President the privilege of kings, allowing him to imprison any critics as alleged 'enemy combatants,' never to see the inside of a court room or to have the chance to challenge their detention or their treatment.” The Center openly questions “What would we say if another country passed a law making it legal to snatch US citizens and detain them indefinitely?”

We don’t have to speculate much to answer the above question, and we can assume the majority of us would be opposed to similar treatment. But if this is true the passing of this recent legislation by Congress reveals us to be hypocrites and is yet another indication of the dismantling by the government of basic human rights in this so called prolonged “war on terror,” a euphemism for the use of force and perpetual detainment against recalcitrant populations in regions of “strategic importance,” or rather regions rich in resources valuable for the ruling-class in the United States. This again raises serious moral questions for members of a society that permits such cruel and inhuman treatment against fellow human beings. Of course once we lose our domination on history, such actions, or inactions on our part, will prompt scorn and official rebuke in future generations. But such considerations are also of little consequence, as at present moment innocent people are subject to physical torture and endless misery. The blame for this hideous stain on the much soiled history of the US is bi-partisan, and therefore our opposition to it should excuse the responsible parties and be a non-partisan, non-electoral ploy, but a true morally-based movement.

The dismantlement and closing down of Guantanamo Bay remains one of the great, unresolved challenges facing our society today, but until we start taking action against it, and begin in the very least to pressure lawmakers, more and more concessions on our collective basic liberties will be made by both Republicans and Democrats, excused under what is now the almost comical guise of “fighting the war on terror,” but something that is less humorous when one considers its consequences.