Last night we were the opening band for No Means No and The Hoffmans. It's been a long time since we've been the openers for anybody, so I consider it to be an honest, humbling experience. Sadly, we had to play early enough so that some of our friends missed our set, but whatever. There will always be a next time. The Hoffmans played their brand of wacky, offbeat garage pop style of music, and No Means No were just fucking phenomenal. Do they ever have an off night? These guys are even older than I am, and play way longer songs, and longer sets. Where the fuck do they get their energy from? Incredible. Thanks to Malcolm for putting us on the bill with very little notice, and thanks to all of our friends who keep coming out no matter what, even to a place like that. Peace.
Hey assholes, everyone should come and see us tomorrow night at the scene of Sunday night's drive-by shooting, Club 919. The alfuckingmighty No Means No are playing, along with a band that NMN say are "not bad", the Hoffmans. It's going to be awesome. No, not because of us, but because of No Means No. They have paid their dues, and deserve your respect, even if you are too stupid to understand their music. Wednesday, Feb.27th. Be there.
It needs to be said again and again. The world is a horror, and does not have to be...For those of you who follow the links to Revolution newspaper, voice of the Revolutionary Communist Party,USA, you know that this is said over and over again. Some things are worth the repetition. There are many people who do not like the RCP. I don't care. It is not a politcal party popular with punk rockers. Again, I do not fucking care. Never mind what you like and what you don't like. What are the fucking issues being discussed, and are the conclusions valid? Yes, they are. Is Chairman Bob Avakian speaking the truth about this rotten fucking system, and how only Revolution can overcome this shit, and bring about meaningful change? Yes, this is true. It doesn't fucking matter what you think about his leadership, or leadership in general. This is the truth. Read the articles. And read this. More facts about this rotten fucking racist imperialist system.
"Mass Incarceration + Silence = Genocide/Break The Silence!"... And the Need to Take a Stand and Act Now
February 24, 2013 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
For example, you have Ronald Reagan, during a speech, angrily exclaiming, "We intend to end the drug menace and to eliminate this dark, evil enemy within." Ostensibly, it's the drug war he's talking about, but not so covered up or coded is the actual program that involves the extermination of Black people in the U.S. I mean, he tells you this almost straight-up. Go see the film to really get how genocidal these comments are, and consciously so.
Something else to glean from this film is how successive administrations, from Nixon to Reagan, from Bush Sr. to Clinton and then through the turn of the century, consciously drove this drug war—and the vicious, racist revenge associated with this program. This war on drugs, which really is a war on the people, includes the arrests of 45 million people since it was started by Nixon, including a huge percentage of Blacks and Latinos, and of course the astronomical numbers of people not only arrested but imprisoned, some for decades, on nonviolent drug violations. A conscious post-1960s counter-revolutionary onslaught indeed.
However, a weakness in the film is the illusions it sows about how some forces in the U.S. Congress, and other spheres of officialdom, are coming to their senses and by implication can be relied upon to lead an effort to turn the tide. This type of reform-minded reliance on the powers can only end in disaster.
In the past period, Carl Dix and others have given speeches titled "Mass Incarceration + Silence = Genocide/Break The Silence!" where the situation we confront has been spelled out. Massive resistance has and is being called for to stop this dangerous genocidal trajectory. The Stop Mass Incarceration Network promotes this understanding and has been spreading this slogan. Ultimately, fundamental change, a real revolution of millions, is required to sweep away the system responsible for and driving this dangerous trajectory. For those who think genocide "could never happen here," the reality is that it already has happened here. And it was an almost total and complete extermination of a people. And it was not too long ago. Or ask yourself, what country in the world turned genocide—"cowboys and Indians"—into a children's game?
In thinking about this, including how the Christian fascist genocidal political program especially revolves around issues of "crime and punishment"—specifically the use of the "Biblical Model" as law and moral code in the U.S., which has "an unmistakable suggestion of the 'final solution' against the masses of people in the inner cities as well as preparation for the use of extreme repression, and even execution, to punish a broad array of activities which today are treated as minor offenses or no crime at all." (See Bob Avakian's book Away With All Gods! Unchaining the Mind and Radically Changing the World, especially Part Three.) I am reminded of this quote from the memoirs of Izhak Zuckerman, one of the few leaders of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising who survived when the Germans crushed it:
"In 1939 we did not understand—we refused to believe—both out of ignorance and from the desire not to see... If only we had realized; if only we had understood; if only we had been able to turn the historical tide back to the year 1939, we should have shouted 'Revolt at once!' For then we were at the height of our strength. Then we were possessed of vigor and self-respect."
"Never Again"—understood correctly: never again shall it be allowed that crimes against humanity can go on and people will be able to plead ignorance or impotence as an excuse for doing nothing to stop those crimes. Food for thought, and time to take a stand, and act.
Here are just a few statistics about Aboriginal incarceration rates vs. percentage of the population.
Aboriginal Adults (2005-2006)
4% of the total canadian adult population - (2006 Census)
24% of admissions to provincial/territorial sentenced custody
18% of admissions to federal prisons
19% of admissions to remand
21% of male prisoner population
30% of female prisoner population
In Manitoba, Aboriginal people accounted for 71% of sentenced admissions in 2005/2006 (and make up 16% of the outside population), up from 58% in 1996/1997.
In Saskatchewan -- Aboriginal adults make up 79% of the total prisoner population (15% of outside population)
And for those idiots who still want to use stupid expressions like "canadians are like this", or "canadians don't want that", keep in mind, that kkkandians are just as divided as the populations of other countries over the questions of racism, the fucking keystone oil pipeline, and other political/social questions. Stephen asshole harper and gordon fucking campbell are kkkanadians. Mining companies going all over the earth to steal resources and destroy the environments of Indigenous people are fucking kkkanadian also. There are troops in Afghanistan from this country helping to kill civilians also. Robert pickton is also kkkanadian. Break out of your fucking national delusion.
Most kkkanadians are still wilfully blind to their own history of genocide, rape, and torture, while being more than happy to point south of the border to say, "At least we're not as bad as those guys, eh". Well, "we" are. The destruction of Indigenous languages, cultures, and people, has been perpetrated inside of these borders just as much as outside of them. Residential schools were a horrible fascist sadistic creation, brought in under the racist fucking notion of "civilizing the savages". The various religious denominations played a huge part in this, and had their own pedophiles on staff to take advantage of the situation. And this is a large part of what this country is based on. This is your history. It's better to know the truth and fight for justice, than to try and make excuses for the terror that went on, and the racism that still continues now. Read...
Death count stamped on disgraced Indian residential school system
Rick O'Brien, chief of the Kwanlin Dun First Nation and a former residential school student, speaks at the Truth …Freshly studied documents on Canada’s disgraced Indian residential school system suggest more than 3,000 children died while in the imposed care of such facilities, stamping a harsh number on the cost of an often overlooked smudge on Canada’s history.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commissionsaid the number has been confirmed through the study of government and school records, telling the Canadian Pressthat all but 500 of those left dead have been identified.
What is amazing is that this is the first time a number has been placed on residential school fatalities based on systematic research.
Until now, there have only been first-hand accounts and speculative accounting.
It will certainly be noted that this report, based on study of various government and school records, comes just days after a judge ordered the federal government provide the commission with all relevant files — not just those available in the archives.
One wonders if more access to documents will mean more details on fatalities.
Some 150,000 First Nations, Metis and Inuit children went through the church-run school system dating back to the 1840s. They were removed from their communities and forbidden to speak their own languages
There were over 130 locations across Canada, the last of which closed in 1996. There are 80,000 former students still living in Canada.
The reported mortality rate is unlikely to have an immediate effect on government policy. Prime Minister Stephen Harper already issued a formal apology to former students in 2008, and the commission's mandate includes recommending a path forward.
And still, it is not as if the rest of Canada didn’t face the threat of sickness and poor living conditions at that time as well.
The mortality rate of the Spanish flu is not exactly known, but as many as 100 million people died of it worldwide in the early 1900s — including some 50,000 Canadians. It is believed the mortality rate was somewhere around 2 per cent.
The horrific conditions of the time and the effects of a devastating Spanish flu certainly attributed to the mortality rate inside the residential school system. But as the Canadian Press notes, those schools would have worked as a breeding ground for flu and tuberculosis.
And those left dead were not the only ones left scarred from the system. There have been countless reports of abuse at the hands of teachers, not to mention the systematic attempt to “kill the Indian in the child.”
If anything positive is to come out of Monday's revelation, it could be that Canadians will finally pay attention to the failings of our past.
Marie Wilson, a commissioner with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, says Canadians have a blind spot when it comes to the residential school system.
Canadians have good hearts. We are the first to jump up to help in places like Haiti and other places around the world where there are tragedies. But we have been taught to be comfortably blind to need when it is in our midst.
By the time the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is finished, we might finally understand the scope of damage caused by the residential school system to our First Nations community.
Whatever the cost was, it cannot be summarized by a simple death count. But that doesn't mean the number can be ignored, either.
Germany in the 1930's had nothing on amerikkka today. Both in terms of what they are doing all over the planet, and the incredible amounts of propaganda put out to confuse and mislead people about the true nature of that country, and system they uphold today. Forests of trees have been cut down just to put out books about how horrible communism was, and how we are so much better off without a real alternative to capitalist/imperialism. And now, there seems to be movie after shitty movie about amerikkka's current wars, including how the use of torture is not a black and white thing, it is somehow more "complicated". The most recent piece of shit to come out whitewashing amerikkka is "Lincoln". In this garbage, they are trying to portray lincoln as a real emancipator, and not some scumbag who actually tried to preserve slavery up until he saw that it wasn't possible anymore. Fuck him, and read how the Comrades in the RCP call bullshit on this nonsense.
We Call Bullshit
4 Big Lies and the 1 Truth of Lincoln
by Toby O’Ryan | February 24, 2013 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
“There would be no United States as we now know it today without slavery. That is a simple and basic truth.”—Bob Avakian, BAsics 1:1
The Four Big Lies of Lincoln
1) The lie: Slavery was mainly ended through working within the political system.
The truth: it took a major war—a war that took more American lives than any other war in history—to settle the question.
2) The lie: Lincoln actually wanted to end slavery, but had to hide his sentiments in order to do so. Only by virtue of his clever tactics could slavery be ended.
The truth: Lincoln only opposed slavery very late in the game, and only when the choice that presented itself was abolition or defeat.
3) The lie: The Abolitionists (those favoring the immediate end of slavery) had to compromise to be effective.
The truth: The Abolitionists were able to polarize and repolarize the whole nation around this issue and actually create favorable conditions for the Civil War to end slavery,because, as a movement, they refused to compromise on questions of principle.
4) The lie: America’s history is one of solving, even if slowly at times, the “problem” of racial injustice.
The truth: America’s history, and present-day reality, is one of racism, constantly retrofitting itself in new forms. The U.S. system of capitalism has had a strong vein of white supremacy since its very beginning, and that vein is just as strong today.
And, correspondingly, there would be no American art and culture as we know it today without slavery, and the long shadow that it casts to the present day. More specifically, nearly every age has been marked by a major work on either slavery or the Civil War.
Now we have Lincoln, which aims to be the masterwork of thisgeneration on the subject. In actual fact, Lincoln is a piece of sugar-coated poison that obfuscates, or covers over, some essential truths about America. Not so much by blatant lies or inventions (though there are some crude distortions and inventions created by the screenwriter Tony Kushner), as by half-truths and misrepresentations. Taken together, these serve to get over a number of specific wrongconclusions, all in service of a larger upside-down view of the world—both then and now.
This is NOT harmless. This is a big part of how people’s views of what is true are formed and reinforced and because of that it has to be thoroughly taken apart. So, let’s walk this through.
War, Not Bourgeois Politicking, Ended Slavery
Lie Number One: The director Steven Spielberg and Kushner chose to focus Lincoln on the passage of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution that forbade slavery and enabled Congress to pass laws to enforce that ban. The movie does so in a way that makes Lincoln’s legislative maneuvering seem to be the decisive element in the abolition of slavery. And the prospect that this movie will very likely be quickly inserted into the curriculum of every middle-school student in the country as the unit on the Civil War (just as Spielberg’s Schindler’s List is the unit on the Nazi genocide against the Jews of Europe) means that this is what most people will take away as theessential way that slavery was abolished.
While the movie goes on and on in this vein, the actual WAR that had to be fought to end slavery has very little screen time. We see at the beginning a scene of a battle that lasts less than a minute, and then another very brief scene toward the end in which Lincoln views the piled-up corpses of a battlefield and mournfully says to the Union commander Ulysses Grant that they have done “terrible things.” “Terrible”? It has to be said that this scene does not portray atrocities or war crimes, but soldiers who died to defend a system, a “way of life,” a “heritage” that rested on the enslavement and torture and utter oppression of millions and millions of human beings, generation after generation. (There is a very obvious Confederate flag among the dead to make just that point.) And even more to the point, why were the truly terrible horrors of slavery—the wholesale kidnapping and murder of millions, the indescribable cruelties of the “seasoning process” where people were broken and conditioned to be slaves, the generations of heartless exploitation, the literal centuries of torture and wholesale rape, the forcible splitting up of families and sale of children, over and over—why were all these not even mentioned in Lincoln and why was the exposure of slavery limited to when Mary Lincoln’s dressmaker says that she was hit by a shovel when she was a small child and when Lincoln’s son insists on looking at pictures of slaves? Here, as in so many other ways, the clearly fictional movie Django Unchained was far, far truer than the supposedly historically “accurate” Lincoln—and note that Quentin Tarantino, who directed and wrote Django Unchained, has said that he only included one-tenth of the real horror of slavery, because he didn’t think an audience could take more.
Well, was the 13th Amendment decisive? No, it was not. The decisive political turning point in the war was when Lincoln was forced, both by circumstance and mass opinion, to issue the Emancipation Proclamation (which freed the slaves, though only in the states that were part of the Confederacy) and then, later, to allow black men to enlist in the Union Army. And the Emancipation Proclamation had nothing to do with Congress—Lincoln issued it by executive order, totally bypassing Congress. (More about the Emancipation Proclamation shortly.) The 13th Amendment codified in law what had been won on the battlefield. Because of this—something that Kushner himself mentioned in an interview with Charlie Rose, saying that in all the books he read, only one author really went into detail on the 13th Amendment—most historians just don’t spend that much time on it.
Despite this, Spielberg and Kushner have chosen to give the strong impression that the most decisive thing was the legislation passed very late in the game through Lincoln’s clever combination of arm-twisting, bribery, and compromise. In the world that Spielberg and Kushner invent, congressional dealing is the engine of profound change; in the world that actually exists, masses of people fighting, sacrificing, and dying was and is necessary for any real basic change.
Prettifying Lincoln’s Real Views on Slavery
Lie Number Two: Lincoln, the movie implies, was actually against slavery from the beginning, but he needed to conceal his views. This is implied in a pivotal scene where Lincoln calls in the radical representative Thaddeus Stevens to persuade Stevens to tone down his stand in order to pass the 13th Amendment.
There is more truth in the dog scene of Django Unchained than in all of Lincoln.
This scene is worth taking apart. Stevens lays out what he says will be the necessary program after the war to really break slavery and emancipate the slaves—the punishment of the southern leaders and slaveholders, the redistribution of land to the former slaves, the political empowerment of those ex-slaves, and the reinforcement of all that with armed occupation. He further says that the moral compass of white Americans has been hopelessly corrupted and corroded by slavery, and that the role of leaders is to LEAD—to not tail behind what people may want at any given moment. Lincoln demurs briefly on Stevens’ post-war program for Reconstruction, but then gives a pointed parable about while you do need a compass, a compass alone won’t tell you how to avoid swamps and other obstacles. The thrust and sense of this scene is that he and Stevens shared a common objective of ending slavery, but that Lincoln was pursuing this through wiser and more realistic means, and through a different kind of leadership to achieve the same end.
The truth is this: Lincoln’s political stance up until September 1862 was not for abolition of slavery, and not for the emancipation of the millions of black people held in bondage on hellish plantations. His position was opposition to the extension of slavery to new states outside the South while preserving slave relations within the South. During the first year and more of the Civil War, Lincoln continued to state that if the Union could be held together on the basis of continued slavery in the South, that would be fine with him; and that the purpose of the Civil War was NOT to free the slaves but to maintain the U.S. government as a single entity comprising both northern and southern states. And during this whole period, and again this extended all the way up until at least late 1862, Lincoln advocated that any blacks who were freed should be “resettled” in Africa.
This position was not just Lincoln’s, but corresponded to how the northern capitalists perceived their class interests at the time. The political representatives of these capitalists clashed with the representatives of the slave states on a whole range of issues. In brief, the capitalists wanted a unified national market within which to sell their goods, and wanted policies to protect that market and their infant industries from European competition; they wanted farming based on small-holding individual farmers which, at that time, was the most productive form of farming; and other things. The slaveholders, who depended on shipping raw materials like cotton, rice, and tobacco to Europe, did NOT want those things. They badly needed to expand the land available to agriculture using slaves, because that agriculture was NOT modern and tended to wear out the soil. Hence they opposed things like the “Homestead Act” (which gave free land west of the Mississippi—previously promised to Native Americans!—to small farmers), and the idea of a railway going from the Atlantic to the Pacific. (Both of these were passed in 1861, right after the war began.) And the slaveholders wanted to protect the deal struck in the Constitution that gave these slaveholders a virtual lock on some key institutions of political power. This led to increasingly bitter conflict in every sphere of life. But rather than shatter the power of the slaveholders, the capitalists sought to curb and gradually diminish their power, fearing the social upheaval that abolition could carry.
This only changed a year into the Civil War, when Lincoln—and again, the mainstream of the class he represented—realized that unless the U.S. government freed the slaves, there was a great danger that the war would be ended on slaveholder terms. By freeing the slaves, the North did three important things: they encouraged a massive movement of slaves running away from the southern plantations, badly crippling production; they made available a huge reserve of black soldiers, which they soon tapped and which proved crucial to the war; and they endowed the soldiers and civilians of the North with a moral mission. Still, it took another two-and-one-half years of grinding bloody war to crush the slaveholders.
As for Lincoln’s personal views, the best evidence seems to be that he found slavery personally distasteful but had very little love for black people. As noted, he favored “resettlement” of black people in Africa, and as late as August 1862, he recommended this to a group of free African-American leaders he met with—a meeting at which he also seemed to blame them for the war! The very good series on PBS, The Abolitionists, details this, as well as Lincoln’s actual stand on slavery. Far from being the “purest man in America,” as the movie claims Stevens called him, Lincoln’s morality, as on display in this 1862 meeting, was the reptilian calculation typical of capitalism, mixed in with white supremacist entitlement: “Who cares about justice? Since you former slaves might get in the way, why don’t you just get yourselves to Africa, where maybe we could use you to colonize other people?”
But Kushner won’t have this, either in his screenplay or his view of the world. Both in the movie and then in the interview with Charlie Rose, he explains away statements made by Lincoln throughout his life as political ploys to keep in line the states that kept slaves but did not leave the Union. In other words, according to Kushner, all this time Honest Abe was lying. There’s no proof for that position; all there really is, is Tony Kushner’s desire to project his own values and wishful thinking on to Lincoln.
Why go into this? Because wishful thinking about Lincoln is typical of all too many people beyond Tony Kushner and does great damage. Kushner, who at one time in his life took important progressive stands, now invokes this view of Lincoln and the logic behind it to defend and extol the war criminal Barack Obama, as he did in the Charlie Rose interview. The belief that Lincoln was motivated by dreams of emancipation—rather than what best served the interests of the capitalist class—allows people like Kushner, who has no small degree of privilege, to stay in a comfort zone where they don’t have to think too much about the great injustices that may have outraged them when young and where they don’t have to face what it really might take to deal with those injustices. Actually, the ways in which Kushner (and Spielberg, presumably) are using this movie to push a particular political line are pretty blatantly on display in this Rose interview—including at the end, when Kushner says that in his youth he was more drawn to revolution, but now he’s thinking that slow evolution may be more the way to go. Not to write off people like Kushner, but they need to come to grips with reality and stop deceiving themselves and others.
The Abolitionists: Standing on Principle, Fighting to Change the Terms
This leads us to Lie Number Three: “In order to emancipate the slaves, the radicals had to compromise their principles.” The climactic scene of the movie features Thaddeus Stevens giving a speech in the House of Representatives renouncing his long-held principle of full social equality for black people, in order to pass the 13th Amendment. (The amendment outlawed slavery and gave black people equality before the law—before that amendment, the official law of the U.S. was that black people had no rights that any white person was bound to respect (!)—but the 13th Amendment did not grant them the vote or other social and political rights.)
The abolitionists started out small. They refused to compromise their beliefs and came up against a lot of opposition and violence. But they stood on principle and they changed the whole nation. Above, Frederick Douglass talks with John Brown in a scene from the PBS TV series The Abolitionists.
This conveniently leaves out the most important fact about the abolitionists: for 30 years they refused to back down and refused to compromise on their views, fighting in many ways for the abolition of slavery, often losing their lives in the process. Indeed, they sought to continually escalate the struggle. But Stevens’ betrayal of principle—and the scene of his peaceful self-satisfaction at having done so—is necessary to make Lincoln the great hero of Spielberg’s and Kushner’s imaginations. Even if Stevens did this—and I haven’t been able to confirm it—this is a case of using one “outlier” fact to obscure a much greater truth. And again, people can and should watch the PBS series referred to earlier.
Lie Number Four: “There are still injustices in America, but Lincoln and the history of Black people generally shows that American democracy will make things better in the end.” Throughout the movie, there are rather crude nudges in the ribs to look back and see “how far we’ve come.” At one point, a black soldier tells Lincoln that soon there will be black officers and then black lieutenants and so on, while Lincoln smiles benignly. But what are the facts? Yes, there have been tremendous struggles and great sacrifices. The Civil War witnessed the deaths of 35,000 black soldiers, a casualty rate twice that of whites. But very quickly after the war—in the space of 10 years—black people were clamped into a different form of servitude: sharecropping and Jim Crow, enforced by Jim Crow terror. Following that, again through tremendous social, political, and economic upheaval, the masses of Black people migrated to cities—only once again to be put, in their masses, in the lowest part of the social order, super-exploited as wage workers, if they could find work at all. The civil rights and then the Black liberation struggles arose in response. And again, many sacrificed their lives, but the system, while rocked once more, was not shattered. Instead, there were a few concessions—and new, more twisted forms of oppression. So now we have a “new Jim Crow” of police brutality and murder, wholesale criminalization and mass incarceration, and legalized discrimination. How does any of this prove the illusion that Tony Kushner and Steven Spielberg are pushing in Lincoln?
While Spielberg and Kushner will probably win a lot of awards forLincoln, the only one they really deserve is the Golden Shovel for most bullshit in a single movie, domestic division.
Having said all that, there is one bit of truth in the giant vat of bullshit that is Lincoln. This is the notion that had Lincoln lived, he would have “gone easy” on the defeated southern slaveholders. This is shown when Lincoln, toward the end of the movie, says that he “wouldn’t mind” if Jefferson Davis, the leader of the Confederacy, was allowed to escape to another country, rather than face prison. In actual fact, this is not that far from what happened. Even though Davis himself ended up serving several years, almost all of the other Confederate officials served little or no time and returned to high positions of power.
To take one stark example that says everything: John Brown, the abolitionist who raided a federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, to seize guns and distribute them to slaves, was hanged within two months of the incident, as were the vast majority of his band. Robert E. Lee, who led the Confederate Army, was given high honors—and the movie makes a big point of showing how the Union Army allowed Lee to keep his sword (a big symbol of honor) when he surrendered and then tipped their hats to him as he rode away.
What is not shown in Lincoln is that after the surrender and following Lincoln’s assassination, the former slaveholders remained basically unrepentant and unleashed a reign of terror against the ex-slaves. The “radical” faction of the Republican Party, including Thaddeus Stevens, pushed through legislation that enabled Black people to vote and hold political office, as well as own land, and sent the army there to protect them. But in just a few short years, things shifted once again and it more suited the interests of the bourgeoisie overall to re-integrate their former slaveholding rivals into the ruling structures and to re-subjugate the former slaves in new forms. By 1876, the short period of Reconstruction had been betrayed and the new reign of Jim Crow, with all its horrors, was firmly implanted.
And here we have to say that this is a prime example of what all the “reaching across the aisle” and “seeking compromise” (with slaveholders!) gets you, what it can only get you, and what it hasalways been intended to get you: the same essential division into oppressor and oppressed, sometimes with slightly different content. And in the case of America, it gets you the same compact between different ruling class interests to preserve and update the institutions of white supremacy at the core of the U.S. capitalist system and social order—even if today a Black man presides over those institutions.
If the history of America proves anything, it is that this centuries-old injustice cannot be dealt with within the confines of this system; that revolution, and nothing less than revolution, is needed; and that anything else is bullshit.
We are all interconnected. Enough of this stupid, "We're pretty lucky to be living in canada, eh?", bullshit. No more crap about human rights in China, (or anywhere else, for that matter) when you insist on getting your garbage manufactured for as cheap as possible. You can't have it both ways. We all benefit from the poor human rights records in other countries. And for the record, the history of human rights ain't so rosy right here, either. Last I heard, trying to completely wipe out another nation's culture (and them, physically) is a crime.
When we are children, we are all told to go to the cops for help if we are in trouble. That is, until we turn 13 and are constantly treated as suspicious by these same motherfuckers. Well, this is one fucking lowlife who should be convicted, and then put in general prison population...
An Ottawa RCMP officer and his wife face a string of charges in a child abuse investigation, where sources say a child was shackled and cuffed.
Police sources tell the Sun a boy had run away from home, and the father suggested where the child would be, and was, found.
The child did not want to return home, sources say, and the father also told officers they would find marks on the child.
Neighbours say the couple had three children — two boys and a baby — and cruisers had been outside the home for several days earlier this week.
Ottawa police, who are conducting the investigation, say the man was arrested on Tuesday after an investigation at his home.
A patrol officer was responding to an Ottawa home, say police, but they declined to elaborate on the nature of the call.
Police also say there is more than one victim but won’t elaborate.
“Just given the sheer number and type of charges, it is a very serious investigation we’re conducting,” said Ottawa police acting Staff Sgt. Frank D’Aoust, with the sexual assault and child abuse section.
The RCMP is “aware of the allegations” and the Mountie was suspended, with pay, on Wednesday.
He has not been on active duty since May 2011 but RCMP Cpl. Lucy Shorey would not elaborate on what may have led to that, how long he has been on the force or what his role is.
An RCMP internal code of conduct investigation is also underway.
The 41-year-old man has been charged with three counts of aggravated assault, three counts of assault with a weapon, one count of aggravated sexual assault, one count of failing to provide the necessaries of life and one count of forcible confinement.
His 34-year-old wife faces similar charges except for the sex assault.
The Mountie’s face was covered with stubble and he bowed his shaved head as prosecutor Marie Dufort outlined the allegations against him.
He’s expected to appear in court Friday to be examined by a court psychiatrist before a bail hearing is scheduled.
His wife appeared minutes earlier wearing a puffy white coat trimmed with fur, her face framed by curly, shoulder-length dark hair.
She never spoke beyond saying her name but nodded that she understood the charges.
She will appear by video Friday.
The wife’s list of charges alleges she assaulted the boy with a wooden spoon.
The names of the accused are not being released to protect the identity of the victims.
These reports of the rcmp abusing, torturing, and sexually assaulting Aboriginal women comes as no surprise to me. Cops acting like macho frat boy racist misogynistic assholes? But how could this be? Give me a fucking break. And the only reason the pigs want the victims to come forward is so they can intimidate them into taking back their accusations against them in the first place. Fuck the rcmp.
RCMP accused of rape in report on B.C. aboriginal women
Force takes claims 'very seriously,' but stresses complainants must come forward
The RCMP says it wants to get to the bottom of abuse allegations against its officers in British Columbia involving aboriginal women and girls, but says individuals making the claims must come forward to allow police to conduct a proper investigation.
Those comments followed the release Wednesday of a report by New York-based Human Rights Watch detailing the claims — which include police threats, torture and sexual assault. The report calls on the federal government to launch a national inquiry.
Two researchers — one from Canada and one from the U.S. — spent five weeks last summer in the province’s north, visiting 10 communities between Prince George to Prince Rupert and hearing accounts from aboriginal women of alleged mistreatment at the hands of police.
First Nations communities they visited are all linked to B.C.'s so-called "Highway of Tears,"where 18 women have disappeared over the past several decades.
Meghan Rhoad, a U.S. researcher with Human Rights Watch, told reporters in Ottawa on Wednesday she is hopeful the RCMP will take the recommendations seriously.
"We met with the RCMP yesterday, and I am encouraged by the level of seriousness in how they are reviewing this report," Rhoad said.
RCMP Chief Supt. Janice Armstrong said in a statement released Wednesday the force is taking the allegations "very seriously," but added it needs more help to investigate further.
"In a written response to a series of questions posed by Human Rights Watch in fall 2012, the RCMP emphasized the seriousness of allegations of police misconduct and that these allegations must be brought forward for proper investigation.
"We also explained that complaints could be made to the RCMP directly, to the Commission of Public Complaints against the RCMP or to other independent investigative bodies without fear of retaliation."
The researchers interviewed 50 aboriginal women and girls, plus family members and service providers in northern B.C. They heard stories of police pepper-spraying and using Tasers on young aboriginal girls, and of women being strip-searched by male officers.
B.C.'s Highway 16 and a complex of routes linked to it have collectively come to be known as the Highway of Tears.(CBC)
“It was very moving to sit across from these women and girls and hear them tell their stories,” Rhoad told CBC News.
However, she told reporters that researchers found levels of fear among aboriginal women with negative stories about police "comparable to post-conflict situations, like post-war Iraq."
"We look to the police for protection, and our girls and women have not been able to trust them to protect them," said Sharon McIvor, who is with the Canadian Feminist Alliance for International Action and is a longtime advocate for aboriginal women.
"Not only are they not protecting them adequately, but they are perpetrating offences against them — criminal offences," she said.
"[The report] is not about painting all members of the RCMP as abusers," Rhoad said. "We know that the great majority of members serve honourably, devoting their lives to the protection of their communities.
"It is about the fact that those good officers deserve better than to see those tarnishing their reputation not be held accountable."
Woman claims life threatened
The report suggests some of the accounts of harm done to women and girls appear to be the result of poor policing tactics, over aggressive policing and insensitivity to victims.
Human Rights watch documented eight incidents of police physically assaulting or using "questionable" force against girls under 18.
The report also contains troubling and graphic allegations of physical and sexual abuse, including from a woman, identified as homeless, who describes how police took her outside of town and raped her.
Rhoad said the woman told her the officers then, "threatened that if I told anybody they would take me out to the mountains and kill me and make it look like an accident."
'Deeply fractured relationship'
Human Rights Watch said none of the complainants are named in the report because they feared retribution. The alleged perpetrators also are not named.
"What's important to know is that often the first response from the police to aboriginal girls is to treat them as criminals, whether they're calling for help, or whether they're just approached on the streets by police," said Annabel Webb, founder of the Vancouver group Justice for Girls.
Despite the RCMP's repeated requests, the group did not release the allegations to the Mounties until this week, CBC News has learned.
The disturbing report does bear some important disclaimers.
"Human Rights Watch does not contend that this information proves a pattern of routine systemic abuse," it says. "But when such incidents take place in the context of an already deeply fractured relationship with the police, they have a particularly harmful, negative impact."
The report also notes that, "the testimonies that Human Rights Watch gathered do not establish the prevalence of abuse."
Stories 'heart-wrenching, appalling'
The international human rights organization's report calls on the federal government to launch a national inquiry into the claims of abuse, and with the help of First Nations leaders, implement a national action plan to address violence against aboriginal women and girls.
Human Rights Watch recommends the province hold a public inquiry, which could be part of a national commission of inquiry or a standalone inquiry.
Shawn Atleo, national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, and Jody Wilson-Rayboud, AFN regional chief for B.C., are calling on both levels of government to implement the recommendations, with cooperation from indigenous communities.
“The stories shared in this report are heart-wrenching and absolutely appalling, particularly given this is only a small sample of the conditions and experiences of indigenous women, girls and families across our territories,” Atleo said in a statement.
Full RCMP statement
The RCMP takes the allegations enclosed in the Human Rights Watch Report very seriously.
The unimaginable loss and pain felt by families and loved ones of missing and murdered persons is also felt across our communities. The RCMP looks forward to working with our government and non-government partners, as well the communities we serve to provide Canadians with the professional and accountable police service they expect and deserve.
In a written response to a series of questions posed by Human Rights Watch in fall 2012, the RCMP emphasized the seriousness of allegations of police misconduct and that these allegations must be brought forward for proper investigation. We also explained that complaints could be made to the RCMP directly, to the Commission of Public Complaints against the RCMP or to other independent investigative bodies without fear of retaliation.
Unfortunately, five months later and none of these allegations have been brought forward for investigation. It is impossible to deal with such public and serious complaints when we have no method to determine who the victims or the accused are.
British Columbians know and have seen that police officers are being held accountable for their actions and are being charged and even dismissed for clearly breaching their authorities and our expectations.
Since a final copy of the completed report was only provided to the RCMP on Tuesday February 12, 2013, we will need to take the necessary time to review it in its entirety in order to provide any additional information, facts or context.
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B.C.'s Highway 16 and a complex of routes linked to it have collectively come to be known as the Highway of Tears.(CBC)