(Note to my
readers. This is the tenth year since
this newsletter first went into publication in 2011.)
BY NOW, everyone except political ingénues is aware that
voting restriction laws are either being considered, or have already been passed
into law, in 47 states. The purpose of
these laws is to make voting harder, to skew the voting demography in favor of white,
non-POC people, non-formerly incarcerated people, and against poor people,
disabled people, normally the demography that tends to vote Democratic in our
glorious rigged two-party electoral system.
Those of us who care are aware of this in all its grim and
grimy details, and I see little reason to add to the steaming pile. One thing stands out however, and that is the
deeper implications for the culture of this particular time in Earth’s political
history we like to refer to as Democracy, and more particularly, the byzantine
artifact we call American Democracy.
WHAT CAUGHT my attention in the recent Georgia law makes
provision that, despite sleet, snow, or broiling hot sun, no water or food may
be passed to anyone on the interminably long voter lines to ease their progress
towards those pearly gates known as the voting booth. “As everyone knows,” to
quote a Portside
article, “the long lines occur in the dense urban areas—Democratic
strongholds with large nonwhite populations.” But this very clause addresses
something even more fundamental than what people in this country obsessively
call “race.” (Full disclosure, there’s no such thing. Race is a construct
designed by people in power to back up their power.)
Such a law as Georgia’s strikes at a very fundamental
behavior which has characterized humans
for a very long time—before the arrival of the dread Columbus, for
example—among non-White people. It’s a
thing called “sharing.” The more one ventures into the cultures and the
histories of people world over who have either nothing (like the San of the
Kalihari, or Juwasi as they call themselves) or very little (like the Innuit of
the North) the more the behavior called sharing occurs.
Why does it occur? Is it a matter of doing the right thing?
Academics, people like anthropologists, may very well lend it interpretations
appropriate to literate, predominantly white cultures, but in that other world,
the real one, where people have nothing or very little, sharing is a
fundamental rule of survival. Among the
Ihalmiut (eskimos) for example, you borrowed what you needed. If you needed a gun to shoot caribou for the
next meal (and the next and all other meals were almost entirely caribou) you borrowed
a gun. It was understood that now you
had borrowed it, it was your gun, until such time as you might (or might not)
chose to return it. And you would certainly think nothing if anyone else who
hadn’t eaten in days borrowed it to shoot his and his family’s next dinner.
If a person was hungry, you gave him to eat, if a guest was
thirsty you gave him to drink. Sharing
even a glass of water (water, pure water, is less and less a thing to be taken
for granted) that precious water was the way of welcoming the guest. If someone
was needful of clothing or blankets in the freezing cold, you shared your
clothing and blankets because there might very well be a time, when you too
would be freezing, and that person—or someone else—might be there to recognize
your want and share with you the clothing or blankets that would save your
life. Call it sequential reciprocity.
And that is why the first White European settlers called the
Indians they encountered thieves, because the White Man for all his evident
superiority knew nothing of sharing, or communal property. For the White Man, borrowing was stealing.
And stealing was not only morally repugnant, but a good way to enslave persons guilty of the White Man’s
crime.
For me, being an apparently white person with indigenous
(Zapotec) blood, sharing food and drink on the punishing long voting queue is a
cultural sign. It speaks of a culture or cultures of people raised on the
notion of sharing, and these cultures happen
to be mostly those of non-white people.
Hence, these laws (along with such actions by the Border Patrol as slashing
bottles of water left in the desert for those making the dangerous trek to the
border) reveal at their very roots—way beyond their intent of voter
suppression—their cultural origins in white
settler colonialism. They are the manifestation of a cultural trend dating back
to where white Europeans originally come from. At last and only very recently, those origins have been
exposed genetically through the study of ancient bones. The required text is Who We Are and How We Got Here by David
Reich.
The book’s
revelations come with
the same import as Copernicus’s
discovery of the solar system.
The Root of Evil
Never, never in the course of the nearly ten years I have
been publishing this newsletter for my thousands of readers, never have I used
the word evil because the word, although frequently abused by many, properly inhabits
a philosophical level of discourse. I use it now to tell this story:
 |
Marija Gimbutas
|
At one time (we are talking of 8,000 – 3,000 BC) Europe (like
the New World) was inhabited by its own indigenous population. One prominent
archeologist, the late
Marija
Gimbutas, was first to refer to these indigenous populations as “Old
Europe.” They were hunter gatherers, who eventually came to practice very
limited agriculture, growing barley, millet, among other very elemental crops.
They were worshippers of the Mother Goddess, held all life sacred, espoused a
world view that the life cycle ends in rebirth, buried their folk equally
without fanfare, both men, women, and those in between. They were a peaceful
people, and no weapons or weaponry has been found in any of their burial sites.
In about 3,000 BC, so Gimbutas’s excavations in Eastern
Europe discovered, an invasion of steppe-origin people (the steppe being
located between the Caspian and Black Seas) invaded Europe. They were stockmen, keepers of animals, ever
on the move, looking for new grazing lands for their cattle. Their tribe is
known as the Yamnaya, and Marjia Gimbutas refers to them as “Kurgan” after their burial
mounds. It is those mounds containing their grave offerings she has heavily
investigated. Her many books consist of
laboriously illustrated artifacts she unearthed there, rendered in painstaking
detail, on which she based her claim that Kurgans brought 1) war 2)weaponry 3)
hierarchy 4) patriarchy 5) sky gods 6) a world view of a life cycle ending in death (not rebirth) and 7) their language,
proto Indo-European, from which all
European languages but four (Basque, Hungarian, Finnish, and Turkish)
originate. (Additionally they probably brought the plague being the first people
to eat and live among animals) and during the course of the next 1000 years
they would sweep across the face of Europe, killing and enslaving any
indigenous people in their way, creating a reign of terror throughout the European continent.
America’s white supremacist worldview: proto-Indo-European-derived language as conveyor belt
Here it is necessary to interrupt this horrific story for
some 4,400 years (until 1492) to take a look at the way language works.
Benjamin Whorf
was the first linguist to advance this view. His
one book is worth reading. Much of it will seem arcane to non-linguists, but there is
enough there to make the case that language is the vehicle for a people’s world
view as it is handed down through generations down the ages.
His approach was through study of
non-proto-Indo-European-derived languages such as Hopi and other native
American languages, untouched by proto-Indo-European. By contrasting the
grammatic structure of these languages he was able to extrapolate that they
bespoke entirely different world views. For example, by the use of gender and
animate syntax, he determined that Hopi people view clouds as animate, alive
beings, which bring rain, snow, hail and shade.
To this day, his work has been marginalized by academic
linguists who still refer to it as the Whorf “hypothesis.” The work of Marija
Gimbutas, has been similarly marginalized by her envious academic colleagues. (Full
disclosure: my work of non-fiction,
Apology to a Whale offers a full
accounting of this tandem archeologic-linguistic hypothesis.) Four years after
the publication of
Apology to a Whale,
the scientific corroboration of this hypothesis has now been confirmed
genetically with the publication of David Reich’s book,
Who We Are and How We Got Here.
Columbus sailed the ocean blue to extermination in 1492
Because the Kurgans lacked the technology that would carry
their invasion across the seas, Europeans had to wait till 1492 to spread their
joys westward with the slaughter and enslavement in the millions of indigenous
people inhabiting the New World. Yes, you say, but these “explorers” and “discoverers”
were White Europeans, not Kurgans. Indeed, but
those White Europeans of the 15th, 16th and 17th
centuries are the descendants of the Kurgans. Their DNA is stamped by the Kurgen Y
chromosome, and their languages, descended from proto-Indo European, perpetuate
the Kurgan worldview handed down through many generations of transmission, parent
to child.
Here our story comes to its bitter conclusion with the corroborating
work of geneticist David Reich of Harvard, whose marvelously equipped lab has carried
through research into the bones of our ancient ancestors stretching far back in
time into pre-history, where nothing exists to tell us what came before, only myths
orally transmitted, like the story of Cain the tiller of soil and Abel, the
keeper of sheep.
I quote from the New
Yorker article of December 14, 2020, “The Skeletons at the Lake” which
describes his genetic research in an easily accessible way:
“Reich led
a team of more than a hundred researchers who published a study in Science that examined the genomes of
some two hundred seventy ancient skeletons [highlighting those] from the
Iberian Peninsula….the DNA of Iberian skeletons…reveals what Reich describes as
the “genetic scar” of a foreign invasion….The local type of Y chromosome was
replaced by an entirely different type.., meaning that the local male line in
Iberia was essentially extinguished.
“It is
likely that the newcomers perpetuated a large-scale killing of local men, boys,
and possibly male infants….The full genetic sequencing, however, indicated that
about 60% of the lineage of the local population was passed on, which shows
that women were not killed, but almost certainly subjected to widespread sexual
coercion, and perhaps even mass rape. We can get a sense of this reign of
terror by thinking about what took place when the descendants of those ancient
Iberians sailed to the New World, producing human suffering on a grotesque
scale—war, mass murder, rape, slavery, genocide, starvation, and pandemic
disease.”
Conclusion
All white males of European origin (except the Basques. I
have no information about speakers of the other 3 non Indo-European derived
languages) bear the signature Y chromosome of the Kurgen Yamnaya. They carry
the Kurgan DNA in their bones, and (with the exception of Basque) their
original languages, descended from the Kurgan proto-Indo-European, carry the
message of the Kurgan-Yamnaya world view down to this day, a world view
inherited generation after generation from those original invaders of 3,000
B.C. foregrounding warfare, weaponry, hierarchy, patriarchy, misogyny, a life
cycle ending in death, and worship of a sky god.
Over a long lifetime of inquiry, I have nothing more to
add. Whether or not this turns out to be
the very last issue of this newsletter in my lifetime, I will have no need to
apologize to a whale or to anyone else.
Every one of these
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to war.
Urge
your reps to convert swords into plough shares: ICBMs into universal coronavirus
vaccine.
Say
you’re down: while millions of Americans are living in tents, hungry, dealing
with despair by dying of opioids, time to stop investing in bombs and drones
and killing everything that lives.
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Prevent
PGE executives rewarding themselves, doubling their salaries after killing over
100 Californians thru criminal negligence.
Extinction Rebellion environmental activists break windows
at Barclay’s Long HQ:
signs” “In case of climate emergency, break glass.”
250 groups urge WTO chief to ditch patent-friendly approach
and embrace vaccine patent waiver.
Opposition wins elections in Greenland, casting c=doubt on
future of rare-earth mine
Network of Defense Of Humanity rejects aggressions by armed
groups in Colombia crossing into Venezuela
Farmers block expressway in Indian State of Haryana to
protest against farm laws
IMF’s planned special drawing rights allocation called a
good first step by CEPR co-director.
Pentagon orders “immediate actions” to tackle extremism in
armed forces.
36 groups to Biden and Congress: reduce oversized Pentagon
request
Afghanistan: Biden pledges to end nation’s longest war yet,
by 9/11 after decades of bloodshed and destruction.
As Biden pledges $20 billion to dismantle highways separating
their communities, racial justice advocates cautiously celebrate
Biden creates commission to study Supreme Court expansion,
other reforms
New bill would add four seats to Supreme Court, to combat
right-wing assault on Democracy
Biden’s spending proposal provides historical investments in
public education
Biden budget seeks aid for unaccompanied kids, backlog of
asylum applications, no new cash for mediaeval wall
Coalition tells Biden White House any further fossil fuel
projects incompatible with Paris goals.
Coalition calls for ban on private, corporate use of racial
recognition as “too dangerous to exist.”
Federal court ends #45 effort to open 128 million acres of
Atlantic, Arctic Oceans to drilling.
Stating goal of making change permanent FDA lifts abortion
pill restriction during pandemic
Agencies working with federal government resettling refugees
had welcomed Biden’s pledge to restore admission numbers to 125,000 but admit their work is
cut out for them.
Sen. Chris Hollen and Rep. Joe Courtney introduce bill to
stop the U.S. from pouring an absurd amount of money into its nuclear arsenal
Sen Markey and Rep. Khanna introduce bill curtailing current
plans to sink $$ in new ICBMs, reallocating sums into developing universal
coronavirus vaccine.
Gillibrand and AOC call on congress to help rebuild USPS
with postal banking pilot programs.
Sanders and Omar unveil bill to end absurd corporate
handouts to fossil fuel industry
Sanders, Senate Dems call on Biden to support COVID vaccine
patent waiver at WTO
D.C. statehood bill on the move in the House with committee
markup scheduled for the 14th
Jayapal, House Dems propose constitutional amendment ending
corporate personhood.
Jayapal calls for crackdown on wealthiest after IRS chief
says tax evasion costs U.S. $1 trillion
a year.
House committee advances bill preventing a future presdent
from enacting another Muslim ban
Yellen calls for global minimum tax on corporations to end
390 year race to bottom.
Iowa nears 60% of power from wind turbines
Interior Department to reconvene council on Native American
issues
Sec. Haaland secretarial orders help restore integrity to
Interior, U.S. leadership on climate.
Bill poised to make Native American history required
teaching in N. Dakota schools.
Indigenous group launches campaign against new voting bills
Four Anishinawbe grandmothers walk cross country carrying sea
water from four cardinal points in Machias,
Maine, Gulfport, MI, Olympia, WA, and Churchill, Manitoba to reassemble later
at Wisconsin lake.
Virginia passes first-ever state-level voting rights act
Apple Studios takes on peace state, exits Georgia production
citing voter suppression law.
Colorado’s independent redistricting commission removes its
chairman for posts on election rigging and coronavirus.
Voting rights groups across country condemn state-level
voter suppression, urge Senate passage of For the People Acct.
After 23 days of fasting, Ana Ramirez and her fellow hunger
strikers win after N.Y. State lawmakers announce agreement on historical $2.1
billion in pandemic relief for excluded essential workers, many of them
undocumented immigrants.
Alabama miners reject tentative agreement, continue strike.
Union to file charges against Amazon over blatantly illegal
conduct in Bessemer election
Movement to end “at-will” employment gets serious
Ain’t gonna take it no more: truck drivers and workers
strike at So Cal ports
Union members expel national guard from St. Paul Minnesota
Labor Center
Self emancipation continues to rise at the St. Louis City
“Justice” Center.
Climate groups cheer Keep it in the Ground Act of 2021.
Citing climate and investment risks N.Y. State fund to ditch tar sands
New study claims all new U.S. car and truck sales can be
electric by 2035
Progressive Charles Booker considers Senate run
Protests erupt after cops lynch yet another back man during Minneapolis traffic stop
Minnespota lynching officer surrenders, faces second-degree
manslaughter charge in Daunte Wright murder
Virginia cop-goon who pepper sprayed army officer fired
after damning video released.
Veteran officer wo=ho stopped white officer from brutalizing
Black suspect wins pension after 13 years
CDC releases statement recognizing structural racism as the
public health threat it is, outline steps they are taking to address it
Maryland repeals police bill of rights, enacts historic
accountability measures
New Mexico second state to ban qualified immunity
