One of the biggest flaws in the major news media is its apparent allergy to important historical context. Past events that help explain complex present-day contours of wealth and power are either inconvenient or uninteresting to reporters and editors, often rushing to make deadline or publish something splashy that will grab readers and boost revenue.

Even the BBC, often seen as the premier international news channel, recently ran a series of stories along these lines. Correspondent Mike Thomson told the terrible story of child slavery in Haiti – told many times over in the Western media – with nary a mention of how slavery was established on this island. He embedded with UN peacekeeping patrols of Cite Soleil, portraying Haitians as uniformly grateful for their presence and neglecting to mention persistent accusations of abuse. His reporting focused on the arresting sights, smells, and personal stories of Haiti’s extreme poverty. Missing context, it’s hard to imagine his work informing viewers towards understanding and civic action more than simply depressing them.

Thankfully, it’s easier now more than ever to uncover and disseminate little known histories. I recently stumbled upon Vuvox.com, a free tool that allows anyone to construct a Flash-based collage of images. A few hours of Google Image searching, Photoshop work and re-reading later, here’s rudimentary pictoral outline of US policy towards Haiti in the past century – critical knowledge for anyone seeking a genuine understanding of Haiti’s problems and why the United States is entangled in them. I’d encourage folks to look through the books and articles cited below for more information. If you hear somebody ask, “What does the United States have to do with Haiti?” give them this link. It covers the basics.

Sources

For a succinct account of the US occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934, I’d suggest Dr. Paul Farmer’s The Uses of Haiti, first published by Common Courage Press in 1994, pages 78-79. Farmer, now the UN Deputy Special Envoy to Haiti (see my interview with him here), also describes in the latter half of the book the extermination of the Creole pig, increasing investment in Haiti during the Duvalier dictatorships, and the conditions agreed to by President Jean-Bertrand Aristide when he returned in 1994 after the first coup.

More on the disparate and cruel treatment of Haitian refugees in Chapter 5 of Let Haiti Live: Unjust US Policies Towards Its Oldest Neighbor, by Melinda Miles and Eugenia Charles, published by Educa Vision in 2004.

Matthew J. Smith’s Red & Black in Haiti: Radicalism, Conflict, and Political Change 1934-1957, out this year by University of North Carolina Press, includes detailed accounts of the failed SHADA rubber program during World War II and the ousting of Daniel Fignole that paved the way for Duvalier. The Eisenhower administration feared Fignole would be “another Arbenz,” the socialist-democrat President of Guatemala overthrown by the CIA just three years earlier. See Chapters 2 and 5.

The story of Aristide’s fall in 2004 is mired in a deep and bitter controversy. I find Dr. Farmer’s take on it, printed in the London Review of Books, to be generally persuasive; Peter Dailey’s letter in response outlines the opposing view. Also, Canadian journalist Claude Adams recently blogged about the minimum wage and textile industry in Haiti. My posts on Haiti over the past year are collected here.

It’s unfortunate that the Young Lords are not as well known among broader public as the Black Panthers. The group was arguably more progressive for its time. Patriarchy and other oppressions within the Young Lords started to break down quickly when members challenged those hierarchies inherited from society. The Lords had deep roots in and support from the “El Barrio” community.

Which makes the New York Lords’ sudden and swift decline all the more puzzling. Why did the group fall apart after just two years of success? What can radicals learn from the Young Lords?

I cannot find any audio or video from Sunday’s forum online, oddly, to help answer those questions. You can hear Democracy Now co-host and Lords co-founder Juan Gonzalez speak on his experience in this interview.

I attempted to answer the question posed above myself last year in a paper for a ‘Radical Social Movements’ class. I’m posting it online now, to share it with y’all and Google’s indexer. The paper is entitled “The Young Lords: Examining Its Deficit of Democracy and Decline. Read it here →

An opening summary paragraph is below, but consider reading the paper itself. It analyzes the Lords’ rise and fall in some detail.

The New York Young Lords broke under the weight of unrelenting police harassment and infiltration, compounded by a series of tactical missteps that ignored the main source of their strength – their support from the Puerto Rican urban poor. These communities were oppressed and ignored, rather than represented, by social institutions. The Young Lords stepped into that vacuum and restored a sense of pride and togetherness to “El Barrio” in East Harlem. But the leadership of the organization subsequently turned its focus away from the direct action campaigns that inspired unprecedented solidarity in the ghetto. The group’s paramilitary structure was over-dependent on the charisma and cooperation of a few leaders and failed to recognize the voices of the Young Lords’ rank and file members. An attempt to open a revolutionary front on the island of Puerto Rico proved to be a fatal mistake, spreading the organization too thin, diverting resources from community programs, and initiating an acrimonious factionalism in the leadership from which the Lords would not recover. With much of the original leadership resigned or exiled, a hardline Marxist clique took over the Lords and it disintegrated.

Link to full paper. Also see Vivirlatino’s reflection on the Young Lords Party and Democracy Now’s coverage.

What are the lessons of the Young Lords’ history in your opinion? Critiques of the paper? Hit me up in the comments.

On June 30, while I was on a mountain in Chile, one of the top 100 most-trafficked websites on the Internet was sold by a group of Swedish geeks to a corporation for $7.8 million. The Pirate Bay as we know it, under constant fire from governments and their patron corporations, is gone after almost six years of defiantly coordinating the sharing of data and culture on a massive scale among users from all over the planet. (Complete coverage at TorrentFreak.)

It’s not clear why the sale happened or what Peter Sunde and the rest of the crew will do now. But it likely had to do with the Bay’s founders being sentenced in April to a huge fines and jailtime. The presiding judge just happened to be a member of several traditional copyright lobbying and trade groups, it was revealed, but there will be no retrial.

So it’s worth revisiting Free and Open Software: Paradigm for a New Intellectual Commons, a talk given in March at Seattle University’s Law of the Commons Conference. The speaker was Eben Moglen, one-time Supreme Court law clerk, now Columbia University professor and award-winning director of the Software Freedom Law Center.

I watched Moglen’s talk a few weeks ago and was blown away. Speaking without notes, he comprehensively packages together a crucial set radical truths about power, technology and society in sixty minutes. Richard Stallman is better known, as the face and founder of the Free Software movement, but he’s an uninspiring (disgusting at times, actually) public figure. Let’s pay more attention to Moglen, who’s collaborated with Stallman over the years, from now on.

20 key points that stood out for me, without Moglen’s eloquence and context, are below. The video too.

Wikisource transcript

1. Until now, the most important reality and fundamental injustice in every human society was their wastage of human brains. The answer to “How many of the Einsteins who ever existed were permitted to learn physics?” is “almost none.”
2. The free software movement exists to address this problem. In digital form knowledge no longer has a non-zero marginal cost, i.e. whatever the initial cost of a piece of knowledge, infinite additional copies of that knowledge can be distributed without significant additional cost.
3. Put another way: “If you could make as much bread, or have as many fishes, as you needed to feed everyone, at the cost of the first loaf and the first fish plus a button press, what would be the morality for charging more for loaves and fishes than the poorest person could afford to pay?”
4. The goal is to eliminate ignorance, the deprivation of knowledge from vast swaths of humanity. The free software movement strives to prevent the embedding of biases and controls in networks at the invisible technical level through software.
5. The network is composed of pipes, merely moving the data from point A to point B, and switches. Switches are computers, running on code. Microsoft has always sought to monopolize the switches, which enable control of the network.
6. The key to maintaining a free, copyleft, and non-monopolized commons is to require that whatever is appropriated – copied, modified, etc. – is put back into the commons. Thus the GNU Public Use License and Creative Commons license family.
7. The results so far of the free software movement are promising. Free software is “embedded irrevocably” in all developed societies – not exclusively, but the powerful and well-funded monopolists cannot displace it.
8. Networks are a commons. Facebook and 3G cell phone networks are examples of faux commons controlled by benevolent autocrats who, through branding, try to remain invisible.
9. Google, with the new Google Voice, will give you free phone calls, thus upping the pressure on telecommunications corporations, but they’ll also track and data-mine all your communications, as they do with all their services.
10. Software aside, network services could be centralized and the data-miner, who wants good relations with governments and advertisers, may find some reason to not want every Einstein to learn physics.
11. Moglen doesn’t see advertisements when he surfs the net. If you use Firefox like him, you’re two clicks away from using Adblock. Moglen’s friends at the Mozilla Foundation are paid millions of dollars every year by Google not to bundle Adblock with every Firefox install. Getting the picture now?
12. “We’re a non-utopian political movement. . .The crucial operating premise of the free software movement as a revolutionary politic is: proof of concept, plus running code.” The movement is based on models that can be built now and demonstrated.
13. On Wikipedia: Wikipedia’s by-the-minute coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings was far superior to that of the major news media. And it has done a better job of preserving the Encyclopedia Britannica than the Encyclopedia Britannica, whose quality deteriorated as it was thinned down for mass consumption.
14. “If it takes a loan sharking thug like Carlos Slim to keep The New York Times in business, then something is wrong at The New York Times; it’s not our problem. A great deal of worry is presently being cast on the question of “How are we going to save newspapers?” with no real question being raised on the question of why we should.”
15. The oligarchic textbook publishers, too, are dying. Do-it-yourself book scanners with OCR will soon drive the nails into their coffins, and there will be zero public sympathy for their plight.
16. Part of the core strength of free software is that it has become indispensable to capitalists and the institutions of power (the extent to which system admins and servers worldwide rely on Linux).
17. The global recession is an opportunity: to point out the folly of centralizing ownership, to stress the need for sharing, to demonstrate a concrete alternative with, for example, a Linux distro on a USB thumb drive.
18. On Apple: “Nobody has yet fully documented what everybody who isn’t part of the cult understands, which is that nobody has ever had more contempt for customers than Mr. Jobs. Nobody.” Zing!
19. We need to realize, collectively, the extent to which the good things in life rest on the economy of the commons. If you use Youtube instead of your TV, or RSS feeds instead of the newspaper, inform your congressperson.
20. What will happen to investigative journalism without the old media? We’ll pay for it because we like it, with the middleman cut out.

When I say ‘radical technology truths’ in the title, that is not to literally endorse every point made above. But I think there’s a good chance each one of them approximates the truth. What do you think?

Re-published at Infoshop News.

Zinn spoke a few weeks ago at the 100th Anniversary of the Progressive Magazine. Speaking without notes, he proceeded to lay out a common-sense rebuttal to what passes for common sense in this country – the idea that the Revolutionary War, Civil War, and World War II were all necessary and just wars. Good wars, as many call them. It’s a talk that, like his book, fundamentally challenges the normative identity of America. Watch it here.

He does speak slowly. That might make the talk less accessible to some people, understandably. So if you’re pressed for time, listen to the edited version of the speech below. I shaved about 12 minutes of mostly dead air off the original recording and it moves along more quickly. But in this version you do miss Zinn’s wry humor, which is hilarious at times. Have a listen, and pass it on. Embed code here, mp3 here.