Cockburn
/ St. Clair's Scorching New History of a Decade of War
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Today's
Stories
June
12 / 13, 2004
Peter
Linebaugh
Remembering the Common Hood: Soweto
and Runnymede
June
11, 2004
Alexander
Cockburn
Reagan in Truth and Fiction
Ron
Jacobs
Ray Charles' Legacy of Spirit
Chris
Floyd
Funeral Games
Steven
Sherman
How Reagan Destroyed the Democrats and Paved the Way for Clinton
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
Remembering Reagan
Norman
Solomon
Media's Mourning in America
Paul
Alexander
The Kerry Fantasies of Chalmers Johnson
CounterPunch
Wire
The Terror Hour: Miami TV Station Invites Commandoes to Talk
About Planned Attacks on Cuba
June
10, 2004
Noam
Chomsky
The Apotheosis of Reagan : Divinity
Through Marketing
Gary
Leupp
Bush, the Religious Scholar
Patrick
Cockburn
The Iraqi Street Has Spoken: New
Govt. Made Up of CIA Pawns
Saul
Landau
Force-Feeding Lies About Free Trade
Scott
Evans
Settling for the System: How Punkvoter.com Became Just Another
Tool of the Democrats
Jacob
Levich
John Kerry's World of Hurt: Senator Supports Beam Weapons
Zeynep
Toufe
Reagan, Neo-Cons and the "Intelligence Failures"
Nico
Pitney
Reform at Wal-Mart?
Dave
Zirin
Son of a Reagan: What a Sporty 6-Year Old Saw at the Revolution
Jack
McCarthy
Where Were You When Reagan Croaked?
Gary
Corseri
Nouns That Should be Acronyms
David
Price
Reagan and the Black Budget
Website
of the Day
Inequality by the Numbers
June
9, 2004
Mustafa
Barghouthi
Israel's Common Use of Torture
Must be Exposed
Mike
Whitney
Alan Dershowitz, Still Defending
Torture
John
Chuckman
Why the CIA will Always be a Costly Flop
Jim
Tarbell / Roger Burbach
Bush's Democratic Charade in Iraq
Dave
Lindorff
Put Reagan on the $3 Bill
Miguel
D'Escoto
Reagan was the Butcher of My People
Becky
Burgwin
The Betrayal of Smarty Jones: Flogging a Natural Born Hero
Patrick
Cockburn
The Rich Have Been Warned to Leave
Baghdad
June
8, 2004
Jeffrey
St. Clair
The Nature of Ronald Reagan: Will
the Earth Accept His Corpse?
Dave
Lindorff
The March on Rumsfeld's House: Is
the US Anti-War Movement Running Out of Steam?
Phillip
Cryan
Torture, Bombings & the Press in
Colombia
Mark
Zepezauer
Getting Reagan Wrong
Mickey
Z.
Reagan, Radicals and Repetitive Reactions
John
L. Hess
Reagan and Bush in Normandy
Alex
Dawoody
Reagan and Saddam: the Unholy Alliance
Christopher
Fons
Reagan in a Word: Mean
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
Some Tenets are More Important Than Others
Ahmed
Bouzid
Nothing New Under the Israeli Sun
Michael
Leon
Bush the Narcissist
June
7, 2004
Jason
Leopold
New Enron Docs Show Lay and Skilling
Knew of California Trading Schemes
Patrick
Cockburn
The Baghdad Bombings: the Pattern
of Attacks is Changing
Dennis
Hans
From Afghanistan to El Salvador: Reagan's
Dark Global Legacy
Tracy
McLellan
Nader at the National Press Club:
a Glimpse at a Different Kind of Politics
Bill
Blum
The Myth of the Gipper: Reagan Didn't
End the Cold War
Ben
Tripp
What I Owe Reagan: the Brylcreemed
Bullshitter
Susan
Davis
Reagan, In a Nutshell
Phil
Gasper
Reagan: Goodbye and Good Riddance
Website
of the Day
A Child's ABCs of Terrorism
June
5 / 6, 2004
C.
Douglas Lummis
Toward a Universal Declaration of
Human Wrongs
Saul
Landau
Five Cubans in Prison, Victims of Bush's Obsession
Dave
Lindorff
John Walker Lindh, Revisited
Brian
Cloughley
Apologies, Please, From Those Who Got It Wrong
Rich
Gibson
The Grenada 17: the Last Prisoners of the Cold War are Black
Elaine
Cassel
A Sorry FBI
Cathrin
Schütz
On the Ruins of Yugoslavia
Ben
Tripp
Call Me, Mr. Cassandra
Kurt
Nimmo
The Madness of King George
Ron
Jacobs
They Ain't Goin' Nowhere (Unless We Make It So)
Laura
Flanders
The Lynne Cheney Show?
Lenni
Brenner
Renaissance Noir: Caravaggio at the Met
Abigail
Jones
Whatever Happened to Lori Berenson, President Toledo's Trophy
Prisoner?
Mark
Latham
Nothing Bush Said Has Changed Our Hopes
Gerry
Adams
I Was Photographed While Tortured, Too
Toni
Solo
Venezuela 2004, Nicaragua's Contra War Reprised
Derek
Seidman
Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old
M.
Junaid Alam
Torture is Just the Symptom
Matt
Siegfried
An American Way of War
Dave
Zirin
The Politics of Charles Barkley
Poets'
Basement
Albert, Krieger, St. Clair
Website
of the Weekend
Overnight Sensations
June
4, 2004
Chris
Floyd
Masked and Anonymous: Inside America's
Animal House
Cornwell
/ Penketh
Exit Tenet: the Fall of a Fall Guy
Wayne
Madsen
Apprehension & Frustation: Neo-Cons on the Brink
Greg
Moses
Agitating for Workers' Rights in Iraq
Yitzak
Laor
Before Rafah
Ghali
Hassan
Ambassador to Death Squads: Who is Negroponte?
Jane
Stillwater
God, the Rapture and Vera Casey
CounterPunch
Wire
D-Day Reconsidered: Was It Really Worth the Carnage?
John
Borowski
Woo-Wooism v. Meteorites: Why the Dems Are No Match for Bush
Mike
Griffin
Caterpillar's Assault on the UAW
Alexander Cockburn
Has Bush Gone Over the Edge?
Website
of the Day
Aquae Urbis Romae:
Water and Empire
June
3, 2004
Ron
Jacobs
Iran's Nuclear Dilemma
Dr.
Susan Block
America in tha Hood
Michael
Donnelly
The Bully and the Brahmin
John
Chuckman
Insanity in America: US Ranks Number
One in the Deranged
Christopher
Brauchli
The Return of Cardinal Law: Rome
on $12,000 a Month
Samia
Nassar Melki
Caravaggio in Iraq
Mike
Whitney
Subverting Justice: Pre-Trial Ruminations in the Padilla Case
Diane
Rejman
Memorial Day Isn't Just About the Dead
Scott
Morris
"WMDs" in Cuba
Paul
de Rooij
Palestinian Misery in Perspective
June
2, 2004
Brian
Cloughley
The Liars are Winning
Ray
McGovern
How Far Would They Go? Beware "Credible
Intelligence"
Josh
Frank
The Anybody But Bush Offensive
Mike
Whitney
The Afghanistan Failure: Bush's Warlord Patriots
Jackie
Corr
Iraq and Ireland: Three Tales from Butte, Montana
Robert
Jensen
The US Lost the Iraq War...and It's a Good Thing, Too
Alexander
Cockburn
"Bye, Bye Boonville!"
June
1, 2004
Gary
Leupp
Instant Karma: Bush's Sins Catch Up
with Him
William
A. Cook
Manufacturers of Fear and Loathing in
Rafah
Dave
Lindorff
Will the Times Clean House?
Kevin
Zeese
Inside the Kerry / Nader Meeting: Did
the Kerry Campaign Lie About What Was Discussed?
Jacob
Levich
Coming Soon: Return of the Draft,
a Bipartisan Production
Kathy
Kelly
Voices in the Wilderness v. the US
Government
Website
of the Day
Remind Us
May
29 / 31, 2004
Lee
Ballinger / Dave Marsh
The Origins of Memorial Day
Janine
Pommy Vega
Memo for Memorial Day
Mike
Ferner
On Their Way to Abu Ghraib
Alfred
W. McCoy
The Cruel Shadow: the Long History of CIA Torture Research
Douglas
Valentine
An Open Letter to the NYT: Questions, Questions, Questions
Chris
White
First to Fight Culture: a Former Marine on the Marine Motto
Bruce
Anderson
The Awful Injustice to Tai Abreu
David
Vest
Get Ready for Kerry's War: the 100 Year Quagmire
Saul
Landau
Torture: the Logical Outcome of Bush's War for Democracy?
Kurt
Nimmo
Abu Hamza al-Mazri, Made in the USA
Elaine
Cassel
The Secrets of Surveillance: Ashcroft, Snoops, and Gag Orders
Will
Potter
The New War on "Terror": Protest the Torture of Chimps;
Get Arrested as a "Terrorist"
Ben
Tripp
They Fiddled While Nero Got the Matches
Dr.
Susan Block
Save Abu Ghraib!
Kia
Kojouri
Nukes, the US, Israel and Iran: an
Interview with Sasan Fayazmanesh
Mickey
Z
D-Day: 60 Years is Enough!
Jon
Brown
Correcting the Correction at the Times
Patrick
B. Barr
Pre-emptive War Insurance
Stephen
Gowans
Bad Apples in a Bad Barrel
Tom
Gorman
Gore on Bush in Iraq: the Approach May be Exotic, But It's Hardly
New
Dave
Zirin
Fighting for Boxers' Rights: an Interview with Eddie Mustafa
Muhammad
Gregory
Weiher
Bush to Arabs: "Go Get Yourself Some Democracy"
Erik
Cummings
Jung Meets Bush
Poets'
Basement
Davies, Ford, Kearney, McLellan and Albert
May
28, 2004
Rafael
Rodriguez Cruz
Curtain of Silence on the Cuban 5
Greg
Moses
Bush's Misleading Speech on Abu Ghraib
Dave
Lindorff
Dissing Independent Contractors:
Those Who Do the Dirty Work
Norman
Solomon
Leaping for Lies at the Times
Rep.
Bill Delahunt
Bush's Cruel New Rules on Cuba
Paul
McGeough
Chalabi Baba and the 40 Thieves
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
India and Nehru: 40 Years After
Alexander
Cockburn
NYTs: "Maybe We Did Screw Up...a
Little"
May
27, 2004
Amy
Goodman / David Goodman
Fatal Errors: the Lies of Our Times
Douglas
Valentine
Ragging the Dogs of War at the
NYTs
John
L. Hess
The Times Confesses...Kind Of
Stew
Albert
Dellinger, the Wrestling Pacifist
Dave
Dellinger
a 1993 Interview
Christopher
Brauchli
Tax Breaks for Scions...to Hell with Poor Kids
Rampton
/ Stauber
Banana Republicans: Pumping Irony
May
26, 2004
Ron
Jacobs
Goodbye, David Dellinger: He Was a
Friend of Ours
Robert
Fisk
The Things Bush Didn't Say in His Speech
Zeynep
Toufe
New Draft UN Resolution Permits Perpetual Occupation
Conn
Hallinan
Bush and Sharon: the Oil Connection
Tom
Stephens
2 + 2 is On My Mind: More Morons
and War Crimes
Derek
Medley
Protesting Gov. Bigot
CounterPunch
Wire
FBI Abducts Artist; Seizes Art
Andrew
Cockburn
The Trail to Tehran
May
25, 2004
Joe
Bageant
The Covert Kingdom: On Earth as It
is in Texas
Col.
Dan Smith
A Question of Human Dignity
Gary
Handschumacher
Visiting Lori Berenson: Time to Bring Her Home
Toni
Solo
A Developing War in the Andes
Marc
Estrin
September Song: Disturbing Questions
About 9/11
Stephen
Banko, III
A Vietnam Vet on "Supporting the
Troops"
Website
of the Day
The Wizard of Whimsy
May
24, 2004
Ron
Jacobs
Dan Senor is Safe!
Kurt
Nimmo
Dirty Tricks & TortureGate: the
Missing Taguba Pages
Sam
Hamod
Gen. Zinni: "Wrong War, Wrong
Place, Wrong Time"
Mike
Whitney
The Wedding was a Bomb
Stan
Goff
Open Season on MAMs
Image
of the Day
A Photo from Abu Ghraib We Didn't See on the Front Page of the
NYTs
May
22 / 23, 2004
Paul
de Rooij
Colin Powell, a Political Obituary
Jeffrey
St. Clair
When War is Swell: Bush and the Carlyle Group
Elizabeth
Weill-Greenberg
Her Son Was Told He Wouldn't See Combat; Now He's Dead: an Interview
with Sue Niederer
Brian
Cloughley
America is Committing War Crimes in Iraq
Saul
Landau
Democracy in Latin America: Great for Investors; Not So Good
for People
Brandy
Baker
Feminists Stand By Their Man: Abortion, Judges and Kerry
Randall
Robinson
Bushwhacked in the Caribbean
Uri
Avnery
The Rape of Rafah
Ben
Tripp
Assume the Worst
Bruce
Anderson
News from Ecotopia: the Truth About the Wine Business
Josh
Ruebner
Why I Burned My Israeli Military Papers
Peter
Wolson, Ph. D.
Exhibitionistic Revenge at Abu Ghraib
Chloe
Cockburn
In Defense of "Troy": What Hector Could Teach Rummy
Linda
Burnham
Sexual Domination in Uniform: an American Value
Adrien
Rain Burke
War of the Necrophiliacs: Spc. Sabrina Harman and Her Corpse
David
Krieger
Charting a New Course for US Nuclear Policy
Ron
Jacobs
Turnaround
Poets'
Basement
Ford, Albert & LaMorticella
May 21, 2004
Ray
Close
The Canards of the Apologists
Christopher
Brauchli
"The Object of Torture is Torture"
Amira
Hass
Darkness at Noon
Jack
McCarthy
Camilo Mejia: Can the Son of a Sandinista Get a Fair Trial from
the US Army?
Bill
Kauffman
Nader v. Bush
Omar
Barghouti
No More Tears for America
Ghali
Hassan
Moral Failure of the "Free World" in Gaza
Christopher
Reed
How the CIA Taught the Portuguese to
Torture
Website
of the Day
Eric Idle on the Bush Administration: Fuck You, So Very Much
May
20, 2004
Andrew
Cockburn
The Truth About Chalabi
Kathy
Kelly
A Visit from the FBI
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
Brown and Bored of Education in India
Tom
Stephens & John Philo
The War Crimes of Bush, Cheney & Co.
Sam
Bahour / Michael Dahan
Genocide by Public Policy
Robert
Ovetz
Ending the Race for the Last Turtle
Billy
Wilson
The Most Important Thing I Learned at School This Year
Website
of the Day
Rafah Today
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante
Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click
Here for More Stories.
|
Weekend
Edition
June 12 / 13, 2004
Remembering
the Common Hood
Soweto
and Runnymede
By
PETER LINEBAUGH
I flew from Detroit, with one stop,
to the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg to participate
in an international conference, The Promise of Freedom and its
Practice: Global Perspectives on South Africa's Decade of Democracy.
I arrived on the heels of students
protesting the cut in university 'bursaries' forcing many to
terminate their studies, especially the poorer students. When
the university responded by calling in armed police, helicopters,
and 'bouncers' from neighborhood gangs, some faculty remonstrated,
"this seems very much like Bantu education in a different
guise," they wrote the Vice Chancellor, alluding to the
apartheid system of education that prevailed during the third
quarter of the 20th century. The difference now is that the IMF-imposed
cutbacks, unlike apartheid, are truly pan-African, whose effect
is the destruction of the independent university in the mother
continent as a whole. (The Committee for Academic Freedom in
Africa has been ringing this alarm for years.)
During a break in the conference
I strolled down the hill from Wits (as they call the university),
across Mandela Bridge, over the railway tracks (O so many!) and
mini-bus yards, down the African street with its hawkers, colors,
and fragrances, in order to meet the comrades of the Anti-Privatization
Forum, the Landless People's Movement, Jubilee South Africa,
and the Indymedia Center who were gathering at the Worker's Library
in an anti-war coalition. They were to be evicted at the end
of the month from that venue by the Johannesburg city council.
Molefi of the Education Rights
Project explained that the anniversary of the Soweto student
uprising on 16 June 1976 had ceased to be a day of resistance,
and, under the new dispensation, had become a day of reconciliation
named National Youth Day. Meanwhile, the bursaries are revoked,
and the financial squeeze is even tighter in secondary and primary
schools. The door to education is closing for the poor, despite
the fact that the Freedom Charter, or Kliptown Charter of 1955,
declared The Doors of Learning and Culture Shall Be Opened!
The verb tense (found in the
Bill of Rights or the Decalogue) we can call the noble intentional
future rather than the mechanical temporal future, though there
are powerful forces that would put the promise of free, equal,
universal  education
into the past tense. "All the cultural treasures of mankind
shall be open to all by free exchange of books, ideas and contact
with other lands."
"Look," I said to
Molefi, "Magna Carta was sealed on about the same day of
the month as the Soweto uprising began, 15 June 1215." "But
what have they to do with each other?" What, indeed! In
my case they were two stops on a journey. They share something
else--a notion of the commons.
The 16 June 1976 uprising began
in Soweto, "the mother city of black urban South Africa,"
in Mandela's words. Phil Bonner and Lauren Segal of Wits History
Workshop show how Hector Peterson was shot dead that day, with
many hundred of others. "Don't Start the Revolution without
Us" said a placard in another city. "The blood of the
martyrs water the tree of the revolution," said the militants.
The Soweto uprising began with school children going on strike
against the government order that the language of instruction
become Afrikaans. One thing led to another, and by a mighty heave
of the planet, by a combination of cultural politics and people's
war, the children invented toyi-toyi, and Mandela was released
from prison, apartheid came crashing down. In fact it is the
source of a vigorous debate, of memories and counter-memories.
As a leader of the African
National Congress, and its armed organization, Umkhonto we Sizwe,
Nelson Mandela was sentenced to life imprisonment at the Rivonia
trial of 1964. The trial helped to destroy the power of the internal
resistance to apartheid and the years of exile began. He spoke
for four hours from the dock, saying in part, "The Magna
Carta, the Petition of Rights, and the Bill of Rights, are documents
which are held in veneration by democrats throughout the world."
Mandela was attracted "by
the idea of a classless society, an attraction which springs
in part from Marxist reading and, in part, from my admiration
of the structure and organization of early African societies
in this country. The land, then the main means of production,
belonged to the tribe. There were no rich or poor and there was
no exploitation." Earlier in 1964 he said that "in
such a society are contained the seeds of revolutionary democracy
in which none will be held in slavery or servitude, and in which
poverty, want, and insecurity shall be no more. It is the inspiration
which, even today, inspires me and my colleagues in our political
struggle." Thus he acknowledges the groundation of the African
commons.
Sifiso Mxolisi Ndlovu was a
Form Two student at Phefeni Junior Secondary School (PJSS ) in
1976. He remembers that they had been on a go-slow from March;
they heaped the Afrikaans text-books in front of the principal's
door. They boycotted classes, and sent emissaries to other schools,
including the more celebrated Morris Isaacson High School whose
student leaders were affliliated with various liberation organizations,
including Black Consciousness. But in its origins the younger
students at Phefeni were the vanguard. They imagined something
easy-going "whereby female students will wear our trousers
or their fathers' trousers and we will wear our sisters' dresses--it
would be like a Guy Fawkes thing" It was an English idiom
of treason and carnival combined. The placards of the 16 June
in front of ten thousand students said simply "O Hell with
Afrikaans." Steve Biko explained that hell was part of European
theology not African.
"In putting forward my
counter-memories as a 14-year-old Form Two student at PJSS in
Soweto I argue that it is these students themselves who were
the actual champions of their own struggles, and very young students
indeed." Commemoration is a contested activity in the creation
of the social imagination. This practice involves a process of
self-criticism and a renewal of identity. Therefore possibilities
are opened for change in the basic terms of reference ."
Yes, I think that he is right and we must do the same with Magna
Carta.
Steven Biko was the guiding
figure in the Black Consciousness Movement which arose after
the banning of the black political parties in 1964. Biko's greatest
essay was "Black Consciousness and the Quest for a True
Humanity." "Black consciousness would be irrelevant
in a colourless and non-exploitative egalitarian society."
Even the liberals "see blacks as additional levers to some
complicated industrial machines. This is white man's integration--an
integration based on exploitative values in which the poor will
grow poorer and the rich richer in a country where the poor have
always been black." "The most potent weapon in the
hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed." "As
people existing in a continuous struggle for truth, we have to
examine and question old concepts, values and systems."
"All people shall have
equal right to use their own languages, and to develop their
own folk culture and customs," said the Kliptown Charter.
Ngugi wa Thiong'o wrote an essay Moving the Center: The Struggle
for Cultural Freedoms "this literature was celebrating the
right to name the world." The center was moving from Europe.
" The history of struggle is maintained by the people's
songs, poems, stories, anecdotes, remembrances, he wrote.
Bantu education said history
began with the white invasion of 1652. The imperialists propagated
the 'return to the bush' concept, where 'bush' equaled savagery.
"A people without a positive history is like a vehicle without
an engine." "Thus a lot of attention has to be paid
to our history if we as blacks want to aid each other in our
coming into consciousness."
Biko praises the culture of
workers and peasants. The love of communication and the widespread
intimacy of social relations arose at first from the village
and then from the township. African songs are group songs. In
the village community "there was no such thing as individual
land ownership. The land belonged to the people. Farming was
based on joint efforts and shared labor; exchange was based on
reciprocity and mutualism. A culture of defiance,  self-assertion, and group
pride and solidarity grew. "We believe that in the long
run the special contribution to the world by Africa will be in
this field of human relationship." That contribution has
its dependence on the African commons, a material substratum.
Biko looked positively upon
the Kliptown Charter, or the People's Charter of 1955. In 1955
a congress of the people met at Kliptown, "a multiracial
village on a scrap of veld a few miles southwest of Johannesburg."
The Charter was read aloud in English, Sesotho, and Xhosa. The
people have been robbed of their birthright to land, liberty,
and peace. "The People Shall Govern!" it exclaims.
The national wealth shall be restored to the people. The land
shall be redivided amongst those who work it. I emphasize the
notion of reparations that are entailed in the charter, expressed
here once again in the tense of grammatical nobility.
Steven Biko was imprisoned
incommunicado. He was kept naked and manacled. What became clear
in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is that his torturers
had received a signal from their superiors. Biko was killed in
September 1977 during interrogation. In 1996 Captain Jeffrey
Benzien demonstrated to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission
how to use the wet bag as a suffocating hood to torture prisoners.
For the first time white South Africans witnessed on their TVs
the routine torture of prisoners.
There is a dim memory that
habeas corpus, the rule of law, the prohibition of torture, and
trial by jury have found their origin in chapter 39 of the 63
chapters of the 'Great Charter.' Until 1215 innocence or guilt
was determined by trial by fire and water; afterwards trial by
jury--"lawful judgment of his peers"--replaced the
tortures as a means of discovery of truth. This is part of the
significance of chapters 39 and 40.
39. No free man shall be taken
or imprisoned or disseised or outlawed or exiled or in any way
ruined, nor will we go or send against him, except by the lawful
judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.
40. To no one will we sell,
to no one will we deny or delay right or justice.
Aelred Stubbs was banned from
South Africa the year his friend, Steve Biko, was killed. He
was Biko's posthumous editor. An Anglican vicar with the Anglo-Saxon
first name of Aelred, named after a Cistercian monk who died
about fifty years prior to Magna Carta, and whose last name of
Stubbs is no less venerable it having been also the name of the
Victorian constitutional historian who summed up Magna Carta
in words unknown to Bush, "the King is, and shall be, below
the law," and mistaken by the American Bar Association as
I found out when I went to Runnymede, which I had done a couple
days earlier.
My flight to Johannesburg had
a twelve-hour lay-over at Heathrow airport, time enough for me
to do some preliminary reconnaissance at Runnymede. Amid the
tangle of companies, stations, stops, slipways that is the result
of privatization of ground transport at Heathrow airport I eventually
found the local bus I was looking for. I purchased a return ticket
for £3.90 and caught the number 50 B bus at platform 5.
It was an utterly beautiful May morning when I discharged myself
across from the royal castle at Windsor, shop awnings were just
opening up, morning shadows were deep under the Jubilee arch
at the train station, &c. I couldn't get a boat so early
in the morning to take me down the Thames to Runnymede but Ali
from Rawalpindi whose uncle lives in Detroit working at the GM
plant in Hamtramck taxied me there.
Birdsong was loud and ringing
across the meadows, a tweeter against the woofer of the roaring
Boeings taking off from Heathrow. The chestnuts were blooming,
and the hawthorne as well, lending the scene a shining light
of loveliness. Such was the magic of the day that it summoned
up in me from the days of yore both nightmares of ruling class
terror and dreams of bountiful, peaceful equality.
I lay me down in a fair field
full of folk and dreamed dreamed, with the medieval Piers Ploughman,
dreamed with the Christian in The Pilgrim's Progress, and dreamed
with William Morris from the News from Nowhere.
The feudal critique begins
with a dream by the side of a stream of the ruling class men
in silk gowns swaying from side to side and making speeches,
or Lady Fee married at the Castle of Strife and Senseless Chattering.
Piers the ploughman is devout: "For human intelligence is
like water, air, and fire--it cannot be bought or sold. These
four things the Father of Heaven made to be shared on earth in
common."
Piers Ploughman was written
in 1370. Three centuries later in 1670 John Bunyan wrote Pilgrim's
Progress while in prison where he also made shoelaces for prisoners
at the borders of Islam. Vanity Fair ruled over by Sir Having
Greedy and Lord Carnal Delight who destroyed that commons of
water, air, fire, and mind, submitting everything to the capitalist
program of getting and enclosing. All religion he said was to
visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction. He wrote
of "an inheritance, incorruptible, undefiled, and that fadeth
not away." Advancing two hundred years to the William Morris
dream of 1890, we have his anti-industrial dream, News from Nowhere.
Having quarreled in their discussion about the Morrow of the
Revolution the anarchist stormed out and sighed on the banks
of the Thames, "if I could but see it! If I could but see
it!" before falling asleep to dream the revolutionary green
utopia.
I was pleasantly roused from
these reveries, half expecting to see Rat at any moment carrying
the bottles under his arms and Mole bringing the basket for a
picnic on the commons. Instead, a young man working for the National
Trust pulled up in a Land Rover, and identified himself as "a
commoner," advising me to stay on this, the west side of
the river if I intended to walk back to Windsor, as the other
side was all private land. Could Toad of Toad Hall be far? Across
the meadow I spied at the foot of Cooper Hill slope where the
land meets the river meads, what I was looking for, namely, the
American Bar Association's shrine to Magna Carta. "Could
I walk across the field?" He looked at my footwear, and
pointed me instead to a narrow way.
This landscape was dense with
ruling class magic, and a few hours tramping about it, notebook
in hand, was not going to discover but the most obvious of the
secrets in this semiotic density. It is a highly wrought landscape--an
English utopia of Whig origins made awkward by nervous American
memorializations, and weird exchanges of dirt.
The Queen of England gave an
acre or so of sloping land here to the USA, and a JFK memorial
put on it. There are fifty steps for the fifty states of the
USA each one different to approach the JFK memorial designed
by Sir Geoffry A. Jellico, CBE. A sign includes this bit, "the
craftsmen were unable to comprehend this need for individuality,
and could only complete their task when the steps were likened
to the uneven appearance of a crowd at a football match."
Welcome to England, the land of class snobbery!
The American Bar Association's
shrine has lots of stars; stars on the ceiling, stars on the
floor, and a star over the plinth in its middle. Cosmic, heavenly,
I guess is the suggestion, or perhaps that inheritance, incorruptible,
undefiled, and that fadeth not away. The words on the plinth
surrounded by stars in this temple on the buttercup field used
to epitomize Magna Carta are "symbol of liberty under law"
which is not at all what Magna Carta does say. Just the opposite
(remember Stubbs): it is the King under law. The ABA has got
the whole thing wrong, understandable for the Cold War in 1957
when they built it.
The thing is centered in an
enclosure which includes an oak tree planted by the Duke of Gloucester,
another by the Prime Minister of India in 1994. In the same year
Her Royal Highness, Queen Elizabeth II, planted an oak, and they
all seem to be flourishing after ten years. In our age of the
reclamation of the commons, the fetishism of the earth as private
property, or indeed as anything else, is becoming increasingly
ridiculous. The fetishism is at the base of patriotic fever.
This became clear to me as I read the sign at the foot of another
young oakling. John O. Marsh, Jr., Secretary of the Army of the
United States of America, in 1987 had planted it with soil that
had been brought from Jamestown, Virginia, "the first permanent
settlement in the new world." English settlement, they meant.
Welcome to a bit of the USA, the land of genocide!
The American Bar Association
misapprehends the significance of Magna Carta. This is not to
imply that British monuments nearby are invariably more faithful
to their subjects. At the fiftieth anniversary of Queen Victoria's
coronation a railway bridge was constructed in Windsor called
the Jubilee Arch, though it has utterly nothing to do with jubilee
as reclamation of land, manumission of slaves, cancellation of
debts, or reparations for wrongs done. The effrontery of imperialism
is to monumentalize the people's struggles and invert their meanings.
In 1929 the Runnymede meadows
were given to the National Trust by the widow, Lady Fairhaven.
Two granite structures on either side of the road signified something
big ahead. On one of these structures carved in four-inch capital
letters are the words, illegible if you are driving, but impressive
on foot,
IN THESE MEADS OF THE 15 JUNE
1215 KING JOHN AT THE INSTANCE OF DEPUTIES FROM THE WHOLE COMMUNITY
OF THE REALM, GRANTED THE GREAT CHARTER, THE EARLIEST OF CONSTITUTIONAL
DOCUMENTS WHEREUNDER ANCIENT AND CHERISHED CUSTOMS WERE CONFIRMED,
ABUSES REDRESSED, THE ADMINISTRATION OF JUSTICE FACILITATED,
NEW PROVISIONS FORMULATED FOR THE PRESERVATION OF PEACE AND EVERY
INDIVIDUAL PERPETUALLY SECURED IN THE FREE ENJOYMENT OF HIS LIFE
AND LIBERTY.
Customs? Ancient customs, OK.
But cherished customs? What do they have in mind? I have argued
that the Americans did not understand Magna Carta, or rather,
that if anyone followed its spirit, it was W.E.B. DuBois rather
than Eleanor Roosevelt because DuBois put the emphasis on the
750 million colonial peoples whose lands were robbed of them
leaving them in poverty whereas the UN Declaration of Rights
which Eleanor Roosevelt hoped would join Magna Carta in worldwide
esteem tended to slight the material issues of equality, those
cherished customs. The argument depends on a little knowledge
of medieval history, and it does not at all depend on a coincidence
in the date of 9/11. The text provided by the National Trust
makes some of the argument.
John merely saw the document
as a means of buying time and by mid-July 1215 he had asked the
Pope to annul the document. Driven to revenge by autumn of the
same year the Barons had offered the throne to Louis, the son
of the King of France, and a bitter civil war ensued. However,
the Magna Carta was not dead. Upon John's death in 1216, his
9 year-old son succeeded to the throne, as Henry III, and his
minority council, appointed to govern in his infancy, resurrected
the Charter. Henry's strength grew after victories over Louis
and his supporters at Lincoln and Dover. Support for Louis dwindled
and in September 1217 [William Blackstone gives its date as September
eleventh] he signed a peace treaty and withdrew to France. The
defeat of Louis was used as an opportunity to re-issue the Magna
Carta with modifications including a supplementary charter dealing
with forest laws. In 1297 the Magna Carta entered the statute
book becoming the first constitutional in the world.
One modification referred to
widows: "she shall have meanwhile her reasonable estover
of common." What did this mean? 'Estover' is Latin. The
17th century English jurist, Edward Coke, author of the Petition
of Right, translated, "it signifieth housebote, hedgebote,
and ploughbote." The Anglo-Saxon may seem equally obscure,
until we say that these botes were quotas for fuel, fencing,
and building. Technically, then, estovers referred to maintenance
of production and preservation of subsistence.
The rest of the argument concerns
direct appropriation. Chris Fisher, J.M. Neeson, E.P. Thompson
comprise the interpretation of customary forest law formed by
'the Warwick School.' What we learn from their studies, respectively,
of the Forest of Dean, Windsor Forest, and the forests of Nottinghamshire
is that while feudalism had come to an end by two hundred years
ago, the poor people who were necessarily the losers in the advent
of capitalism retained with a firm grip their customary hold
on various forms of timber and other usufructs of the forest.
The miners of the Forest of Dean had the foresight in 1610 to
write down their laws and customs "time out of mind".
When their customs were enclosed, the Book of Dennis was their
constitutional writ, for when they were challenged in 1831 the
Deputy Surveyor to the Chief Commissioner of Woods referred to
"that little book which they consider their Magna Carta."
Written statute law had to
come to terms with common custom, and it did so with the locution
"from time immemorial" or from "the time when
the memory of man runneth not." The customary uses are named;
the names are unfamiliar to us privatized souls, the names may
be subject to a variety of condescension--historical materialist,
Monty Pyhtonist, sociological, or farcical, and good fun it is
too. Yet they spelled health care, shelter, even social security,
and a comely table spread. Some might see them religiously as
Bunyan did, relief for the fatherless and widows of affliction.
Pannage, chiminage, and agistments
were protected in the supplementary forest charter. Pannage is
to put the pigs in the forest in the autumn to feed on the nuts
and mast. Agistment permits livestock some regulated forest pasture.
Chiminage is use of forest paths without having to pay toll.
Professor Isabel Hofmeyr of the University of Witswatersrand
concludes her brilliant study of the African Pilgrim's Progress
by asking us to remove the tollgates that separate the national
and the international. She thus asks for a literary world with
chiminage, and of course you immediately wonder, why stop there?
Karl Marx concluded Das Capital's
magnificent chapter ten on the working day, "In place of
the pompous catalogue of the 'inalienable rights of man' comes
the modest Magna Carta of a legally limited working-day."
One tradition is local, particular, antiquarian, modest; the
other is universal, general, modern, and pompous. The Kliptown
Charter (1955) contains similarly modest provisions, such as,
"there shall be a forty-hour working week, a national minimum
wage, paid annual leave, and sick leave for all workers, and
maternity leave on full pay for all working mothers." It
also abolished slavery, or unpaid labor, "child labour,
compound labour, the tot system and contract labour shall be
abolished." In the vine-growing agricultural districts of
South Africa it had long been the form of exploitation to pay
workers in "tots," or mugs, of wine rather than cash.
A modest, unpretentious memorial
can be found at Runnymede with apparently nothing to do with
Magna Carta. Two oral historians produced a book on sale at the
Magna Carta tea-room of "the life stories of twenty-two
ordinary people of Runnymede." It provides a microscopic
view into the 20th century British working-class. So many of
the lives born before or during World War I, so many suffered
from childhood diseases, some were orphaned, other parents fostered
children. Ernie Holland had a 'bad war.' After it he could not
stop shaking and weeping for decades. Rose Vincent said, "Life
seemed one long catastrophe." Many had the chiminage of
war or empire, experiences in Burma, North Africa, Spain, Australia,
New Zealand, Ireland, Naples, Poland, Canada. Many worked at
Vickers, building Spitfires, Wellingtons, other weapons of war,
the post-war engineering. Although there is one reference to
a communal water well, the commoning experienced by this testimony
was either of an emergency kind--survival during the Battle of
Britain, in which the self-activity of ordinary people discovered
sharing--or it was indirect and a result of the post-war welfare
state. Time after time the happiest moment, the "luckiest,"
was the acquisition of a council flat, housing, like news from
nowhere. Of the twenty-two lives, fourteen are widows and they
have their estovers by which I simply mean fuel, shelter, and
nurturance are not wanting.
I hitched from Runnymede with
Julian and his dog Max back to Windsor where traffic was completely
blocked by the police as an anti-terrorist precaution while the
guard was changed at the imposing and impregnable Victoria Barracks.
Thus he had the leisure to point out to me a) the Royal flower
gardens which were opened only two days a year and this was one
of them, and b) the relatively large fields belonging to the
Castle and which were planted with all sorts of organic and non-genetically
modified plants. Having left the shade of the Runnymedge commons,
in a twinkling I was to hear about the South African commons.
My visit to the Apartheid Museum
on Gold Reef Road in southwest Johannesburg was on a warm winter
afternoon. Welkom, my taxi driver, was born in Zimbabwe and returns
when he can (or must) to visit his grandmother's village. He
speaks eight African languages, in addition to English. He explained
that he learned them as a school-boy from the other kids in school.
From him I first heard the clicking of Xhosa talk, which danced
in my ear like the grace notes of a Chopin waltz. He discharged
me to the sounds of the muezzin's call to the faithful to afternoon
prayer sung out from a minaret near the museum. My colleagues
at Witswatersrand were so right--two hours was not nearly enough
time to take in the powerful explanations of racial degradation
(the photos, texts, videos) or absorb the impact of the engines
of human exploitation (nooses, Casspirs, "hippos,"
and prison-cells) there on display.
The UN Conference against Racism,
Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance met
in Durban, South Africa, in the late summer of 2001. The UN High
Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson of Ireland, joined
President Thabo Mbeki, the host of the Conference, and the delegates
from Bulgaria and Thailand, in comparing the final declaration
of the conference to the twenty-first century "Magna Carta."
Magna Carta does not contain
clauses about schooling, education, books, language, or culture:
certainly, it cannot compare to the specific grievance of the
imposition of an oppressor's language upon popular instruction
such as the decree from the Department of Bantu Education. Resistance
to Afrikaans escalated bringing with it a train of others grievances
from the apartheid system as a whole. Although Magna Carta was
written in Latin, it was read aloud in the churches in French
and English translation. As we compare the Soweto uprising of
16 June 1976 with the Magna Carta of 15 June 1215 it becomes
clear that while languages (Latin, Afrikaans, English, Zulu)
need to be learned, language itself is not the subject which
will help us compare them. What has been lost in each is the
vernacular discourse of the commons. Of course the Structural
Adjustment Programs of the World Bank and the IMF destroy the
actual commons of intelligence, water, air and fire. The destruction
of the discourse of the commons, on the other hand, is left to
Lord Turn About and his sychophants, Mr Two Tongue and Mr Any
Thing.
That English has been the language
for the consolidation of the neo-liberal global order is known.
That counter-discourses of insurgent knowledge can be nevertheless
formulated in English is also known. What Alamin Mazrui has pointed
out is that this can occur only in conditions of collective struggle
and mass movement.
The World Bank has provided
figures indicating that the majority of students in African universities
have been drawn from the ranks of the peasantry, the working
class and petty traders. But the families of many of these students
do not have the means to bear the rising cost of university education
imposed by IMF's so-called cost-sharing formula. Many of the
poor have chosen to impoverish themselves even further by selling
part of their subsistence plots or livestock, for example--than
see their children locked out of the Academy.
A traditional commons of the
sort that inspired Biko and Mandela and to which Welkom, the
cabbie, returns, has been exchanged by these families for the
university and its promise of "the cultural treasures of
mankind." The OED gives us examples of the use of the word
"bursaries" from Canada, a 1907 English statute, and
from 18th century Scottish practices all denoting free education,
providing semantic agreement with Piers the Ploughman's notion
that human intelligence cannot be bought and sold but must be
shared on earth in common. As for the 'promise of freedom and
its practise,' the title of the conference in Wits, I'd conclude
that before getting a new 21st century Magna Carta we should
get the old one back, now with chiminage, widow's estovers, rule
of law, jury, no torture, habeas corpus, the whole hog.
Peter Linebaugh teaches history at the University
of Toledo. He is the author of two of CounterPunch's favorite
books, The
London Hanged and (with Marcus Rediker) The
Many-Headed Hydra: the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic.
He can be reached at: plineba@yahoo.com
FURTHER
READING
Steve Biko, I Write What I
Like (Heinemann: London, 1987)
Philip Bonner and Lauren Segal,
Soweto: A History (Longman: Cape Town, 1998)
Danny Danziger & John Gillingham,
1215: The Year of Magna Carta (Hodder & Stoughton: London,
2003)
Chris Fisher, Custom, Work
and Market Capitalism: The Forest of Dean Colliers, 1788-1888
(Croom Helm: London, 1981)
Isabel Hofmeyr, The Portable
Bunyan: A Transnational History of The Pilgrim's Progress (University
of Witwatersrand: Johannesburg, South Africa, 2004)
Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to
Freedom (Little, Brown & Co.: Boston, 1994)
Alamin Mazrui, "Colonial
Anglophonism and the African Academy," Committee for Academic
Freedom in Africa, Newsletter 17 (fall 2001/winter 2002).
Sifiso Mxolisi Ndlovu, The
Soweto Uprisings: Counter-Memories of June 1976, (Ravan Local
History Series: Randburg, South Africa, 1998).
J.M. Neeson, Commoners: Common
right, enclosure and social change in England, 1700-1820 (Cambridge,
1993)
Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Moving the
Center: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms (Heinemann: London,
1993).
E.P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters:
the Origin of the Black Act (Pantheon: N.Y., 1975)
Ray Ward & Jean Simpson,
Harvest of Lives: The Life Stories of Twenty-two Ordinary People
of Runnymede spanning almost One Hundred Years (Surrey, 2003).
Weekend
Edition Features for June 5 / 6, 2004
C.
Douglas Lummis
Toward a Universal Declaration of
Human Wrongs
Saul
Landau
Five Cubans in Prison, Victims of Bush's Obsession
Dave
Lindorff
John Walker Lindh, Revisited
Brian
Cloughley
Apologies, Please, From Those Who Got It Wrong
Rich
Gibson
The Grenada 17: the Last Prisoners of the Cold War are Black
Elaine
Cassel
A Sorry FBI
Cathrin
Schütz
On the Ruins of Yugoslavia
Ben
Tripp
Call Me, Mr. Cassandra
Kurt
Nimmo
The Madness of King George
Ron
Jacobs
They Ain't Goin' Nowhere (Unless We Make It So)
Laura
Flanders
The Lynne Cheney Show?
Lenni
Brenner
Renaissance Noir: Caravaggio at the Met
Abigail
Jones
Whatever Happened to Lori Berenson, President Toledo's Trophy
Prisoner?
Mark
Latham
Nothing Bush Said Has Changed Our Hopes
Gerry
Adams
I Was Photographed While Tortured, Too
Toni
Solo
Venezuela 2004, Nicaragua's Contra War Reprised
Derek
Seidman
Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old
M.
Junaid Alam
Torture is Just the Symptom
Matt
Siegfried
An American Way of War
Dave
Zirin
The Politics of Charles Barkley
Poets'
Basement
Albert, Krieger, St. Clair
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