Marks on the Calendar: Two Years into Eradication of a People, “So Move on”!
Note: Again, smalltown news, a newspaper that is now as thin as a tissue, once a week, and here we are — a 900 to 1000 word piece by yours truly once a month. This November, some catching up with October’s Banner Books week, and other funky things.
Next month I do a bit of jujitsu, and I was begged to speak, and I both look forward to it and dread it:
I am NEVER in friendly territory, and in most cases, it’s ‘friendly fire’ against me, the messenger and the dude who is anti-authority and is not a sheeple, but again, Haeder does not spell H-A-T-E.
In a week, another Op-Ed runs, twice in a month, and that pisses people off, for sure. So much copy, and why so long, why 956 words? I’m introducing this talk to the wider community, tied to the death of journalism, with a trigger warning and redressing the zombification and infantalilization of AmeriKKKa.
Oh, maybe 60 Power Point slides, a media literacy quiz, and a box full of Project Censored “year in review books on the most censored stories of that respective year” and some Covert Action magazines and Z-Magazines, too.
Public schools across the U.S. saw more than 6,800 book bans in the 2024-25 school year. A new documentary, The Librarians, examines the experiences of school librarians who’ve found themselves on the front lines of a battle against censorship.
Maybe they will make connection between schooling and libraries and media illiteracy? The documentary, The Librarians.
It’s a lot of work, working with democrats, mostly grayhairs, and alas with the Anti-Antisemitism virus hitting may of us, those in the audience do not like the word “genocide” or the concept of “ethnic cleansing” or the very big tent idea of 130 Jewish billionaires and a few million multi-millionaire Jews, well, having that outsized “control of banking and media and tech and AI and war mongering and finance and real estate and, well, governments from her to Sudan to Venezuela, et al.”
Now, this op-ed continues with the bloody lies of, well, Capitalism, big time or small time USA.
Ahh, the banned books week passed (it should be a daily reminder that freedom of speech and thought are illusory in Capitalism). That was October 5 through 11, and you can Google what intense censorship has always occurred in USA and is going on now with the new brownshirts in office.
You can call school and library administrators, school board and library board members, city councilpersons, and your elected representatives to ask them to support the right to read! But most of them are running scared and are completely cowed by their own shadows.
Imagine California, running this House Bill and it passing with the Ray-Ban governor’s signature.
The law no longer references Israel’s war in Gaza, but critics have said it could still have a chilling effect and prevent open discussion on contentious issues in the classroom.
“Teacher discourse on Palestine or the genocide in Gaza will be policed, misrepresented, and reported to the antisemitism coordinator,” Theresa Montaño with the California Faculty Association said in a statement.
So, no need to burn books or ban them since K12 students will be policed and brought before boards of inquiry if they dare talk about the Nakba and how that ethnic cleansing that started in 1948 (earlier, really, but don’t tell our representative Gomberg that!) relates to another passing October critical thinking milestone – Indigenous People’s Day.
That was October 13, and with the fanfare of stormtroopers hitting Portland’s streets and even our own backwater county seeing ICE masked raiders taking a citizen away, forget about finding deep discussion about that day of infamy – celebrating for ONE 24-hour period our own legacy of indigenous culture and wisdom.
The schools might not even be able to put up posters stating the following with this new regime of Stephen Miller and his Homeland Security infecting the great shining city on the hill: “We honor the Native American people for their culture including art and many crafts, their food, their clothing, their grit and endurance, their goodness and influence. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there are about 4.5 million Native Americans and Alaska Natives in the United States today. That is about 1.5 percent of the population in the United States. There are ten main areas of North America where the Native Americans have lived over the last 2,000 years.”
The jig was up more than 250 years ago, throughout the enslavement of Africans, but recall that we had politician after general after newspaper editor repeating in variations of a theme these racist but highly American statements in regard to our Native People:
- In 2021, Rick Santorum claimed there was “nothing” in America before colonization and little Native American culture present today.
- Trump’s boy, Andrew Jackson, signed the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which forced many eastern tribes, such as the Cherokee, Choctaw, and others, off their ancestral lands. This policy led directly to the “Trail of Tears.” Jackson’s own words often framed Native Americans as uncivilized and an obstacle to American progress.
- “The only good Indian is a dead Indian” is a racist proverb originating from General Philip Sheridan. [Denied by Sheridan — DV Ed]
Maybe schools will allow coursework — now that we have National Day of Remembrance or Sorrow — to include American Indian scholars questioning the origins of Thanksgiving.
“Almost any portrait that we see of an Indian, he is represented with tomahawk and scalping knife in hand, as if they possessed no other but a barbarous nature. Christian nations might with equal justice be always represented with cannon and ball, swords and pistols,” states Elias Johnson, A Native Tuscarora Chief.
I doubt this book has been banned from public libraries: Let’s Play Indian, is a children’s book by Madye Lee Chastain. It’s one of countless examples of “playing Indian,” a practice engaged in by outsiders who appropriate, or take on, American Indian identities and cultural ways. Chastain’s main character transforms herself into “a really truly dressed-up painted Indian,” who runs, whoops, and waves her tomahawk.
Forget about K12. I believe OCCC would get pushback if, say, I taught writing and communication including an amazing young Lakota’s Red Nation broadcast Nick Estes is a Lakota activist, writer, and scholar whose work delves into settler-colonialism, indigenous history, and decolonization. He is the author of Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance. I’d be highlighting Nick’s on-line advocacy for Palestinian liberation, wherein he highlights the ongoing genocide in Gaza by exploring the intersection of the struggles faced by Palestinian and Indigenous peoples in America.
Drill down into Native American perspectives and unmask almost all myths perpetrated in this country. But as you pass the gravy on Nov. 27, remember it’s not all a bed of pumpkins and cranberries:
Federal agents kept the Dakota-Sioux from receiving food and provisions. Accordingly, on the brink of death from starvation, some fought back, resulting in the Dakota War of 1862. In the end, President Lincoln ordered 38 Dakota men to die from hanging, but he too was spinning PR, so he felt that the first Thanksgiving (1863) offered an opportunity to bridge the hard feelings amongst Natives and the federal government.
“It was propaganda,” Dr. Kelli Mosteller, Citizen Potawatomi Nation’s Cultural Heritage Center director explains. “It was to try and build this event so that you could have a deeper narrative about community building and coming together in shared brotherhood and unity.”
So, there was a counter Op-Ed, running two weeks ago, and of course, I ran my own letter to the editor, here:
But they, the readers, the democrat lite or light-headed, they just DO NOT get AmeriKKKa.
Imagine just a month tying into just a few dozen Break Through News reports, such as this one:
Dear Editor:
So, a long attack on me was published Nov. 12, along with a snarky fucked up letter to the editor also attacking the above “facts.” Opinion piece. Here, just published today, my letter response:
Dear Editor — Recent attacks (Nov. 5 commentary and letter to the editor) on my integrity as a writer and as an educator, plus the inane label of “antisemitism,” just don’t hold water. The thing about going after someone’s credentials and lifework is called ad hominem attack. Kill the messenger is also a term I could deploy with two personal attacks on my Oct. 15 Commentary.
Learning curves are steep in a country of people who have been miseducated, propagandized, and drawn and quartered by an elite media, whether right or left of some imaginary middle.
For real journalism on Gaza and the Jewish genocide, as well as just general news, try Drop Site News (dropsitenews.com). Try heading over to Monthly Review On-Line for deeper analyses of USA the Empire, and its insane and perverted hatred of socialism, as well as its relationship with an apartheid and genocidal state called Israel, the Occupied Land of Palestinians (monthlyreview.org). Then, of course, The Intercept, theintercept.com, will get you more news.
Again, steep learning curves are present when one comes out of K12 and college in this Empire of Chaos, War, Pain, and Terror. Try Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research — thetricontinental.org. I could list five dozen sites here that easily counter the narratives cooked up in the minds of Americans who have been colonized by one-sided narratives and bizarre takes on US and Global history.
Lifetimes of work and research and ground-truthing easily shoot holes into what most Americans and Westerners have come to believe are their “truths.”
Paul Haeder, Waldport
