Indigenous activists share mixed feelings on Vatican repudiation of Doctrine of Discovery

‘They haven’t even begun to come to terms with the true nature of what we’re actually talking about,’ Steven Newcomb said.

A 16th-century illustration by Theodor de Bry (1561-1623) depicting Spanish atrocities against Indigenous peoples during the conquest of Hispaniola. Image courtesy of Wikipedia/Creative Commons

April 5, 2023

By 

Emily McFarlan Miller

(RNS) — Steven Newcomb, who is Shawnee and Lenape, recalls first writing to the pope in 1992 to ask him to revoke the papal bulls behind the Doctrine of Discovery.

That was Pope John Paul II. Two popes ago.

So when the Vatican released a statement last week saying it repudiated that doctrine — which, backed by a series of 15th-century papal bulls, justified the domination by European Christians of lands already inhabited by Indigenous peoples — Newcomb said he wasn’t terribly surprised.

“I just think it’s fascinating and it’s really great because what it does is it catapults the issue to the world stage in a very prominent manner,” said Newcomb, author of the 2008 book “Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery” and co-founder and co-director of the Indigenous Law Institute.

Steven Newcomb. Photo by William Laronal Jr.

But Newcomb, like many Indigenous activists and organizations that have been outspoken about the continuing impact of the Doctrine of Discovery, has mixed feelings about the Vatican’s repudiation.

“They haven’t even begun to come to terms with the true nature of what we’re actually talking about,” he said.

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RELATED: Responding to Indigenous, Vatican rejects Discovery Doctrine

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The Doctrine of Discovery has received renewed attention in recent years as Indigenous activists have pushed for action to right the wrongs of colonization, and a number of Protestant — mostly mainline — denominations have issued their own repudiations.

The doctrine was first expressed by Pope Nicholas V in the 1452 papal bull “Dum Diversas,” which — along with subsequent bulls “Romanus Pontifex” and “Inter Caetera” — created a theological justification for Christian rulers to seize the property and possessions of non-Christians.

It was referenced as recently as 2005 in the Supreme Court ruling Sherrill v. Oneida, in which justices held that the repurchase of traditional tribal lands did not restore tribal sovereignty to that land.

Some have welcomed the Vatican’s statement.

The National Congress of American Indians, the oldest and largest organization representing Indigenous peoples in the United States, said Thursday (March 30) it commended Pope Francis and the Catholic Church for the statement released that day by the Vatican’s Dicastery for Culture and Dicastery for Integral Human Development.

Pope Francis arrives for a pilgrimage at the Lac Saint Anne, Canada, on July 26, 2022. The Vatican on March 30, 2023, responded to Indigenous demands and formally repudiated the Doctrine of Discovery, the theories backed by 15th-century papal bulls that legitimized the colonial-era seizure of Native lands and form the basis of some property law today. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia, File)

The Vatican statement reads in part, “In no uncertain terms, the Church’s magisterium upholds the respect due to every human being. The Catholic Church therefore repudiates those concepts that fail to recognize the inherent human rights of indigenous peoples, including what has become known as the legal and political ‘doctrine of discovery.’”

The NCAI expressed hope that statement would be the beginning of a full accounting for the legacies of colonialism, not only from the church, but also from governments that have used it to justify the mistreatment of Indigenous peoples.

“We thank the Creator that Indigenous peoples are strong, resilient, full of wisdom, faith, hope, and love, and we stand ready to have difficult conversations about the future and to work together to build off of today’s step forward to bring about meaningful positive change to our people and nations, and for the healing, reconciliation and restoration of all peoples across the globe,” it said.

Others were more reserved.

Renouncing the Doctrine of Discovery was the right decision, according to Deborah Parker, CEO of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition. But the Vatican statement downplayed the church’s role in legitimizing the doctrine and lacked accountability for the harm it has caused, she said.

“We demand more from the Catholic Church,” said Parker, who is Tulalip.

Parker, in a statement reacting to the Vatican’s announcement, went on to list a number of demands, including access to documents regarding Catholic-run Indian boarding schools in the U.S.; the return of land on which those schools were built; and support for a bill that would create a Truth and Healing Commission in the U.S.

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RELATED: Mark Charles and Soong-Chan Rah share ‘Unsettling Truths’ in new book

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Mark Charles, a former pastor who co-wrote the 2019 book “Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing, Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery” and ran for U.S. president in 2020 in part to draw the country’s attention to the Doctrine of Discovery, also sees a missed opportunity.

Mark Charles — a Navajo pastor, speaker and author — discusses the Doctrine of Discovery with missionaries of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, at the Loyola University Retreat and Ecology Campus in Woodstock, Illinois, on July 26, 2018. RNS photo by Emily McFarlan Miller

“In what could have been a groundbreaking and historic repudiation of the Doctrine of Discovery, the Vatican instead released a series of political statements that sought to rewrite history, shield the Catholic Church from legal liability and shift the blame for the Doctrine of Discovery to governmental and colonial powers,” said Charles, who is Navajo.

The statement doesn’t exactly repudiate the Doctrine of Discovery, he told Religion News Service. Instead, he said, it defines the doctrine as a legal concept and states it is not part of the teachings of the Catholic Church — that the papal bulls have never been considered expressions of the Catholic faith.

The statement, Charles noted, also claims those documents were “manipulated for political purposes by competing colonial power,” in order to justify the mistreatment of Indigenous peoples.

“If you truly see yourself as a representative of Christ to this world, you absolutely not only can do better, but need to do better. And, as a Native, Indigenous man, I will tell you wholeheartedly: Our people deserve better,” Charles said.

Sarah Augustine, co-founder and executive director of the Coalition to Dismantle the Doctrine of Discovery and author of the 2021 book “The Land Is Not Empty: Following Jesus in Dismantling the Doctrine of Discovery,” is primarily interested in dismantling the legal structure of the doctrine. But, she said, she isn’t sure how the Vatican can say the papal bulls were manipulated for political purposes.

Sarah Augustine. Courtesy photo

In “Inter Caetera,” Pope Alexander VI writes in part, “Out of the fullness of our apostolic power, by the authority of Almighty God conferred upon us in blessed Peter and of the vicarship of Jesus Christ, which we hold on earth, do by tenor of these presents, should any of said islands have been found by your envoys and captains, give, grant, and assign to you and your heirs and successors, kings of Castile and Leon, forever,” noted Augustine, who is Pueblo (Tewa).

“So how can you say that’s being manipulated by heads of state? I can’t sort of square that,” she said.

Augustine said the statement is a “momentous acknowledgment” by the Catholic Church and something she never thought she’d see in her lifetime. But, she said, she’d stop short of calling it a repudiation.

“I guess I think there is still a ways to go,” she said.

That includes steps toward repair, defined in relationship with Indigenous people, she said.

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RELATED: Churches return land to Indigenous groups as part of #LandBack movement

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Newcomb echoed many of the same concerns with the Vatican statement. It also never uses the word “domination,” Newcomb pointed out, when “we’re not just talking about discovery, we’re talking about discovery in order to establish domination where it did not yet exist.”

He sees it as a move in the right direction, though.

“We’re certainly glad that they’ve taken the step, but they need to keep walking,” Newcomb said.

Newcomb has visited the Vatican twice; first, in 2000, when he handed a copy of “Inter Caetera” to a confused Swiss Guard and asked him to pass along to the pope his request — “on the part of Indigenous persons throughout the world,” including the small group of Indigenous people from the Americas he had come with — to formally revoke it.

In 2016, he had the chance to make that request himself and press a copy of “Pagans in the Promised Land” into the hands of Pope Francis during a papal audience in St. Peter’s Square as part of an Indigenous delegation gathered for what they called the Long March to Rome.

Newcomb told RNS he was reminded of the Jesuit leader who asked him during one of those visits to the Vatican if he believed the pope ever would revoke the papal bulls.

“‘Well, it’s possible,’ I said, ‘but it doesn’t really matter one way or the other,'” Newcomb remembered answering.

The request for the repudiation itself, whether it was ever granted or not, was the focal point that Newcomb said allowed him and others to build momentum and awareness about the Doctrine of Discovery. Now it’s being discussed all over the world.

“Sometimes the importance is in the journey itself,’” he said.

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RELATED: Denominations repent for Native American land grabs

Capitalism, Racism and Selling the AR-15

 APRIL 21, 2023 

BY ANDRES D. MEDELLINFacebookTwitter

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Photograph Source: Fibonacci Blue – CC BY 2.0

When it comes to mass shootings in the United States (like the one that just took place in Nashville), the figures are unequivocal. “Active shooter” cases have become more common in recent years. The percentage of mass shooters using semi-automatic rifles in those incidents has risen since 2009, with those armed with such rifles killing more people on average than those with handguns. One particular weapon, the AR-15-style rifle, stands outin recent incidents.

Some estimates put the number of AR-15-style rifles owned by civilians in the U.S. somewhere between 5 and 20 million. This may represent a small share of the roughly 400 million firearms privately owned in the United States; however, due to their customization and versatility, these rifles are being increasingly used in mass shootings. The AR-15 has thus consolidated itself not only as “America’s Rifle” – as the National Rifle Association (NRA) cheerily calls it -, but also as the preferred weapon of choice for mass murder in the United States.

Easy access to these firearms also has negative effects elsewhere. My own country of origin (Mexico) experienced a decline in homicides between 1999 and 2004, followed by a sharp increase afterwards – at the same time as the production and advertising of military-grade weapons in the U.S. soared. Nowadays between 70% and 90% of firearms recovered from crime scenes in Mexico come from the United States (with rifles representing a third of all weapons recovered there and traced by American authorities). As for my current country of residence (Haiti), both the United Nations and U.S. authoritiesacknowledge the uptick of high-powered weapons being smuggled from Florida to Haiti, fueling the unprecedented gang violence ravaging the country. These two countries are hardly the only ones in the region experiencing increased gun violence as a result of firearm trafficking from the U.S.

Some suggest that the proliferation of AR-15s can be attributed to an American exceptional gun culture. But what lies behind this “exceptional culture” is a tale of capitalist greed meeting white fear. Confronting gun violence and the proliferation of “America’s Rifle” will require more than legislative action. It will require addressing unbridled capitalism and white supremacy in the United States.

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Designed in the late 1950s by the California-based company ArmaLite (which later sold the patent to Colt), the AR-15 was first issued to American units engaged in Vietnam in the early 1960s. In 1963 the U.S. military officially adopted a modified AR-15, designated M16, which eventually became the service firearm for American troops. Today all branches of the U.S. military use a variant of this rifle as their standard weapon.

At around the same time that the rifle was adopted by the military, Colt began merchandising a semiautomatic version of the AR-15 for law enforcement agencies and civilians. In the late 1970s, after most of the patents for the AR-15 expired, other American firearm manufacturers also began producing copies of the weapon under various names. However, sales of these rifles were not significant, not even while U.S. troops were in Southeast Asia. For many years the rifle was on the fringes within the American gun market.

The AR-15’s “popularity” really took off in the early 2000s as a result of two major factors. First, in the wake of 9/11 attacks, patriotic sentiment surged; support for the military spiked as the United States sent forces to Afghanistan and Iraq. This in turn would shift public opinion regarding gun control, especially for a certain social segment (white, middle- or upper-class, with some relationship to the military or law enforcement). As former gun executive Ryan Busse mentions,

Nothing normalized the “black rifle” like the evening-news segments featuring U.S. soldiers on combat missions. Later, as returning veterans, they would go on to form a ready-made customer base for civilian versions of the rifle. For many of those ex-service members, owning and shooting the rifle became a way to stay connected to the people they had served [in Afghanistan and Iraq].

Secondly, the U.S. government undermined gun control by advancing the interest of gun capitalists. In 2004 Congress allowed the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban (which, despite its drawbacks, had prohibited the manufacture, sale or possession of some types of AR-15 rifles) to expire. Later, the George W. Bush administration further signed, in 2005, the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA), which shielded gun manufacturers from any liability in the use of their products. Finally, in the 2008 District of Columbia v. Heller case, the U.S. Supreme Court reinterpreted the Second Amendment of the Constitution as securing an individual right of gun ownership for self-defense.

Without constraints, gun manufacturers – encouraged and abetted by the American ruling class – were ready to reap profits by merchandising their products to the civilian market. Knowing that there was “niche” for AR-15 rifles to exploit, gun companies pursued a relentless campaign to sell them to civilians. Today, almost every major gun company in the United States produces some variant of the rifle, increasingly being marketed for womenand minors. Although merchandised as “modern sporting rifles”, they are indeed military-grade weapons; not even magazine capacity as a form of gun control will take the rifle’s military essence away.

The Washington Post and BBC notwithstanding, gun manufacturers knew very well what they were selling. They were also aware that their products could end up in the wrong hands. They nonetheless continued to extract massive profits by appealing to white fear in some segments of American society, which explains successful sales despite mass shootings involving this firearm.

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For many years, the NRA (founded in 1871 to improve marksmanship skills) was best known for serving the interest of hunters and sportsmen. It even supported federal laws against machine guns during the violent years of Prohibition. Up to the late 1970s, its leadership seemed perfectly fit to work with the U.S. authorities to devise reasonable laws to limit the spread of firearms. But this all changed after the NRA held its annual convention in Cincinnati in May 1977.

At the time, the NRA’s leadership favored orienting the organization closer to its sportsmen identity whilst distancing itself from a constituency advocating armed self-defense. Ahead of that year’s meeting, two fierce opponents of gun control – gun-magazine publisher Neal Knox and former head of the U.S. Border Patrol Harlon Bronson Carter – maneuvered within the NRA to replace their leaders. Knox and Carter’s faction changed the organization’s bylaws and voted out much of the leadership during the 1977 convention, after which the NRA pledged never to support gun control again. The takeover made the NRA more partisan as well, endorsing in 1980 a presidential candidate (Ronald Reagan) for the first time in the organization’s history. Slowly but surely, the NRA waged a war to eradicate most gun control regulation, even in the wake of notorious school shootings. During its 1999 convention (held a few days after the Columbine massacre), the NRA held closed-door business meetings to discuss strategy options. When faced with engagement with lawmakers to help draft improved policies or resorting to white fear mongering to sell their products, the NRA leadership chose the latter.

By doing so, the NRA simply upgraded a historical trend that best suited the white nationalist base forming its constituency. This trend is illustrated by all the historical obstacles faced by black people in the U.S. to own firearms. Even after the end of the U.S. Civil War, many states enacted gun control bills to make it impossible for black people to own guns, while the KKK was given free reign to disarm and terrorize them. The NRA supported gun control later again to prevent gun ownership by black people, teaming up in 1967 with then California governor Ronald Reagan to pass the Mulford Act – a state bill prohibiting the open carry of loaded firearms in response to the Black Panther Party.

Not surprisingly, this trend continues. The NRA declined to comment on the deaths of two black legal gun owners – Philando Castile and Jason Washington – shot and killed by police in 2016 and 2018. When it comes to police brutality against black people owning guns, the NRA does not invoke the individual freedoms it allegedly defends.

In fact, the relentless defense of firearms – including military-grade weaponry – has little to do with protecting individual freedoms or preventing tyranny on U.S. soil. No guns were brandished to defend the Constitution when the U.S. government authorized surveillance on civilians without warrant, imprisonment of suspected terrorists without trial, extrajudicial executions, and war without congressional approval – thus flouting four other constitutional amendments along the way.

For historian Roxane Dunbar-Ortiz – author of Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment – and others, the history of the uniquely American gun culture is closely linkedto settler colonialism, segregation and racism. As Dunbar-Ortiz recalls in a recent interview,

The gun as a technology is deeply tied to the history of U.S. expansion and warfare […] The Second Amendment is really understood by many Americans as a religious covenant linked to white nationalism, and the idea that God has ordained this country for whites and therefore licenses white nationalist’s violence […] The Second Amendment is about the right but also the obligation of settlers to own guns and to take those guns out into the frontier to kill Native people.

That the AR-15 epitomizes white supremacy is well understood by gun manufacturers and retailers. Barack Obama’s victories in 2008 and 2012 provided the firearms industry with a culture-war boost, as the NRA took to promoting conspiracy-theory-minded fears. And every mass shooting involving the AR-15 has been met with a spike in sales (and stocks) lest some form of gun control is enacted. Gun retailers know which audience they want to reach when glorifying a teenager who shot unarmed civilians with such a rifle.

Advocacy for the AR-15 often stems from the same right-wing influencers who regularly bemoan “critical race theory” and embrace the “great replacement theory”. Little wonder that a weapon designed for – and extensively used in – U.S. wars of imperial aggression became a symbol of right-wing politics. The firearm industry, the NRA, the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) and their enablers in government know very well the constituency for which these rifles are marketed. Hence the intense symbolic importance attached to AR-15-type rifles in right-wing circles. White fear, NRA’s influence in government, aggressive marketing, the returning soldiers and the glorification of war have all coalesced into this political climate.

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More people are questioning not only the militarization of police, but also of civilians. Two black representatives were just expelled from the Tennessee House Chamber after leading protesters in a call for stricter gun laws. Outside the United States, the Mexican government has been pursuing a lawsuit since 2021 against gun companies in the U.S. for their negligent commercial practices facilitating the illicit trafficking of their firearms into Mexico.

These are all encouraging signs. Nonetheless, a major challenge for American society will be acknowledging that guns (and particularly the AR-15 in recent years) have been an indispensable part of white male violence, often perceived as the most effective means of exercising it.

Gun control activists must demand more than better laws governing gun ownership. As Dunbar-Ortiz suggests, they must yearn for a revolutionary change deeper than legislative victories. They must demand a shift in public consciousness, which can only be achieved with a reckoning of the U.S. history. Such an effort must begin by taking the AR-15, in the American context, for what it is: an enforcer of capitalism and white supremacy.

Andrés D. Medellín is a Mexican career diplomat. A sociologist by training, his essays and book reviews have appeared in Africa is a Country and Le Monde diplomatique, among other outlets. He can be reached at dariomedellin83@gmail.com.

Carnage: Guns and Fascism in Armed 

Madhouse Amerika

BY PAUL STREETFacebookTwitter

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A downtown Louisville bank slaughter 11 days ago was the 150th mass shooting (an incident in which 4 people other than the gun-wielder were shot) in the United States (US) in 2023. There have been 19 such shootings since then (as of 4 pm Central time on Thursday, April 20), including one that killed 4 people and injured 34 last Saturday, a day that saw 7 mass shootings.

That’s 169 mass shootings in 111 days this year, including a school shooting that killed 7 people, including 3 children in Nashville, Tennessee three weeks ago.

Mass shootings are no super big deal in the US anymore. They’ve been normalized, like high gas prices. They’re just part of US life now, an almost routine part of our “condition,” like climate change. I half expect to learn about a new mass shooting somewhere in the US every time I turn on cable news.

I predicted 1 mass shooting and 28 shootings in the US on Easter Sunday. I was borne-out on the first prediction and fell absurdly short on the second prediction: there were 90 shootings. Not sure what I was thinking with just 28. A quick glance at the Gun Violence Archives shows that would have been very far below the norm.

The Easter mass shooting came late in the day, in Orlando, Florida. Louisville followed the next morning.

Mere shootings of just 1 to 3 individuals are barely even a story anymore. There has to be a twist now for a non-mass shooting to make the national news. This last week we’ve seen three such twists: a Black teenager who got shot by an 84-year-old white racist man in north Kansas City after the adolescent rang the octogenarian’s doorbell in a case of mistaken address; a 20-year old white woman shot to death in upstate New York by a 65-year-old white male lunatic after her boyfriend mistakenly pulled his car into the shooter’s driveway; two white female cheerleaders shot in Texas after one of them mistakenly tried to open some armed freak’s car.

Gun violence is now the leading killer of US children. The Republi-fascist Party and the neofascist National Rifle Association (NRA) have an interesting response to such madness: So what? More please! As the nation’s gun carnage peaks, the dark red Missouri House has just passed an NRA-sponsored bill that would permit guns in the state’s churches, synagogues, and buses. Two weeks ago, Florida governor Ron DeFascist signed an NRA-sponsored bill that lets anyone who can legally own a gun in his state carry without a permit. It means training and background checks are no longer required for people to carry concealed guns in public in Florida. And so it goes in other states, consistent with a Supreme Court’s ruling last summer that a New York law requiring a license to carry concealed weapons in public places was unconstitutional.

The mayor of Louisville and a Democratic Congressman from Louisville responded to the bank shooting (which killed a CEO friend of theirs) by begging the Republi-fascist-dominated Kentucky state government and the Republi-fascist-crippled US Congress to implement sane gun policies. Everybody knows that’s futile because of the Republicans’ captivity to the NRA.

The NRA just held its annual convention in Indianapolis, where the latest in mass-kill assault and home slaughter weaponry was on display and panelists held forth on how to get yet more guns into Americans’ hands, residences, and militias. More bloodshed more carnage, please.

The NRA hosted Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors” Trump. Mr. “I will be Your Retribution” explained that the nation’s gun violence has nothing to with its insane firearms saturation and everything to do with urban “thugs” (a clear dog whistle for Black and brown people) who are “coddled” by the supposedly “radical Left” Democrats and against whom “real Americans” (meaning white heartland volk and suburbanites) need to arm themselves.

I get tired of the guns vs. mental health debate on gun violence. Of course it’s supremely dangerous for the US to have 125 firearms loose for every 100 people in the country. The next closest ratio is The Falkland Islands at 74 per 100! And yes, many other countries have mental health problems that don’t turn into mass homicidal gun slaughter. But it’s pretty damn mentally ill to take an AR-15 or any other weapon to murder a bunch of your fellow human beings in bars, schools, banks, concerts, movie theaters, parking lots, stores, dance studios, churches, and so on.

Isn’t the real problem that this sick, demented, savagely unequal, atomizing and violence-worshipping capitalist-imperialist society and culture have produced intersecting and overlapping, mutually reinforcing crises of over-arming and mental and moral madness leading to a frankly predictable consequence?

Fascism, I say? Oh indeed. Let’s acknowledge something unpleasant about why the NRA-allied Republi-fascist Party steadfastly oppose elementary gun control measures even as the nation experiences one mass shooting after another. Let’s say what we know or ought to know out loud: the nation’s rightmost major party is now a socially, racially, and politically eliminationist, neofascist formation that embraces the rule of men over the rule of law. It channels and contains white-supremacist genocidal tendencies and sensibilities. As such, it leaders are happy about the fact that its adherents possess a wildly disproportionate share of the insane number of firearms and especially of the military style weaponry that is out and about in the US-American Armed Madhouse. It is pleased with the private arms status quo as it applauds demented politicos including a putschist ex-president who fascistically and absurdly call their corporate Democratic opponents “radical Left animals” and who speak in open terms about bloody “vengeance” and “Civil War.”’

Two weeks ago, as the vicious Christian white nationalists in charge of the Tennessee House of Representatives prepared to expel two young Black state legislators for breaking “decorum” rules by joining protests for gun reform in the wake of a Nashville school shooting, young people in the gallery above the legislative chamber started chanting “fascists, fascists!”  And why not?  The NRA-owned Tennessee Republicans’ move to cancel democratically elected Black legislators, cancelling the votes of those representatives’ predominantly Black constituents in Memphis and Nashville, was chillingly racist and richly authoritarian. It was a brazen act of racial and political eliminationism.

The NRA has aimed not-so veiled assassination threats at liberal politicians, journalists, and celebrities,

If it walks like a duck and sounds like a duck….

Speaking of which, Trump has applauded and hosted the teen fascist Kyle Rittenhouse, who killed two Black Lives Matter protesters with an illegally owned AR-15 in August of 2020. Never forget that Trump went to Kenosha, Wisconsin, the site notorious for Rittenhouse’s fascist butchery, on the final night of the 2020 presidential campaign. Think that might have been a message about Trumpist-fascist havoc to come?

One year later, Trump invited the freshly and absurdly exonerated Rittenhouse for a sit down at Mar-a-Lago, proclaiming the adolescent slayer “ a nice young man” who shouldn’t have had to go through a trial for, you know, using an illegally owned assault weapon to kill two people at a march against racist police brutality.

Never forget that Donald “Take the F’ng Mags Away” Trump had a tantrum calling for government metal detectors to be taken down so that fascist paramilitaries could bring their AR-15s to the January 6^th Attack on the US Capitol. “They don’t want to hurt me,” Trump explained. Imagine the carnage that might have ensued if Trump had had his way.

And check this out now a year and a half after Rittenhouse walked. We learned recently that Texas’ Republi-fascist governor Greg Abbott intends to pardon a fascist killer named Daniel Perry within days of Perry’s jury conviction for having shot to death a BLM protester in Austin, Texas in July of 2020. As the Austin-American Statesman reports:

“Perry, an Army sergeant, was working as an Uber driver in Austin on the night of July 25, 2020, when he ran a red light at the intersection of Fourth Street and Congress Avenue and drove into a Black Lives Matter march before stopping.…Prosecutors [successfully] contended that Perry instigated what happened. They highlighted a series of social media posts and Facebook messages in which Perry made statements that they said indicated his state of mind, such as he might ‘kill a few people on my way to work. They are rioting outside my apartment complex.’ A friend responded, ‘Can you legally do so?’ Perry replied, ‘If they attack me or try to pull me out of my car then yes.’ …A jury Friday unanimously convicted Perry.  State District Judge Clifford Brown is set to sentence him to prison in the coming days. He faces up to life in prison…David Wahlberg, a former Travis County criminal court judge, said he cannot think of another example in the state’s history when a governor sought a pardon before a verdict was formally appealed. ‘I think it’s outrageously presumptuous for someone to make a judgment about the verdict of 12 unanimous jurors without actually hearing the evidence in person,’ Wahlberg said” (emphasis added)

The Austin-American Statesman elaborates:

“Less than 24 hours after a jury in Austin found Daniel Perry guilty of shooting to death a protester, Gov. Greg Abbott announced on social media Saturday that he would pardon the convicted killer as soon as a request ‘hits my desk.’  The unprecedented effort, which Abbott announced to his 1 million followers on Twitter, came as Abbott faced growing calls from national conservative figures such as Fox News host Tucker Carlson and Kyle Rittenhouse, who was acquitted in the shooting deaths of two Wisconsin protesters in 2020, to act to urgently undo the conviction” (emphasis added).

How despicable. It’s not just the pardon itself.  It’s the advance promise of a pardon before the killer’s lawyers even appealed – a pledge to pardon as soon as possible without even reviewing the evidence.

Abbott’s purported legal basis for pardoning Perry is Texas’ NRA-sponsored “Stand Your Ground” bill, which permits the no-retreat use of deadly force if one is attacked.  The killer claimed that his victim raised a weapon at him before he shot but the obvious fact presented by numerous eyewitnesses was that Perry totally instigated the confrontation. That’s not “standing your ground.”

If it walks like a fascist duck and sounds like a fascist duck…

We might want to get serious about what we’re up against in this country.

In the meantime, the notion that the Armed Madhouse USA has anything to say to any other nations or people on how to organize and live their lives is laughable and not just because of the insane level of gun violence.

Paul Street’s latest book is This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America (London: Routledge, 2022).

A Fascist Assault upon the Individual “Right to Change”

 APRIL 21, 2023

BY STEPHEN F. EISENMANFacebook

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Caravaggio, Conversion on the Way to Damascus (detail), 1601, Santa Maria Del Popolo, Rome.

The Right to Change

The fundamental right to change is under assault by a generation of American fascists acting under cover of a mainstream political party: the Republican Party. The danger grows daily and threatens civil rights, women’s rights, and personal liberty.

The right to change is not explicitly enumerated in America’s founding documents but is everywhere implicit. The second paragraph of the U.S. Declaration of Independence (1776) states that the purpose of government is to protect “certain unalienable Rights,” including “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The first amendment to the U.S. Constitution, protects “freedom of speech [and] the press; the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.” The 14^th amendment prevents any state from abridging these rights and forbids unlawful “deprivations of life, liberty, or property.” These statements are hollow if they don’t enable individuals to freely change beliefs, attitudes, utterances, identities, behaviors, and allegiances.

The current Republican attacks upon trans people, reproductive freedom, public protest, free speech, and the rights of former prisoners, undermine the fundamental right to change; they may rightly be called fascist because they would impose a single, timeless standard of identity, belief, and behavior – Christian nationalist — upon a diverse and mutable nation.

A changed man

About 15 years ago, when I lived in Chicago, I became friendly with Billy Deadeye (not his real name, but close). He was a tall Black man in his late 50s who worked as a paralegal helping former prisoners find housing and decent work. He was always impeccably dressed in a grey or blue suit with a white handkerchief poking from his breast pocket. Billy’s character belied his name; he was kind, generous, and thoughtful. He regularly attended meetings of the prison abolition group, Tamms Year Ten, that I helped organize. That was how I came to know him and learn about his troubled past.

In 1979, Deadeye was sentenced to serve a prison term of 150-300 years for murder and armed robbery. I won’t go into details of the case but suffice to say they were grim. He only escaped a death sentence by a quirk in legal history – his crimes occurred after the Supreme Court ruled the death penalty unconstitutional in 1972, and before it was reinstated nationally in 1976 and in Illinois in 1977. Deadeye avoided lethal injection, but the sentence he received was tough enough, effectively a life term; and given the nature of Illinois’ maximum-security prisons – Stateville, Menard, and Pontiac — arguably a fate worse than death.

In prison however, Billy calmed down and earned the trust of prisoners and guards alike. He ran the law library, mentored other prisoners, gained a degree in political science and finally certification as a paralegal. He even worked in the car-pool, driving outside the prison walls, and always coming back. After 30 years, he was released from prison to start a new life. He performed his paralegal work with both care and urgency, and his clients and their families were grateful to him. And despite his full-time job, he made time to help us in our effort to shut down Illinois’s only all-solitary confinement prison, Tamms supermax. Billy shared our celebration when the prison, a high-tech torture chamber, was closed by order of then Governor Pat Quinn in 2013.

Here’s the point of this story: By the time I knew him, Billy was a changed man. Why and how he changed is a mystery that even Billy doesn’t fully understand, but hard work was a big part of it. I knew other guys too who changed utterly from their criminal youths. Johnny Walton was a big, funny, avuncular man when I met him after his release from prison in 2007. Like Billy, he was kind to everybody, a gentle giant. But in his youth, he was a leader of the Vice Lords and committed at least a dozen armed robberies. Finally, out of prison after 25 years, he worked night shifts as a watchman at a warehouse. During the day, he either slept or helped families who still had men inside; he too was a regular at our meetings. Everybody was sad when he died from a heart attack just a few years after his release.

People in prison change, not always for the better of course, but sometimes. That’s why the death penalty and life-in-prison without the possibility of parole are so evil; they punish the person who committed the crime but then continue to punish (or even kill) the new person who didn’t. Proposed laws in Republican states that limit parole, increase sentences, or expand the death penalty – for example in Florida, Arkansas, and Iowa — are violations of the fundamental human right to change. So are lesser, but still significant impediments to rehabilitation and change: cash bail, long, pre-trial incarceration, brutal prison conditions, meagre or non-existent post-release social services, disenfranchisement, and public ostracism.

In Florida, voters overwhelming approved a ballot initiative restoring the voting rights of released prisoners. In response, Governor DeSantis and Republican legislators imposed new conditions that thwarted both the will of the people and the enfranchisement of released convicts, denying the latter the right to change from convicts to full citizens. The governor’s goal was both to block new Democratic voter registration, and to insist upon the incorrigibility of people who have served time in prison – particularly Black men. DeSantis presents himself as the still point of a dangerous world in flux; he is the Führer who would protect us from change.

“You’ve changed”

The transformation of criminals back into productive citizens is dramatic. But in fact, everybody changes all the time, in ways big and small. When children and young adults receive an education, they change. When adults learn a new skill, they change. When protesters confront injustice, they change. When we fall in or out of love, we also change, as the song made famous by Billie Holiday attests:

You’ve forgotten the words, “I love you”
Each memory that we’ve shared
You ignore every star above you
I can’t realize you’ve ever cared
You’ve changed
You’re not the angel I once knew
No need to tell me that we’re through
It’s all over now, you’ve changed

(music by Carl Fischer, lyrics by Bill Carey)

The song is structured as testimony from the spurned lover. She’s so shocked at the changes in her beloved’s speech and behavior that she doubts her own former conviction that he “ever cared.” He was once an angel, but now he’s changed. When politicians today deny or undermine the constitutionally protected right to change, they deviously draw upon a notion many of us share: that we each possess a single, unchangeable nature, and that any deviation from that is a fault, possibly even a crime: “It’s all over now, you’ve changed.”

Tristram Shandy

That idea of unchanging individuality arose only recently in history, probably in the late 18^th and 19^th centuries, as an aspect of industrialization and the wider Romantic movement. Before that, elite opinion held that we possessed multiple selves that emerged according to context and need. With one interlocutor, we spoke and acted a certain way, with a different one, another; and each of those people was equally authentic. In his novel, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-67), Laurence Sterne rejected the idea that his hero was a unique individual whose life followed a single, prescribed trajectory, as novelists such as Daniel DeFoe, Samuel Richardson, and Henry Fielding were beginning to propose. Sterne’s narrative is full of interruptions, diversions, misunderstandings, and accidents. Far from being unique and unchanging, Tristram is a bundle of inconsistencies, and his life is based upon contingency; its direction is comically mapped by Sterne at the start of book six, chapter 40:

Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, 1760. Collection and photo, the author.

Curves, loops, zig zags, dips, diagonals, hills, valleys and even a spiral chart the narrative as much as the life of its protagonist. Sterne here appears to be borrowing from Plato borrowing from Heraclitus: “Everything changes and nothing stands still.”

The alternative, modern idea, that people have an unchanging, core identity was a defense against the depredations of capitalism: the destruction of the commons, the de-skilling of labor, and the alienation of workers from their employer, their work-product, their-co-workers and their own minds and bodies. The capitalist owns the workers – or at least the essential part of them called their labor power – and turns them into interchangeable commodities. In response, members of the bourgeois class, and that portion of workers who took their ideological cues from them, asserted their individualism and autonomy. You may control my labor, this segment of the lower and middle class argued, but you can’t control me; I’m a free and unchangeable self.

The bulk of organized workers in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, however, never doubted they were mere replaceable cogs in the capitalist machine. But the destruction of the union movement in the U.S. in the late 20^th and 21^st centuries, left workers victim to the psychologically affirming but politically disabling ideology of the unchanging, bourgeois individual. Change has now been reconfigured by American fascists as the very obverse of freedom — as a threat to individual bodily and psychic integrity. The braying crowds at MAGA gatherings all believe they are unique, autonomous individuals armored against change.

Trans rights matter

The Republican assault upon people who identify as trans epitomizes the broader, fascist war on change. The very word “trans”, short for transgender, mean movement from one position to another, and though it’s notable that symptoms of gender dysphoria frequently appear in young children, actual transitions occur at all stages of life. This suggests that trans may not be so much a medical or psychiatric condition, as a form of passage that people either choose or feel compelled to embrace. Though the actual percentage of Americans who identify as transgender is only 1.6% according to a recent poll, it’s plausibly been argued that all of us are trans in the sense that we are always performing gender, and that our location on the spectrum male to female is always in flux. Proof appears when someone – usually a man – loudly protests that he is “all man” or “100% male”; its then that his femininity is most apparent!

The relatively small percentage of people who claim trans identity renders them easy targets for discrimination, ostracism, and abuse. In Republican-majority states, legislators have passed or soon will pass hundreds of laws limiting the rights of trans individuals to receive the medical care they need, perform in public, or interact freely with children. Concern about trans bathroom use and trans athletes has reached a fever pitch in some places, despite the miniscule numbers of people impacted by the issue. Republican voters largely approve these measures while Democratic ones reject them. 63% of the former support laws banning gender-transition medical care to teens, and 61% would forbid or highly regulate drag performances. In my home state of Florida, a proposed new law would forbid gender-affirming care for teens and strip parental rights from parents who seek it out of state. Doctors as are also targeted by this bills. They could lose their license and be charged with a felony for providing gender-affirming care.

As bad as are these anti-trans laws, they are a subset of other laws and initiatives that undercut the right to change. New laws in Republican states (or proposed by Republican legislators) ban the teaching of subjects that might cause students to believe that the U.S. is morally culpable for slavery, or that racism was fundamental to the nation’s founding. Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri introduced a bill that would make schools ineligible for federal funding if they teach that the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, or Pledge of Allegiance are the product of white supremacy. A new law in Texas requires the teaching of “informed American patriotism” and acknowledgement of “the deepest and noblest purposes of the United States and Texas.” A Florida law forbids any school requirement that university students “attend or participate in any training or orientation that teaches, advocates, acts upon, or promotes divisive concepts.”

The goal of these laws is to prevent people from changing their gender and changing their politics. Florida’s latest anti-abortion law, which if upheld by the Florida Supreme Court, will deny women access to abortion beyond six weeks of their pregnancy, aims to prevent women the right to freely decide about their own bodies and futures. Their agency – their opportunity to make choices and change directions in their lives — will be circumscribed by their biology and the presidential aspirations of the Florida governor. So too, will the freedom of all of us – our right to change – be severely limited if the fascists in Washington. D.C., Mar a Lago, Tallahassee and elsewhere are not stopped.

Stephen F. Eisenman is Professor Emeritus of Art History at Northwestern University and the author of Gauguin’s Skirt (Thames and Hudson, 1997), The Abu Ghraib Effect (Reaktion, 2007), The Cry of Nature: Art and the Making of Animal Rights (Reaktion, 2015) and other books. He is also co-founder of the environmental justice non-profit,  Anthropocene Alliance. He and the artist Sue Coe have just published American Fascism, Still for Rotland Press.