The Pussy Riot Trial Was a Warning for US Universities

The 2012 trial of Russian punk band Pussy Riot was a scandalous case of censorship dressed up as preventing offense. Claims that US campus protests over Gaza represent “faith-based harassment” are doing the same thing.

By Spencer Adler

July 29, 2024

Source: Jacobin


Yekaterina Samutsevich (Pussy Riot) at the Moscow Tagansky District Court | Photo: Denis Bochkarev, public domain wikimedia commons



Three women sit before their country’s highest deliberative body, on trial for incitement of hatred against a religious group. Their statements, which rigorously distinguish political speech from criminal harassment, earn widespread condemnation from liberal and conservative commentators alike. In the eyes of the federal government and the court of public opinion, these women have crossed an unspoken boundary on acceptable political discourse. Calls for their public punishment abound.

One would be forgiven for confusing this scenario with the 2012 trial of Russian punk band Pussy Riot. In fact, I’m referring to the recent Congressional hearings on antisemitism at college campuses, which began on December 5, 2023, in Washington, DC. University of Pennsylvania president Elizabeth Magill and Harvard University president Claudine Gay resigned after backlash to their testimony, while the leaders of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Columbia University also faced immense pressure to step down. While the state-sanctioned cases against Pussy Riot and the Ivy League presidents differ vastly in context, content, and consequences, they rely upon the same tactic: invoking accusations of religious intolerance, faith-based harassment, and faith-based animus as a reason to censor political speech. The repercussions of the Pussy Riot trial in Russia should give all Americans pause as they consider the appropriate tools, and actors, to combat hate speech.
Fighting Words

While the prosecution of Pussy Riot struck many Western observers as a cynical show trial, the charges against them reflect a rather conventional interpretation of free-speech limitations in the Russian context. On February 21, 2012, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina, and Yekaterina Samutsevich disrupted services in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior to sing the following lyrics from their song “Punk Prayer:”


Black robe, golden epaulettes

All parishioners crawl to bow

The phantom of liberty is in heaven

Gay pride sent to Siberia in chains

The head of the KGB, their chief saint,

Leads protesters to prison under escort

In order not to offend His Holiness

Women must give birth and love

Shit, shit, the shit of God!

Shit, shit, the shit of God!

They were apprehended before reaching the second verse and chorus, which contained more explicit denunciations of President Vladimir Putin. For this protest performance, the three women faced criminal charges of “disruption to the social order . . . motivated by religious hatred or enmity.” Patriarch Kirill of Moscow asserted that “Nadia has a plan . . . to destroy church and state,” while a commentator for state television declared that “a sin must be called a sin, not a political act.” Aliokhina’s explanation that “God’s shit” referred to the relationship between church and state, rather than religion itself, resonated with an international audience. However, Putin’s argument that “we must protect the feelings of believers” reflected the dominant response in Russia.

In both Russia and the West, the apparently simple notion of free speech becomes complicated when it clashes with religious freedom. Soviet history helps clarify the rationale for prosecuting anti-Orthodox political statements as hate crimes. In an English-language interview for Russia Today, which touched on the events, Putin cited the communists’ persecution of Orthodox believers to justify the punishment of Pussy Riot. Although the idea that punk singers could destroy the Orthodox Church seems ludicrous, the memory of Bolshevik radicals suppressing religion remains fresh for many devout Russians. The prosecution reasoned that “one may not spit at another or poke a person in the eye. One may not insult those who have different beliefs.” This argument invokes the “fighting words” restriction on statements that, “by their very utterance, inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace.” Do the location and choreography of Pussy Riot’s song “Punk Prayer” qualify the lyrics as “fighting words”? American courts have historically protected similar protests, but powerful organizations across the political spectrum seek to censor speech that disrupts religious worship. The Anti-Defamation League claims that a 2023 anti-Israel march in St. Louis, which led protesters by a synagogue, infringed “on the right of Jewish people to pray without harassment.” This logic echoes the Russian prosecution’s argument that Pussy Riot had deprived worshippers “of their dignity” and freedom to pray in peace.

Moreover, the Russian government employed its doctrine of “sovereign democracy” to sacralize the state and deny the political nature of “Punk Prayer.” Putin’s party, United Russia, developed the concept of sovereign democracy in 2006 to restrict viewpoints and actors that ostensibly threatened Russian sovereignty. The ruling elite has cynically interpreted this notion to imply that a stable dictatorship reflects the will of the narod, or common folk. However, the basic logic of sovereign democracy can be compatible with democratic principles. In his influential 2006 speech at a United Russia rally, Kremlin ideologist Vladislav Surkov attacked a variety of perceived threats to Russian sovereignty: Western cultural imperialism, military patronage networks such as NATO, and economic globalization. He proclaimed that these forces imperil Russian values, norms, and traditions, which largely derive from Orthodox Christianity. Fundamentally, Surkov argued that certain issues are too important to be left to democracy — an idea with surprising sway in liberal democracies themselves. The Senate, the Electoral College, the Bill of Rights, the House Un-American Activities Committee, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — these measures and countless others attempted to limit the influence of foreign agents, white supremacists, populous states, communists, and similar groups that could threaten “liberal values” by winning democratic elections.

The trial of Pussy Riot illustrates the danger of the sovereign democracy doctrine, especially when the state locates its sovereignty in organized religion. In an essay on the Pussy Riot affair, anthropologist Anya Bernstein documents the state’s efforts to strip “Punk Prayer” of its political message. She links Putin’s claim that Pussy Riot threatened the “moral health of our society” to the trial judge’s statement that “Punk Prayer” did not count as political speech because no politicians’ names were uttered in the church. Bernstein argues that the prosecution employed Orthodox notions of heresy or blasphemy in their case against the band — as she points out, Putin himself declared criticism of the Orthodox Church an offense against the Russian state. The state prosecutors recast Pussy Riot’s political performance into an apolitical desecration of sacred space. By imprisoning the performers, the government restricted its notion of “politics” to the official actions of elected politicians, excluding gender, religion, or any other social issues.

The government response to anti-Israel speech at American universities bears troubling resemblances to the prosecution of Pussy Riot. In particular, members of Congress have repeatedly equated anti-Zionism with antisemitism and mischaracterized the constitutional limits on free speech, both during and after the December 5 hearings. In her questioning, Representative Elise Stefanik linked chants of “intifada” (Arabic for “uprising”) to calls for “genocide,” which implicitly equated the two and potentially led to the university presidents’ confused responses. Presidents Magill, Gay, and Kornbluth all maintained that calls to “genocide” only rise to the level of harassment in certain contexts, which earned the ire of Republican and Democratic lawmakers alike. Among many others who criticized the “unacceptable” statements, Democratic senator John Fetterman remarked, “it isn’t ‘free speech,’ it’s simply hate speech.” However, legal doctrine on the First Amendment supports the university leaders’ emphasis on context. For speech to become incitement, the plaintiff must prove a direct connection between statements and (potential) violence; for speech to qualify as harassment, it must be directed at specific individuals with the intent to bully, threaten, or infringe on a protected activity such as worship. Otherwise male chauvinists could successfully sue Pussy Riot for the song “Kill the Sexist!” because its lyrics endorse violence.
Official Censure

Since December 5, the federal government has pressured private universities to censor political speech well beyond restrictions in the Constitution. The House of Representatives passed a resolution on December 13 that stated, “President Magill has resigned, and the other Presidents should follow suit.” Federal elected officials have repeatedly called on university leaders to arrest and punish student protesters, with Speaker Mike Johnson even demanding the deployment of the National Guard. Although less direct than the Russian model, Congress’s use of investigations, public hearings, and the leverage of funding to achieve its aim counts as state censorship nonetheless. Why does censorship at private, Ivy League universities pose a threat to free speech more broadly? First, academic freedom translates the abstract ideal of free speech into societal practice by providing a relatively open and democratic forum for different viewpoints. Second, pro-Palestinian protesters on campus already risk being doxxed and blacklisted from future academic or professional endeavors. Official censure from the university, which impacts students’ educational disciplinary records, immigration status, and access to on-campus housing, has a chilling effect on speech.

Even before the new year, developments within the University of Pennsylvania administration painted a grim picture of the censorship to come. The New York Times has chronicled the monthslong effort of Zionist billionaire Marc Rowan to oust president Magill and board chairman Scott L. Bok. Following their ouster, the Washington Post published a column by Claire Finkelstein, law professor and member of the school’s Open Expression Committee, entitled “To fight antisemitism on campuses, we must restrict speech.” Finkelstein asserts that “calls for genocide against Jews — or even proxies for such sentiments, such as calling for intifada against Jews or the elimination of Israel by chanting ‘from the river to the sea’ — are, in the present context, calls for violence against a discrete ethnic or religious group.” Her claim that “such speech arguably incites violence” mischaracterizes the several decades of legal precedent on the “fighting words” doctrine. More alarmingly, her proposed ban of “proxies” for genocidal statements dangerously conflates anti-Zionism with antisemitism. The chant “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” calls for the end of a Jewish-majority ethnostate, but the phrase makes no mention of the type of state that should come in its place. By characterizing this chant as an endorsement of genocide, Finkelstein suggests that Palestinians are incapable of living in a multicultural democracy.

Finkelstein’s essay underscores the Israeli sovereign democracy doctrine that limits criticism of Zionism. In her final trial statement, Pussy Riot member Yekaterina Samsutevich declared, “Orthodox culture does not belong solely to the Patriarch.” The state proved her right in one important sense: the imprisonment of Pussy Riot demonstrated that Orthodox culture belongs to the Patriarch and the Kremlin, but not to the people. The Israeli government, which has appropriated Jewish religious symbols into its national iconography, makes a similarly broad claim over Jewish culture. Israel equates rejection of a Jewish state with hostility toward Jews and their right to exist. Whereas Russia censors domestic criticism of the relationship between church and state, Israel manages to restrict speech abroad as well. The trial of Pussy Riot clearly illustrates the danger posed by any ethnoreligious regime that seeks to control the bounds of political discourse.

Spencer Adler is a cellist and recent graduate of Yale University, where he was secretary of Yale Young Democratic Socialists.

AMERIKA

‘No Children In The Village’: Tribes’ Losses To Indian Boarding Schools

"My aunt said after we all left, after the planes came and we all left, she said the village was so quiet because there was no children. No children in the village," another student from Alaska told a panel convened to hear from boarding students...

By Debra Utacia Krol 

July 31, 2024

Source: Arizona Republic

Photos of the Phoenix Indian School Visitor Center, which is dedicated to sharing the history of the Phoenix Indian School.

More than 18,000 children were shipped off to faraway schools in the late 19th and 20th centuries. Nearly 900 known deaths occurred in the 417 federal-run institutions, along with uncounted cases of trauma, abuse, neglect, poor nutrition and despair. Entire generations paid the price for a failed federal policy.

These and other facts punctuated the second report on the troubled legacy of Indian boarding school policies and the federal government’s attempt to assimilate tribes by removing children as young as age 4 to military-style schools.

But it was the personal accounts that stood out Tuesday in the second and final volume of a groundbreaking report on the toll the federal Indian boarding schools exacted on tribal communities, families and children.

“I think the worst part of it was at night, listening to all the other children crying themselves to sleep, crying for their parents, and just wanting to go home,” one former student said.

“My aunt said after we all left, after the planes came and we all left, she said the village was so quiet because there was no children. No children in the village,” another student from Alaska told a panel convened to hear from boarding students and their families.

Interior Secretary Deb Haaland released the report Tuesday, following up on the first from 2022. This one contained more accurate information about how federal assimilation policies, including boarding schools and the wholesale removal of children handed off for adoption by non-Native families, caused havoc and disruption in Indigenous communities throughout the U.S.

This map shows some of the federal Indian boarding school sites that were examined in an Interior Department report. Source: Department of the Interior

Federal Indian boarding schools examined

Haaland launched the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative in 2021 to investigate and document the “troubled legacy” of how the 417 federal schools and another 1,025 religious and privately operated schools worked to assimilate Indian children by removing them from their homes to sometimes remote military-style schools where they were systemically deprived of language, culture and family life.

“We’re here because our ancestors persisted,” Haaland said during a call with reporters Tuesday. “It’s our duty to share those stories with the world.”

The Interior Department’s team identified 417 Federal schools operating on 451 sites across 37 states or then-territories, including 22 schools in Alaska and 7 schools in Hawaii, between 1819 and 1969. The report found that religious organizations operated nearly half of the 417 federal schools, while another 59 schools run by religious groups received federal dollars.

Bryan Newland, assistant secretary for Indian Affairs, said investigators also identified 1,025 other institutions that were not run by the federal government but by religious organizations.

The report also provided detailed profiles on the federal institutions, Newland said.

Investigators pored through 103 million pages of records to locate at least 18,624 Indian, Alaska Native and Hawaiian children who were taken into the federal Indian boarding school system between 1819 and 1969, but they admitted the numbers are not complete.

For one thing, the report noted, children in the system outside of the study period would not be counted. Also, records from non-federal religious or private schools were not available. Other schools like day schools, sanitariums, asylums, orphanages, stand-alone dormitories and schools operated without government support also were not counted.

The report also estimated that more than $23.3 billion in fiscal year 2023 inflation-adjusted dollars were appropriated from 1871 to 1969 to run the schools and similar institutions and associated policies.

Deaths at boarding schools are likely underreported

The report identified 973 children who died while attending one of the federal boarding schools. That number included 249 students from Arizona tribes. The three largest tribes in Arizona suffered the greatest losses. The Navajo Nation lost 135 children plus one from the Ramah Navajo Reservation in New Mexico; the four Apache tribes in Arizona suffered 49 deaths; and the O’odham tribes lost 41 students.

Those figures are also likely far less than the number of children who perished. Some burial sites contain human remains of multiple people or burials of people relocated from other sites. This prevents tribes from the ability to identify those individuals.

The report also identified schools with onsite and offsite burial sites. The Phoenix Indian School, which operated from 1891 to 1990, did not have an onsite cemetery to inter the estimated 23 children who perished there.

Students, their families and entire communities have endured disruption from the boarding school system for nearly 200 years, the report said. Tribes are dealing with domestic violence, substance abuse and adverse childhood experiences often resulting in reduced cognitive abilities through adulthood, along with other social ills.

Those effects include the government’s next failed tribal assimilation policy: the wholesale removal of Indian children to be adopted into non-Native families. That policy persisted until 1978 with the enactment of the Indian Child Welfare Act, although Native kids are still removed from homes at greater rates than other groups.

What’s next in ‘The Road to Healing’

The boarding school initiative included hearing the experiences of boarding school survivors and their families about the school experience and how it affected their lives and those of their descendants during “The Road to Healing,” a series of listening sessions across the U.S.

“We listened, we wept and we began to heal,” Haaland said.

The Interior Department held one of those sessions in the Gila River Indian Community in 2023.

The report includes eight recommendations for the federal government from Assistant Secretary Newland that aim to support a path to healing the nation, including:

1. Issuing a formal acknowledgment and apology from the U.S. government regarding its role in adopting and implementing national federal Indian boarding school policies.
2. Investing in remedies to the present-day impacts of the federal Indian boarding school system.
3. Establishing a national memorial to acknowledge and commemorate the experiences of Indian tribes, individuals, and families affected by the federal Indian boarding school system.
4. Identifying and repatriating remains of children and funerary objects who never returned from federal Indian boarding schools.
5. Returning former federal Indian boarding school sites to tribes.
6. Telling the story of federal Indian boarding schools to the American people and the global community.
7. Investing in further research regarding the present-day health and economic impacts of the federal Indian boarding school system.
8. Advancing international relationships in other countries with similar but their own unique histories of boarding schools or other assimilationist policies.

An oral history project launched in 2023 will continue to collect and make public boarding school students’ experiences. The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, which has been recording boarding school survivors’ accounts and advocating for support services, will receive $3.7 million in grant funding to help facilitate this project.

Newland and Haaland also said that language revitalization was one of the most-asked-for points during the 12-stop “Road to Healing” tour. Haaland said the departments of Education, Health and Human Services and Interior were developing a 10-year strategy to promote language revivals in tribal communities.

President Joe Biden has supported the generation of the report, Haaland said, and she expects him to read it. She believes Biden and First Lady Jill Biden support language revitalization efforts.

“President Biden has made many promises and kept many promises to Indian County,” Haaland said.

Newland said families and students have also been calling for community-based, trauma-informed healing care, family-strengthening programs and reductions in Native kids being pulled into foster care, and programs to address domestic violence to deal with the intergenerational effects of the schools and other federal policies.

“There’s a lot of work to be done to turn these broad recommendations into specific strategies,” Newland said.

Historians, scholars say it’s too little, too late

Dakota historian and Indian education history expert Jeanne Eder Rhodes believes the effort could be too little, too late. Rhodes, a retired history professor and co-author of one of the first definitive books on the history of Indian education, said the damage boarding schools inflicted on tribes is “so complicated that they really can’t fix it.”

For one thing, Rhodes said, the schools did such a good job of suppressing Indigenous languages that many tribes no longer have any living speakers, making revitalization difficult if not impossible. And, she said, larger tribes would most likely receive the lion’s share of any funding, leaving smaller tribes out.

Rhodes also said she believes the report is “reinventing the wheel,” pointing to earlier such reports like the Meriam Report, which among other findings showcased the poor conditions in the schools, inadequate diet, including foods like milk to which Indigenous kids were allergic, and the difficulties Native students returning from boarding school faced as they were not prepared to reassume their lives in tribal communities.

Because her stepfather worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, she got a waiver to attend public schools. Still, she and other Native students suffered similar abuses to what boarding school students endured.

“There was a perception that Indian kids weren’t capable of learning,” Rhodes said.

She went on to earn a Ph.D in history from Washington State University.

David Martinez, an Indian studies professor at Arizona State University, said the federal government “should be held accountable for all people who suffered from the egregious boarding school policies whether or not they are in recognized tribes.”

Martinez is enrolled in the Gila River Indian Community but is also a member of the Hia-Ced O’odham Tribe, the only unrecognized tribe in Arizona.

He said there were no recognized tribes until 1934 when the Indian Reorganization Act was enacted, and that many students from currently non-recognized tribes were pulled into the schools.

“The worst abuses in Indian boarding schools occurred before 1934,” Martinez said. “Justice for non-federally recognized tribes is not based on when the abuses happened but on the fact that they happened at all.”

Newland said abuses occurred in the schools well into the 1960s and 1970s but the department is aware that many Native people living with the harmful effects of the schools don’t live in their communities or are not members of recognized tribes. He also said the boarding schools may have had effects on federal recognition, particularly in Northern California.

“We’ve got to repair our relationship with all Indian people,” Newland said.

Federal Indian boarding school sites are shown on this map from an Interior Department report. (Source: Department of the Interior)

ICYMI

Canada Owes First Nations Billions After Making ‘Mockery’ of Treaty Deal, Top Court Rules

Court urges federal and Ontario governments to make payouts after ‘dishonourably’ neglecting 174-year-old deal. The Crown promised riches to First Nations in Canada – over 150 years on, they could finally get billions

By Leyland Cecco

July 29, 2024

Source: The Guardian


First Nations elders watch the Canada Day festivities in Calgary, Alberta - 2022 

| Image via wikimedia commons

An “egregious” refusal by successive Canadian governments to honor a key treaty signed with Indigenous nations made a “mockery” of the deal and deprived generations of fair compensation for their resources, Canada’s top court has ruled.

But while the closely watched decision will likely yield billions in payouts, First Nation chiefs say the ruling adds yet another hurdle in the multi-decade battle for justice.

In a scathing and unanimous decision released on Friday, Canada’s supreme court sharply criticized both the federal and Ontario governments for their “dishonourable” conduct around a 174-year-old agreement, which left First Nations people to struggle in poverty while surrounding communities, industry and government exploited the abundant natural resources in order to enrich themselves.

“For almost a century and a half, the Anishinaabe have been left with an empty shell of a treaty promise,” the court wrote in the landmark ruling.

The stark language reflects the enduring legacy of the colonial project first envisioned by the British government and continued after Canada gained independence and offers yet another example of major cases tilting towards Indigenous peoples. The court decision to highlight “egregious” ways in which governments have treated their agreements with nations could have far-reaching consequences, both for the affected communities and the country.

The case centered on a treaty signed in 1850 between the British Crown and a group of Anishinaabe nations on the shores of Lakes Huron and Superior. Known as the Robinson Treaties, the agreements, covering 35,700 sq miles (92,400 sq km) of land, included a rare “augmentation clause” that promised to increase annual payments “from time to time” as the land generated more wealth – “if and when” that payment could be made without the Crown incurring a loss.

Over the next 174 years, the lands and waters covered by the deal generated immense profits for companies – and substantial revenues for the province of Ontario. But in 1874, the annuities were capped in at $4 a person and never increased.

“Today, in what can only be described as a mockery of the Crown’s treaty promise to the Anishinaabe of the upper Great Lakes, the annuities are distributed to individual treaty beneficiaries by giving them $4 each,” the court wrote, singling out the “shocking” figure paid to beneficiaries. “The Crown has severely undermined both the spirit and substance of the Robinson Treaties.”

Among the key issues the court tackled was the novel “augmentation clause” in the treaty. The justices said that even though the treaty does not promise to pay a certain sum of money, “no party doubts that the Crown was able to increase the annuities beyond $4 per person without incurring loss, and that it should have exercised its discretion to do so.”

Finding the nation-to-nation agreement was an alliance of equals, the court called on the Crown to return “to the foundations of the treaty” and to “engage the honour of the Crown”, by increasing the annual payments. Failing to do so would be “patently dishonourable”, wrote justice Mahmud Jamal.

Lawrence Wanakamik, chief of Whitesand First Nation, told reporters the decision had been a “long time coming”.

“We have suffered all those years [with] no economic benefits to our community. It’s been hard over the years trying to make a whole community for Whitesand,” he said, holding back tears. “We do have other struggles to contend with, but you know, with this settlement … we’ll have a better community from this point on.”

Crucially, the ruling does not award a settlement to Superior Anishinaabe First Nations, who had previously argued they are owed C$126bn in back payments. An Ontario court ruled on this claim last year, but the supreme court ordered the ruling be held in reserve pending Friday’s decsion. The court also said the settlement ruling must remain unreleased for another six months so that both parties could come to an agreement.

But Wilfred King, chief of Gull Bay First Nation, said he was “a bit disappointed” by key parts of the ruling, namely the way in which the Crown proposes the figure it feels is fair.

“How do you negotiate when one side says, ‘Well, we think this is a fair amount?’”

Ontario has previously argued in court that far from growing rich, it has spent nearly C$4.2bn in its efforts to settle the north and open it up to industry.

For nations that have waited decades for compensation, the prospect of more legal wrangling is “unfortunate”, said King.

“Both Crowns – Canada and Ontario – were admonished by the court for making a mockery of the treaty. And it’s important that both Crowns understand why they were being criticized,” he continued.

The supreme court has given Ontario a six-month timeline to propose a new settlement with the First Nations groups on Lake Superior. The justices warned that if governments couldn’t settle fair compensation, the court would step in.

“I’m hopeful that the Crown comes to the table with clean hands this time and try to come to an amicable agreement,” said King. “We knew we were never going to come close to the C$126bn we believe we’re owed. But it just showed you the vast amount of resources that have been extracted from our territory without fair compensation.”

Leyland Cecco is a Canadian freelance photojournalist focusing on the intersection of culture, economics and the environment. He has covered the Middle East and North Africa for the last three years, and currently divides his time between Cairo and Toronto.

Will Leonard Peltier Die In Prison?

By Sarah Baum

July 30, 2024

Source: The Nation


Image by Kenny, Creative Commons 2.0

Leonard Peltier, one of America’s longest-serving political prisoners, could have been a free man today. He could have gone home to the little plot of land waiting for him in North Dakota that Indigenous groups and elders had prepared for him. He could have hugged his son, Chauncey, who he hasn’t seen outside the walls of a prison since Chauncey was 10. He could have lived out his final days in peace, or at least the approximation of it, after a lifetime of violence at the hands of the United States government, starting with his boyhood at the notoriously abusive, state-sponsored Indian Boarding Schools.

Instead, the US Parole Commission decided on July 2 that the ailing soon-to-be-octogenarian would spend the next 15 years—if he lives that long—in a federal penitentiary.

“They didn’t sentence him to death,” Nick Tilsen, an Indigenous activist who aided in the Peltier release efforts with the South Dakota-based NDN Collective, told The Nation, “but that’s what’s happening to him slowly, every day.”

The announcement came three weeks to the day after Peltier’s June 10 parole hearing, his first in well over a decade. It was a lot like his other legal proceedings, which is to say, highly unusual.

Many of the people who had led the charge to put Peltier behind bars in the first place, such as District Attorney James Reynolds and a top federal officer, were among those advocating for his release. But neither of those men—nor most of the character witnesses requested by Peltier’s legal team—were permitted by the government to take the stand. Only Tilsen, who had been coordinating Peltier’s release plan, and Peltier’s doctor had made the cut.

Most of the eight character witnesses Peltier’s legal team brought to speak on his behalf were deemed “inadmissible.” The Parole Commission didn’t give reasons as to why, but such quirks—to put it lightly—in the judicial process are not new for Leonard Peltier, a man who has spent nearly 50 years incarcerated for a crime he likely did not commit, thanks to a trial rife with prosecutorial misconduct and state-sanctioned violence.

To use that district attorney’s words: “[T]he continued incarceration of Mr. Peltier was and is injust. We [the FBI] were not able to prove that Mr. Peltier personally committed any offense.” To use Amnesty International’s words, Peltier is a “political prisoner”—jailed simply for being part of the American Indian Movement, or AIM.

Thirty sitting members of Congress (and countless former ones) have also called for Peltier’s release, as have the United Nations, Nelson Mandela, Pope Francis, the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa, Human Rights Watch, and the Democratic National Committee.

But Peltier’s defense committee told The Nation that the roster was stacked against him at his hearing. In contrast to Peltier’s two allotted witnesses, nearly a dozen people were brought in to speak out against him. The current FBI director, Christopher Wray, wrote to the commission calling Peltier a “remorseless killer.” Testimony also included the families of the two FBI agents at the heart of the Peltier case: Jack R. Coler and Ronald A. Williams. The pair were killed in a shootout at the Raging Bull encampment, located inside the Pine Ridge Reservation, on June 26, 1975.

Hundreds of thousands of pages of evidence have since been uncovered to suggest that Peltier’s conviction was the end product of unconstitutional tactics and surreptitious violence perpetrated by the feds. The Raging Bull shootout occurred in an era dubbed the “Reign of Terror” by Indigenous traditionalists who were routinely brutalized by the FBI, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the paramilitary faction of the US-installed tribal government, known as the Guardians of the Oglala Nation, or the Goon Squad. There were reportedly upwards of 60 unsolved murders across the reservation in one three-year period at this time. The FBI was known to turn a blind eye to, if not actively arm, the GOONs.

Peltier’s AIM codefendants were acquitted on homicide charges by an Iowa jury on the grounds that it was rational and necessary self-defense in the face of the government’s ongoing terror campaign. But Peltier, who had fled to Canada, had to be extradited, so his trial came later. This time, the FBI took the case to a federal judge who was“notoriously anti-Indian” and who barred all evidence pertaining to anti-Indigenous violence from the GOONs and the federal government. Key witnesses were blocked from the stand, or threatened and coerced into false testimony.

The jury found Peltier guilty of two counts of first-degree murder; he was given two consecutive life sentences.

Today, Peltier cannot even walk unassisted, let alone be a “danger to his community,” which is one of the considerations the Parole Commission must take into account. His lawyers told The Nation that for an incarcerated person, it can be near-impossible to access quality healthcare.

“The only consistent feature of his medical records is the near-universal lack of follow-up,” Moira Meltzer-Cohen, of the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee, said. “Even when it’s the prison’s own doctors recommending care, it just doesn’t happen.”

Moreover, in a maximum security prison, inmates are often thrust suddenly into lockdown—making reliable, routine care seemingly impossible, Meltzer-Cohen said.

But Jenipher Jones, a cocounsel on the case, said Peltier’s plight goes beyond the typical pitfalls of prison healthcare. “To withhold care from that political prisoner often means that attention is being diverted from advocacy, from pursuit of release,” Jones told The Nation. “It is forcing them to fight for their lives instead.”

Meanwhile, the FBI has leveraged its political power to keep Peltier locked up. Under the Clinton administration, The White House allegedly all but promised to free Peltier. His defense committee bought him clothes and his grandson prepared a bedroom for his homecoming.

Then, thousands of current and former FBI agents swarmed to Washington to protest Peltier’s clemency. Suddenly, and without warning, Clinton released his list of clemency grantees on January 20, 2001—without Peltier’s name on it.

Chauncey Peltier, Leonard Peltier’s oldest son, was with his father on the reservation on the day of the shootout. He recalls the long, winding road trips in his father’s orange Chevy van, fishing out on the lake, traveling with AIM demonstrators. He also remembers being 10 years old, entering the courthouse for his father’s trial—and being slammed against the wall by FBI agents who told him his “murdering dad would never walk free.”

It was just one more chapter in what the junior Peltier described as a lifetime of FBI harassment and violence on account of his last name, and a lifetime of loss.

“So many people tell me I sound just like him,” Chauncey Peltier told The Nation. “I feel like I’ve been robbed in this situation too, because my father’s been wrongfully incarcerated and he ain’t been there for us kids when we needed him.”

But Peltier’s reach has also spanned far beyond the prison walls—not just his story, but his words, his poetry, his art and his activism. From his cell in a supermax prison, Peltier has helped organize Indigenous-led mutual aid initiatives such as toy drives, collaborated with scholars to craft Indigenous-focused policy, and funded humanitarian initiatives by selling his artwork.

The elder Peltier was not available for interview at this time, impeded by both his declining health and the communications roadblocks of incarceration—phone calls and visits are severely limited. But in his 1999 memoir, he stood up for continued Indigenous resistance, and emphasized the importance of preserving the culture and heritage of his people.

“I am guilty only of being an Indian,” he wrote. “Being who I am, being who you are—that’s Aboriginal Sin.”

Peltier’s lawyers told The Nation they will be filing an appeal. There have also been continued demands for President Joe Biden to grant Peltier clemency—demands that will likely increase now that Biden is set to leave office in January.

USPS Letter Carriers Convention Shapes Up to Be Open Bargaining Showdown

By Tim Bash

July 30, 2024

Source: Labor Notes

Image by Nora Stamper



City letter carriers have been working without a contract for more than 400 days, and leaders of the Letter Carriers (NALC) still refuse to provide any substantive updates from bargaining. As rank-and-file anger boils over, a new group called Build a Fighting NALC (BFN) is building momentum to demand a stronger and more transparent contract fight next time.

We’re bringing an “Open Bargaining” resolution to the national convention, August 5-9 in Boston. As of this writing, two NALC state associations and 44 branches across the country have passed the resolution to show their support.

There was a time when the NALC, under the leadership of President Vince Sombrotto (1978-2002), used to engage in contract campaigns, hold rallies, make its demands public, and keep members informed of contract progress. Our resolution calls on the union to build on that legacy.

Union leaders have promised us over and over that contract resolution is imminent. But they share details only in closed-door meetings, where attendees are discouraged from sharing specifics with the membership. They insist we must trust them and trust their process.

If the parties reach an impasse in bargaining, the unresolved items will be taken to an arbitration panel and the resulting contract will be binding, with no opportunity for the 200,000 members to vote.

NALC leaders seem to be relying on management’s good faith. But in the daily life of a carrier, we don’t see much good faith coming from management. We work in often dangerous conditions and under increasingly strict metrics. For example, a carrier is supposed to take only 22 minutes to load a truck—no matter the volume of packages, no matter if you have to push a heavy cart through the snow. Though these work standards are not contractually enforceable and we can’t be disciplined over them, that doesn’t stop the threats and harassment.

Members have begun organizing to make ourselves heard, through a series of Zoom meetings with speakers from across the union. Out of these meetings, the BFN movement has landed on five demands to champion:An open bargaining strategy in future contract negotiations
A starting wage of $30 an hour (carriers currently start at $19.33)
An end to mandatory overtime
A “worker’s wage” for union officers
Fighting for the right to strike

GONNA BE INTERESTING

The leadership of the NALC has seen some controversy in recent months. President Brian Renfroe is facing charges brought by members of the Executive Council, including “abandoned position and dereliction/neglect of duty,” “making false or misleading statements about a NALC officer,” and “impaired driving after hours in a NALC-owned vehicle.”

Though the charges have mostly been dismissed, there will likely be an appeal to the national convention. This could lead to removal from office. Members at the convention will have a chance to reconsider the charges, and may vote on whether to follow the appeal’s suggestion to remove Renfroe from office.

Out of this disarray has emerged another organization, the Concerned Letter Carriers, led partly by carrier Corey Walton, host of the popular podcast “From A to Arbitration.” (These are not competing groups; Walton has also promoted the BFN movement on his show.) CLC’s goal is to replace the national leadership with members who will put the fighting spirit back in the union and fix the failures of the current regime.

Already two members of the Executive Council have announced their candidacy to replace Renfroe in the 2026 elections; one is backed by the CLC. They will both have to differentiate themselves from the old guard.

All this sets up what promises to be a national convention to remember. The debate over open bargaining has already begun; leaders who claim the strategy of secrecy is the only way have been making their case to members at various meetings and in union publications.

And while Renfroe fosters a friendly relationship with USPS Postmaster General Louis Dejoy, many members are working to oppose DeJoy’s “Delivering for America” plan that would close and consolidate scores of postal facilities. The group Communities and Postal Workers United has been fighting to make its voice heard at meetings of the Postal Board of Governors, the body that could fire DeJoy.

BFN hopes to awaken a long dormant rank and file—offering carriers a cause to fight for and a way to be heard. The time has come for change in the NALC.

Tim Bash is a letter carrier in Minneapolis and on the interim coordinating committee of Build a Fighting NALC.

IDF Just Destroyed Key Rafah Water Facility Rachel Corrie Spent Her Last Month of Life Defending

By Younis Tirawi

July 30, 2024
Source: Drop News Site



On Friday, I discovered a video posted on Instagram by an Israeli soldier from the 601st Combat Engineering Battalion, showing the calculated demolition of a chief water facility in Rafah. The video, in three parts, shows Israeli soldiers planting explosives inside and around the water pumps of a facility in the occupied city. The video—which is captioned in Hebrew, “Destruction of the Tal Sultan water reservoir in honor of Shabbat”—ends with footage of the water facility being blown up. The soundtrack is a song produced by soldiers of the 51st Golani Brigade with lyrics like, “We will burn Gaza… shake all of Gaza… for every house you destroy we will destroy ten.”

The water facility, also known as the Canada Well, is situated in Tel Sultan Neighborhood, in the western part of Rafah city. U.S. human rights activist Rachel Corrie, who was crushed to death in 2003 by an Israeli military bulldozer while attempting to prevent demolitions in the city, spent much of her time during the last month of her life helping to protect the municipality workers at the Canada Well. The workers were repairing damage done to the well due to the Israeli military bulldozers in the area, according to Gordon Murray, one of her fellow activists.

A report Corrie wrote just weeks before her murder lays out the work she and other activists with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM)—“human shield work with the Rafah Municipal Water authority,” she described it—were doing with local Palestinian workers to protect the well and local water system. “The workers are currently building a barrier surrounding the Canada Well…in the Canada-Tel El Sultan area of Rafah,” she wrote. “This well along with the El Iskan Well…was destroyed by Israeli bulldozers on 30th January [2003]. On several occasions the internationals have witnessed shooting from military vehicles on the settler road which passes along the northwestern edge of the sand-dunes and agricultural areas on the outskirts of Rafah.”

Corrie’s report added that the Canada Well had the capacity to produce 35 percent of Rafah’s total water supply back then. The defense of the water supply, she noted, led “to ISM activists coming under fire.”

The soldiers who blew up the water system this week were carrying out a strategy that has been explicitly articulated by the Netanyahu government. In October, an adviser to Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, Giora Eiland, laid out the strategy to deprive Palestinians not just of water from outside Gaza, but to disrupt their ability to pump and purify water locally, on the IDF’s radio station, GLZ. “Israel, as I understand, closed the water supply to Gaza,” said Eiland in a Hebrew-language interview. “But there are many wells in Gaza, which contain water which they treat locally, since originally they contain salt. If the energy shortage in Gaza makes it so that they stop pumping out water, that’s good. Otherwise we have to attack these water treatment plants in order to create a situation of thirst and hunger in Gaza, and I would say, forewarn of an unprecedented economical and humanitarian crisis.”

The interviewer pushed back. “Giora, I want to check that I understand correctly. You are saying—get the residents of Gaza into thirst, into hunger. These are the terms you are using?”

“You understood correctly,” he said. “If you want to topple the Hamas regime, you won’t achieve that merely through aerial attacks. And a ground invasion, it has its benefits, [but] it also comes with great risks, and it’s unclear that the state of Israel needs to take these right now.”

For months, Israeli forces have been targeting vital water resources in the strip leading to starvation and, according to new reports, worsening access to clean water. Last week, the Israeli military and the Palestinian Ministry of Health reported that Poliovirus has been found in Gaza’s sewage, further intensifying the catastrophic humanitarian situation in the occupied enclave.

Our exposure of the video on Friday immediately sparked outrage, with some describing it as evidence of war crimes. The soldier quickly made his account private and deleted the stories.

The Canada well was built in 1999 with Canadian International Development Agency funding. While initial reporting, based on the soldier’s caption, called it a “reservoir,” according to Gaza’s coastal municipalities water utility, the Canada well is the main water facility in the city of Rafah and provides services to 50 percent of the city’s residents, mainly in West Rafah.

Monther Shoblaq, Director General of the Coastal Municipalities Water Utility, who oversaw the maintenance and renovation of the Canada Well, described the destruction as “scandalous evidence” of the Israeli army’s deliberate targeting of water and sanitation facilities.

Monther told Drop Site in an interview that his organization had provided the Israeli military with precise GPS coordinates for the Canada Well and all water facilities in the Strip, in coordination with the Red Cross. Despite these precautions, the well was blown up. The Canada well remained operational throughout the war until the Israeli military full invasion into the neighborhood in late May, he said.

“The solar panels at the facility enabled water services during the war for tens of thousands of people in the area, even with the electricity shutdown,” he said. “I was shocked when I saw the video. It’s not just that they targeted this water facility; it’s the fact that they planted explosives, celebrated the act on Instagram, and did so under the guise of honoring the Sabbath. It’s deeply cruel. This is the Canada Well in Tal al-Sultan—one of the most important water facilities in the city of Rafah.”

Monther recounts witnessing the complete destruction of one of Gaza’s vital water facilities located in West Khan Younis by the Israeli military. He requested that facility be designated a deconflicted area through OCHA and UNICEF, providing details about the employees and their families present inside. The military approved the request, and CMWU restricted access to only employees and their immediate family members. Despite this, during the Israeli military operations in Khan Younis, the facility was struck without warning, resulting in the deaths of four of its employees’ relatives. As a result, the water facility, which housed Gaza’s largest water tools and equipment, was left and subsequently utterly destroyed.

In the north, too, Gaza City’s municipal government has repeatedly reported deliberate attacks on water facilities in the city. A statement by the municipality on July 15 warned that the city is experiencing “a severe water crisis, with available water amounting to only a quarter of the pre-aggression supply at best, covering only 40 percent of the city’s area.”

A BBC analysis based on satellite data from May 9, three days after the Rafah invasion, found out that 50% of Gaza’s water and sanitation facilities had been damaged or destroyed since Israel began its offensive following the Oct 7 attack.

Ryan Grim and Hind Khoudary contributed reporting.

Update: Monday, July 29, 2024. The IDF has not yet provided a comment, but, according to Haaretz, army sources said senior commanders did not approve the destruction of the facility. The military, Haaretz reported, is conducting an initial probe, after which it will determine whether to open an investigation.

Right to Housing and Its Relation to Democracy

By Yavor Tarinski

July 30, 2024

Source: Transnational Institute of Social Ecology

Image by Cathy Crowe

Housing is absolutely essential to human flourishing. Without stable shelter, it all falls apart.
~Matthew Desmond[1]

The issue of housing is of fundamental importance that has a direct connection, among other basic rights, to democratic participation. Despite that (or because of it) it is being contested by capitalist forces worldwide. Capitalist forces, being on the offensive of submitting everything to the doctrine of profit-making, are in the process of also shifting the use of urban space from one serving communal needs, to one generating profits.

This results in the expulsion of urban residents (via rising rent prices etc.) away from whole sections of cities, so that space is made for profiteering. A phenomenon that can be observed in many cities around the world. One stark example is the Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte, where over 100,000 people live in occupied buildings, because of the housing crisis.[2]

As Peter Marcuse suggests, “neither cities nor places in them are unordered, unplanned; the question is only whose order, whose planning, for what purpose?”[3] In this sense, the current housing crisis is a product of structural adjustments of a system that favors certain social roles and behaviors over others. It is through the enforcement of scarcity over certain resources, which are often more than enough to satisfy the needs of the people,[4] that capitalism prompts societies to embark on wasteful consumerist lifestyles. As Samuel Alexander and Alex Baumann write:


The huge cost of land and housing has significant implications, affecting what we do for work, how much we work, our need for a car, and a range of other consumer habits. Our economy has developed in such perverse ways (particularly when it comes to land cost) that we are often locked into high-impact consumerist lifestyles.[5]

In other words, people are pressured to lead a passive type of life, where there is barely any time left outside of the work-consumption-sleep cycle. If someone dares to drift away from it, they run the risk of being deprived of vital resources for recreation. Once without them, people become marginalized, with different systemic obstacles and conservative prejudices standing on their way to go out of this marginalization.

People who are subjected to the stress of homelessness may have previous mental illness exacerbated, as well as have their mental state burdened by anxiety, fear, depression, sleeplessness, and substance use.[6] Homelessness thus sickens human beings, slowly crippling them in multiple levels. But despite that, we have seen many times that even under such violent conditions human beings are still capable to self-organize and fight to reclaim urban space for their recreational needs. This comes to show that no matter how grim a given condition my get, there is always potential for radical change, as long as people work collectively.

The absence of a right to housing should be viewed as an act of violence, as yet another means of keeping people engaged in passive consumerist lifestyle.

But a real democracy, one that is based on direct popular participation rather than on elections of representatives once every four years, requires social and individual autonomous activity. Political theorist and researcher Katy Wells underline the connection between housing and autonomy:


Individuals require somewhere they can sleep, prepare food, use the facilities of a bathroom, and be at leisure. Some of these are pre-requisites for basic health, and basic health is a pre-requisite for autonomy. Being able to relax and be at leisure is also a prerequisite of autonomous activity since otherwise we can never replenish our mental and physical resources.[7]

This relation is also highlighted by classical philosophers like Aristotle, according to whom:


The objective of work is usually to sustain our lives biologically, an objective we share with other animals. But the objective of leisure can and should be to sustain other aspects of our lives which make us uniquely human: our souls, our minds, our personal and civic relationships.[8]

In a truly democratic environment – one where everyone share power on equal basis – we can suggest that every member of the community will also have its personal space, where to be able to retreat from the public sphere and recreate. For a healthy civic life to be established, one cannot exist solely in the public sphere – i.e. in the agora – where it is exposed to encounter every possible member of the community. While stimulating, the debates and encounters produced in the public sphere need to be followed by citizens retreating to a personal sphere – i.e. oikos – where they can reflect on their own, or with their closest circle of people, on social matters and life in general. Without this symbiotic relationship between public and personal spheres, popular participation decays.

One example in history that points toward the relation between popular reclamation of power and right to housing is the Paris Commune, when the inhabitants of the city claimed for themselves the role of real citizens that directly participate in the management of their city through a network of revolutionary councils and sectional assemblies. In this revolutionary environment the rebellious Parisians decided, on 29 of March 1871, to suspend payment of rent. On 25 of April, the Commune also made the decision to requisition empty housing for the victims of bombing by the troops of Versailles[9], since by mid-April, the French army had began a bombardment of Paris.

In the more recent past, during the 1970s, a civil war broke in Lebanon. Due to severe capitalist crisis, the grassroots rebelled against the ruling elite, in an attempt to radically restructure Lebanese society. This uprising saw the emergence of people’s committees that undertook the management of cities, towns and villages. Sources refer that the inhabitants of the slums and refugee camps surrounding the capital city of Beirut have taken control of their own communities, and that government authorities were unable to enter the ‘belt of poverty’ for several months.[10] With the inhabitants reclaiming their control over their habitat, they refused to pay for rent or electricity. Instead, they give money over to the committees that administer the areas so that basic services can be provided.

In both cases, as well as in other historic moments, we see the implementation policies indicate that with the radical and equal redistribution of power also goes similar redistribution of urban space.

Nowadays the struggles for participation and space remain tightly interlinked. Initiatives for the Right to Housing and municipalist movements all can be viewed as different parts of the popular claim to a right to the city. Housing must be taken away from bureaucratic management (which by its nature tends to benefit the ruling oligarchies), and instead placed under the control of the collective citizenry (whose everyday life directly depends on). As 20th-century philosopher Harry Overstreet suggests:


Recreation is not a secondary concern for a democracy. It is a primary concern, for the kind of recreation a people make for themselves determines the kind of people they become and the kind of society they build.[11]

References:

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/mar/13/we-must-separate-the-idea-of-house-from-home-the-case-for-drastic-action-on-shelter

[2] Baruq. Casa encantada: A Portrait of the Fight for Housing in Belo Horizonte (Seditionist Distribution, 2024) p11.

[3] Peter Marcuse. ‘Not chaos but walls: postmodernism and the partitioned city’, in Postmodern Cities and Space. (Oxford: Blackwel, 1995), p244.

[4] https://www.housingevolutions.eu/project/the-empty-homes-initiative-tackling-irelands-housing-crisis/

[5] https://www.resilience.org/stories/2020-03-03/access-to-land-plus-a-participation-income-could-change-the-world/

[6] https://www.homelesshub.ca/about-homelessness/topics/mental-health#:~:text=The%20stress%20of%20experiencing%20homelessness,%2C%20sleeplessness%2C%20and%20substance%20use.

[7] Katy Wells (2019). ‘The Right to Housing’ in Political Studies, 67 (2), pp406-421.

[8] https://philosophybreak.com/articles/aristotle-on-why-leisure-defines-us-more-than-work/

[9] https://www.cadtm.org/The-Paris-Commune-of-1871-banks-and-debt#the_commune_s_positive_measures_dealing_with_rent_and_other_debts

[10] Georges Mehrabian. A Revolution Derailed: Lebanon in the 1960s and 1970s (Athens & Lebanon: Diethnes Vima & Dar Al Mousawar Al Arabi, 2023), p192.

[11] Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs. Recreation Act of 1962: Hearings Before the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs (Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1962), p32.