Thursday, March 09, 2006

Snuffing History With "The Big Lie"

Developing...

The academic Mary Berry is a former head of the US Commission on Civil Rights and a former chancellor of the University of Colorado at Boulder. I think that her ideas about civil rights, the FBI, and "genocide" in 20th century America are a lot like Ward Churchill's.

Mary Berry mischaracterized the policies of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society
genocidal” because they helped black women get access to family planning–something that more affluent, white women had. (At this time, "family planning" meant information about contraception, not abortion.)

President Johnson did so much to try to get justice and better opportunities for black people. The Great Society was not a “campaign of genocide.” [Washington Monthly; 10/1/1987; Glastris, Paul]

Women can’t escape poverty if they don’t have access to family planning. To characterize what was happening to blacks in the 1960s as “the threat of genocide” is really crazy.

Here is what Berry and John Blassingame wrote in their 1982 book, Long Memory: The Black Experience in America:

“Although most historians have dismissed the claims of Afro-Americans that the United States had inaugurated a campaign of genocide against black people in the 1960s as unfounded, hysterical charges, the threat of genocide was real. It was roughly comparable to the threat faced by Jews in the 1930s.” [Washington Monthly; 10/1/1987; Glastris, Paul]
Berry even celebrated Stalin’s Soviet Union and Mao’s China. In my opinion,"civil rights activist” Berry was an ideological opponent of the US and an apologist for two of the biggest mass-murderers in the 20th Century. Tens of millions of people died of starvation or were murdered in Stalin's USSR. Mao is responsible for the deaths of 70 million Chinese people in peacetime.

Berry praised the partisan indoctrination of the education system in communist China. She said that Chinese college students “must develop what they call socialist consciousness and culture," and that this was was no cause for criticism. “It would be both cheap and easy for us here in America to denounce that approach.” [Washington Monthly; 10/1/1987; Glastris, Paul]

It is not called “civil rights” when a student has to “develop socialist culture and consciousness” as a condition of an education. This is called a totalitarian one-party dictatorship.

Barry said that black Americans didn’t embrace communism during the depression only because they were “subjected to a massive barrage of propaganda from American news media, [so] few of them knew about Russia’s constitutional safeguards for minorities, the extent of equal opportunity, or the equal provision of social services to its citizens.” [Washington Monthly; 10/1/1987; Glastris, Paul]

Tens of millions of ordinary Soviet citizens were being shot, starved, worked to death, and frozen. There were no constitutional safeguards or provision of social services for them. There was no free speech to criticize the mass murder of millions. Communists allow free speech only for themselves. Everyone else goes to prison for slander.

In the USSR this was Article 70 of the Constitution: Anti-Soviet Agitation and Propaganda (ie telling the truth).

That Berry did not care two-hoots about real educational success for minority students is shown by this example:

“The folks at the University of Colorado in Boulder, where she was chancellor [1976—?], know what can happen when Berry is put at the helm of a large organization. In 1977 English professors had decided that minority students should not receive credit for summer courses given by the Educational Opportunities Program (EOP) because the classes were “remedial.”The faculty argued that “high-risk” minority students, though helped by the courses, were still entering fall classes seriously deficient in language skills.

Minority students and EOP officials protested. Berry and the English department reached a compromise under which the students would receive credit for the summer courses but would also have to take freshman English. Simple enough, until 25 minority students barricaded themselves in the dean’s office. Berry, who had already left for Washington, came back to campus to negotiate. (She had told the university the federal job would last only a year and the U.S. Senate that she expected to stay in Washington indefinitely. Angry officials in Washington and Colorado were just discovering the conflicting statements when Berry flew back to Boulder to defuse the crisis.) Outside, according to the Denver Post, minority students led a rally to support the “struggling masses’ inside, calling the course compromise “racist’ and demanding “destruction of the capitalist system which the University of Colorado represents.’
After meeting with the students, Berry announced a new policy: if the students would be nice enough to leave the building without tearing it apart, the university would grant all their demands–no freshman English requirements; EOP, not the English department, gets control of the classes; amnesty for the protesters. English professors were beside themselves with anger and drew up a petition demanding that she be censured. But Berry was already back in Washington, leaving the university to clean up the mess. ” [Washington Monthly; 10/1/1987; Glastris, Paul]

Interestingly enough, Ward Churchill , who called the 9-11 victims “little Eichmans” and their murderers “heroes” moved to Boulder in 1976, too, and began working in the Boulder school system’s Indian EOP program and also got a job at CU in 1978.
http://www.pirateballerina.com/files/chronology.htm

This EOP (Equal Opportunity Program) did not give the kids equal opportunities. The kids got to take a remedial English course and count it as Freshman English. This really kept the minority students ignorant.

So the minority children did NOT get equal rights because of this EOP program. The EOP was really being used to undermine the English department requirements and the students’ right to an equal education.

The EOP used the students and the threat of violence and property destruction to get power. The destruction of public property and the destruction of the English department requirements to the EOP is not civil rights. It is thuggish intimidation.


Links for Washington Monthly article pages 4 and 5:
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1316/is_v19/ai_5264889/pg_4
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1316/is_v19/ai_5264889/pg_5
In 1999 Mary Berry, then the Chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, became involved in the controversy about the so-called uninvestigated deaths at Pine Ridge:

"In response to criticism from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, the FBI released a report Monday it says reconciles 57 unresolved deaths of American Indians on or near the Pine Ridge Reservation during the early 1970s.
Members of the American Indian Movement and other reservation residents for decades have accused the FBI of covering up or ignoring dozens of slayings during the '70s.

But the FBI says only six of the 57 deaths it studied are unsolved. The vast majority have been cleared by arrests or were never crimes, according to the report.
"The FBI got a definitive list of people who were supposedly murdered on Pine Ridge. We took that, and tried to put out the truth," said Chip Burrus, FBI assistant special agent in charge of Indian Country.


The chairwoman of the Civil Rights Commission, who has lambasted the FBI for its apparent nonchalant attitude toward the deaths, said Monday the report might not be enough to appease distrustful reservation residents."


"We have no way of knowing about the accuracy of the reporting, but I'm pleased that that the FBI is attempting to be responsive by accounting for these cold cases," said Chairwoman Mary Francis Berry, who suggested that congressional hearings or a grand jury might be the solution.

"Such an inquiry may inspire greater confidence (in the FBI), by the Native American people."
The American Indian Movement blames the FBI for not conducting a thorough investigation into each of the cases, which the movement considers AIM casualties.
During December 1999 hearings before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in Rapid City, Berry and other commission members chastised senior FBI officials for a lack of accountability in the deaths.


Monday, the FBI responded.
In a Justice Department document titled: Accounting for Native American Deaths, Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, South Dakota: A report of the FBI Minneapolis Division, the bureau dissects each of the 57 deaths its says it came from media outlets. The document provides the victim's name, allegations surrounding the deaths and the agent's findings.


"We can't do our job without the trust of the people of Pine Ridge," Burrus said. "This booklet tells the truth."


I think that this whole dishonest business of claiming that the FBI was complicit in murders and not investigating them was the result of false rumors spread by AIM and by Ward Churchill's constantly morphing claims about FBI-backed death squads murdering AIM activists. Mary Berry thinks that China and the Soviet Union have civil rights and that America was trying to commit genocide in the 1960s. I don't believe anything Mary Berry says about the FBI. She is a dishonest scholar and an operative for propagandists, not a human rights activist.

Ward Churchill wrote his claims that 342 Indians had been murdered in the Soviet-influenced Covert Action Information Bulletin. The purpose of this publication was to smear the CIA and FBI. http://legendofpineridge.blogspot.com/2006/02/342-indians.html

To smear the FBI, AIM and Churchill spread false rumors about the deaths of people that even their relatives knew were untrue:

"Joseph Swift Bird lost his brother in January 1975. AIM says Leon Swift Bird was killed by members of the Guardians of the Oglala Nation, an armed force working under tribal auspices.

Joseph, now 79, heard the rumors but always knew the truth.


No one bothered to ask, he said. Leon was stabbed by his girlfriend.


"They were both drinking, argued a bit, and she put the knife to him," he said, adding he hopes the report will stop the rumors about his family." http://ishgooda.org/peltier/tuesdayarticle2.htm


Here is a quote from a good article in an Indian publication about how AIM squelched Indian voices and how the FBI tried to give them a voice.

For many years the American Indian Movement and the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee made a list of 64 names public with explanations that no investigation was conducted or that investigations into the deaths were insufficient. On July 10, the FBI fought back and issued a 30-page booklet that briefly explains cases in question. It does address the eight deaths that occurred along Rapid Creek in Rapid City within the last several years. "The publication is part of our attempt to correct the many, many myths circulating on the Internet and on the reservations," said Chip Burrus, assistant special agent in charge of the FBI's Minneapolis division. "For many years, rumors of unresolved murders of Native Americans have come to our attention," wrote Douglas J. Domin, special agent in charge of the Minneapolis Division in the forward of the booklet. "At times, these allegations represented that there were hundreds of murdered Native Americans that had not been investigated by the FBI. The names of murder victims were not attached to the rumors and addressing the allegations could not be accomplished," Domin stated. Burrus intended to release the booklet to tribal elders at Pine Ridge, but when he started in Kyle he began handing them out in parking lots as well. He dropped the report at 18 different locations on the reservation. He said the FBI could not do its job if tribal members do not trust the work done by the FBI. "I hope the document will stop the idea that the FBI lets murders go uninvestigated," Burrus said. "I was really surprised. Our reception was favorable. Some people we gave the book to said we should take it down to the Red Cloud Building. We did not get a negative response there and they said they would pass it along to the elders."
http://www.indiancountry.com/content.cfm?id=747

I think Ward Churchill and AIM just made up a big communist lies about these deaths to smear the FBI. To smear the FBI he has to shut-up Indian voices. As noted in an earlier post, I think he plagiarized his big lie about the "reign of terror" on Pine Ridge from the FBI file on the Osage Indian Murders. http://legendofpineridge.blogspot.com/2006/02/osage-indian-murders-and-legend-of.html

The Osage Indian murders were also called a "reign of terror."
I think that Churchill even copied that term from the Osage history. However, to solve the Osage murders, the FBI and the Indians worked together to catch the criminals who were killing Indians and some white people, too. Ward Churchill couldn't stand for anyone to know that the FBI got justice for the Osage, so he made up his Legend of Pine Ridge to cover-up the Osage-FBI record of cooperation. He cannibalized Osage-FBI history and snuffed out the true history of the events at Pine Ridge with his fabrications.

Ward Churchill wants the Indians to distrust the FBI. If the Indians distrust the FBI and don't cooperate with the authorities, the authorities can't do a good job of protecting people. I think that suits Ward Churchill just fine. He is a despicable person who doesn't really care about Indian rights at all. In fact, the worse things are for Indians, the better it is for Churchill's anti-FBI propaganda.

What Ward Churchill cares about is trashing the FBI in the eyes of the American people.

I am not saying that the FBI is perfect or that they never make mistakes, but Churchill's propaganda is dishonest and destructive of human rights for all Americans.

Soon I will write about how lawyer-operatives with ties to Ward Churchill spread the lie that the government was protecting a ring of powerful pedophiles who had murdered Jonbenet Ramsey in Boulder Colorado. This was virtually the same lie that Churchill told the people on Pine Ridge---that the government was protecting death squads who had murdered Indians who were AIM activists.

Squirm little Wardo, squirm!




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