What we forget about Watts. The riot was spontaneous, leaderless
and fueled by a long-smoldering rage that is still burning.
By Walter Mosley
LA Times: August 9, 2005
WALTER MOSLEY is the author, most recently, of "Little Scarlet" (Little,
Brown, 2005), a mystery featuring Easy Rawlins and set five days after the
Watts riots.
WHAT WE remember about Watts and its environs that hot summer is not nearly
as important as what we forget. Many of us remember a young man arrested for
a crime he may or may not have committed, and the way the streets of Los
Angeles became a war zone. Whole blocks went up in flames. Dozens died. The
National Guard was called out. Five days of violence blazed and the whole
nation, the whole world, took notice.
What we don't remember, what many of us never really considered, was that
this was a mass political action that had no leaders, no apologists, no
internal critics. The Watts riot was a spontaneous act of a people who had
been oppressed, emasculated and impoverished for too long. It didn't matter
if the man being arrested was guilty or not. It didn't matter if the police
stood out in the street and said to go home. Who cared what they said or
what their laws said? Who cared about property that would never be ours?
The riot was a rebellion, a naturally formed revolution, an unconscious
expression of a people who had lived entire lives, many generations, in a
state of enforced unconsciousness. It was about people who were poor and
undereducated, people who had no motherland or mother tongue or even a
history as far as most of them knew.
I was 12 years old that summer. My parents had moved west by then, over near
Fairfax and Pico. But on the third night of the riot, I found myself being
driven through parts of town that were rife with burning, looting and
violence. One might think that this would provide me with an interesting
memory of that time. But I don't find it particularly enlightening. Violence
is merely a symptom of a deeper malady.
The citizens of Watts understood that if a black son was arrested, he was
likely to get brutalized, railroaded, blindsided, humiliated. And that it
didn't have much to do with whether he was innocent or guilty.
And so young people (and some old) poured gasoline into beer bottles, added
a rag and flicker and made a statement that had lain fallow in their hearts
for more years than they had been living, a statement that had been
whispered by ancestors so far back that its first utterance had been the
murmur of slaves.
The Watts riot was unity without direction, agreement without understanding.
This was not the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. This was not the
NAACP. This was not Paul Robeson or Jesse Owens or any other identifiable
group, movement or personality.
The Watts riot was a deep-seated anger at injustice that had gone on
unchallenged, that was intended to go on forever. There would be no true
power for black people. They did not deserve a history or a worldview or
even a place at most tables. The Watts riot was the product of an
intelligence that was unaware of itself. It was an action that was artless,
unstructured and unplanned.
So, what's so important about this? What lesson could we possibly learn
today from that 40-year-old expression of unrest?
Maybe some people reading these words already have an answer. Maybe they
know about the million black men and women languishing in prison -
overcrowded, bored and hopeless; they know about the millions more who are
soon to return to the penal system with its punitive rules and
representatives.
They know about the gangs that form in the vacuum of hope. They know about
the innocents and soldiers hung out to dry on foreign soil. They know about
the shrinking pot and the empty promises and the intentions of those in
power to keep the status quo.
The immediate and mostly unconscious result of the Watts riot was that some
people got a sense of bitter satisfaction while others learned to fear. But
this is not knowledge, not learning. The lesson, for black and white, was
taught but not learned.
People all over the world - in Darfur and Cleveland, Paris and Jakarta - are
suffering. They're angry and disaffected, lost and staring at TV screens or
podiums dominated by religious zealots. There's a thought somewhere in their
unconsciousness, a word waiting to be spoken.
This is what I am remembering when I think about that hot summer. I am
remembering a future that will be forgotten before we know it has happened.
***
From: John Jones
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=10664122
Nothing short of nukes will work
By Gwynne Dyer
New Zealand Herald: Aug 7, 2010
When Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the
highest-ranking American officer, was asked recently on NBC's Meet The Press
show whether the United States has a military plan for an attack on Iran, he
replied simply: "We do".
General staffs are supposed to plan for even the most unlikely future
contingencies. Right down to the 1930s, the US maintained and annually
updated plans for the invasion of Canada - and the Canadian military made
plans to pre-empt the invasion.
But what the planning process will have shown, in this case, is that there
is no way for the US to win a non-nuclear war with Iran.
The US could "win" by dropping hundreds of nuclear weapons on Iran's
military bases, nuclear facilities and industrial centres (cities) and
killing five to 10 million people. But short of that, nothing works.
On this we have the word of Richard Clarke, counter-terrorism adviser in the
White House under three administrations.
In the early 1990s, Clarke said in an interview with the New York Times four
years ago, the Clinton Administration had considered a bombing campaign
against Iran, but the military professionals told them not to do it.
"After a long debate, the highest levels of the military could not forecast
a way in which things would end favourably for the US," he said. The
Pentagon's planners have war-gamed an attack on Iran and they just can't
make it come out as a US victory.
It's not the fear of Iranian nuclear weapons that makes the US Joint Chiefs
of Staff so reluctant to get involved in a war with Iran. Those weapons
don't exist and the whole justification for the war would be to make sure
that they never do.
The problem is that there's nothing the US can do to Iran, short of nuking
the place, that would really force Tehran to kneel and beg for mercy.
It can bomb Iran's nuclear sites and military installations to its heart's
content, but everything it destroys can be rebuilt in a few years.
And there is no way that the US could actually invade Iran.
There are some 80 million people in Iran and, although many of them don't
like the present regime, they are almost all fervent patriots who would
resist a foreign invasion.
Iran is a mountainous country and big: four times the size of Iraq.
The Iranian army currently numbers about 450,000 men, slightly smaller than
the US Army - but unlike the US Army, it does not have its troops scattered
across literally dozens of countries.
If the White House were to propose anything larger than minor military
incursions along Iran's south coast, senior American generals would resign
in protest.
Without the option of a land war, the only lever the US would have on
Iranian policy is the threat of yet more bombs - but if they aren't nuclear,
then they aren't very persuasive. Whereas Iran would have lots of options
for bringing pressure on the US.
Just stopping Iran's oil exports would drive the oil price sky-high in a
tight market. Iran accounts for about 7 per cent of internationally traded
oil.
But it could also block another 40 per cent of global oil exports just by
sinking tankers coming from Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the other Arab Gulf
states with its lethal Noor anti-ship missiles.
The Noor anti-ship missile is a locally built version of the Chinese YJ-82.
It has a 200km range, enough to cover all the major choke points in the
Gulf. It flies at twice the speed of sound just metres above the sea's
surface and has a tiny radar profile. Its single-shot kill probability has
been put as high as 98 per cent.
Iran's mountainous coastline extends along the whole northern side of the
Gulf and these missiles have easily concealed mobile launchers. They would
sink tankers with ease and, in a few days, insurance rates for tankers
planning to enter the Gulf would become prohibitive, effectively shutting
down the region's oil exports completely.
Meanwhile, Iran would start supplying modern surface-to-air missiles to the
Taleban in Afghanistan and that would soon shut down the US military effort
there. (It was the arrival of US-supplied Stinger missiles in Afghanistan in
the late 1980s that drove Russian helicopters from the sky and ultimately
doomed the whole Soviet intervention there.)
Iranian ballistic missiles would strike US bases on the southern (Arab) side
of the Gulf and Iran's Hizbollah allies in Beirut would start dropping
missiles on Israel.
The US would have no options for escalation other than the nuclear one, and
pressure on it to stop the war would mount by the day as the world's
industries and transport ground to a halt.
The end would be an embarrassing retreat by the US and the definitive
establishment of Iran as the dominant power of the Gulf region. That was the
outcome of every war-game the Pentagon played and Mike Mullen knows it.
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are
published in 45 countries.
By Gwynne Dyer
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