Success, or Failure of a Political Movement

How to peacefully evolve out of our current political, social and economic black hole

- By Bahram Maskanian - June 08, 2012

Success, or failure of any struggle and mass movement for raising public awareness to achieve political, economic and social justice evolutionary changes, directly depends upon the understanding and implementation of the following simple and easily achievable nonviolent civil disobedience principles.

Nonviolent Civil Disobedience:
Is the means of struggle for achieving political, economic and social justice transformation, utilizing nonviolent action as a strategy for reform, rejecting the use of violence for accomplishing the desired political, economic and social justice evolutionary goals.

Mass demonstrations alone throughout the true-recorded history have proven highly ineffective, for the simple fact that the criminal ruling elites could easily and patiently wait-out the demonstrators.  Knowing full well that in a day, or two, they eventually have to leave to tend their lives, children, work, farm, etc. 

Achieving success in any struggle, or mass movement requires far more than just public demonstrations.  Demonstrations must be parallel with, or to be followed by unbending and long-term massive civil disobedience actions, such as, but not limited to: boycott, non-participation and non-cooperation, maintained and implemented under the guidelines of nonviolent principles.

Known Fact About Revolutions:
One of many well known hidden facts about social and political struggles, or mass movements, or the so-called revolutions is that they were all orchestrated and paid for either by a foreign power for colonial exploitations, or in support of, or by a rival criminal elites in search of more money and power.  Not a single revolution has ever been truly instigated and funded by the people, anywhere in the world.  That includes: the American, French, Russian Bolshevik, or Communist, Iranian, Cuban, Chinese, and all the rest.

The U.S.A. Democracy Show - Screenplay:
Democracy is the biggest scheme and piece of fiction perpetrated on the people of the world, since the fabrication of the other big fibs, the patriarchal religions. 

A true Democracy is decentralized; unlike the scheme we call democracy, which in many countries translates to one time voting, followed by a lifetime of suffering, misery and regrets.  But in U.S. every 4 years people are deceived into thinking that they are electing a new president, who is going to work for the people and honor his word.  Not realizing that as so long as the screenplay, the producers and the directors of our democracy show remain the same; so is the U.S. government tyrannical regime.  To evolve out of and reform our fascist regime the screenplay, or the U.S. constitution must be changed and throw out the current producers and directors as well.

Definition of Democracy:
Democracy is a dynamic participatory means of governance.  Democracy is a dynamic set of governing principles and laws for establishing and maintaining social, political, and economic standards within a community, society and country.  Democracy is formed and maintained by well-informed, involved and organized citizens, exercising their inalienable rights directly, and through term-limited elected representatives.  In a true Democracy common people are considered the primary source of political voice and power.

U.S. Balance of Power: The System of Checks and Balances:
There is no such thing as “U.S. separation of powers, the system of checks and balances”.  The Judicial, Legislative and Executive branches of the U.S. government are all on the very same tight leash, held and controlled by a very small group of estimated few hundred criminal, Parasite Ruling Class (PRC).

All members of Congress, with a tiny exception of a very few, from both political parties: Democrats and Republicans have their head deep into the criminal ruling elite’s trough.   These Republicrats undivided loyalty and attention are all devoted to their master, not the American public.

Almost immediately after taking the oath of office, the U.S. President becomes the boss of his political party, which makes all of the members of Congress affiliated with President's political party, his subordinates.

As soon as the President takes office the first thing he does is appointing cabinet members, one of which is the Attorney General, in charge of the Justice Department, who heads the Judicial branch of the U.S.!  Just like putting the fox in charge of the chicken coop!

As we all know the President also selects and appoints judges for the Supreme, Federal and other courts. Yes, the Legislative Branch has to approve them, and they always do, how could they not!  In another words, the President becomes the King, with complete control of the United States Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches of government.

Why would any one in pursuit of public office: Congress, President and generally any elected office, willingly spend millions of dollars to get a job that pays a measly fraction of what they had to beg, borrow and steal for, and accept large sums of bribe money, or as they euphemistically call it: “political contributions” to get the job, says it all.

There has never been any system of Checks and Balances.

Boycott All Elections, and Convene Constitutional Convention:
To peacefully evolve out of our current political, social and economic black hole we must boycott all elections, which would be peoples’ vote of no confidence and simple, but powerful proof of U.S. government lack of legitimacy. 

Besides, even if we did vote, our vote does not matter and in reality doesn’t even count.  Elections are part of the big fake democracy showdown.  Why you ask?  Because we have such thing called Electoral College.  The Electoral College elite is a group of 538 electors who are selected to elect the U.S. president and vice president to office, every 4 years on November 4th, see U.S. Constitution, Article 2, Section 1.

Parallel to boycotting all elections, we must form constitutional conventions in every city and state across the United States to write a new constitution of the people, by the people for the people.  We must use our energy and time, by engaging in a constructive form of public demonstration, to demonstrate for, and educate, inform and enlighten our fellow citizens: the silent majority, who without their participation nothing will ever change.  

Keep in mind that there is no lack of environmental solutions, there is no lack of economic solutions, there is no lack of political and social justice solutions, the only thing lacking is peoples’ awareness and participation.

Ballot Initiative, or Referendum:
Soon after a new modern constitution is written, approved and finalized, it will be put up for the vote of the U.S. public as a ballot initiative, or referendum for vote and approval.   Once the new constitution is approved by the majority vote, it shall automatically becomes the law of the land, without the need of 50 states ratification.

And on the next glorious day, after the public referendum, now that we have a new and approved modern constitution, of the people, by the people and for the people it has to be respected and enforced immediately by all governmental agencies.   For example if the abolition of Federal Reserve is one of many evolutionary laws of the new constitution it shall be done, etc.

Definition of Constitution:
Constitution is a dynamic written social governing contract, a set of fundamental laws, preferably democratic laws and principles that safeguards and prescribes the nature, functions, and limits the powers of government branches, the elected, the appointed and the employed government officials, institutions, private and public entities involved with public policy making and implementation, and the direct and indirect relationships with the managing directors of the country, the people. The people, who have voted, elected and allowed the appointed, the elected and employed officials to administer the prescribed fundamental democratic laws and principles, approved and enacted by The Managing Directors of the country: The People; honestly, faithfully, precisely, and in a good and honorable manner.

United States Declaration of Independence:
"Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

“Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will.” -- Frederick Douglass

Click here to download a PDF version of the Declaration of Independence - United States Constitution and The Bill of Rights documents all in one

Since George Washington, U.S. First President, Guess How Many Of The U.S. Presidents Were Legitimately Elected.?

Ballot Initiative, #Referendum

Gunter Grass's Controversial Poem About Israel, Iran, and War, Translated

The German Nobel laureate denounced Israel's nuclear weapons, and was in turn denounced by the Israeli Prime Minister.

On Wednesday, Nobel-winning German writer Günter Grass published a poem denouncing Israel's nuclear program and aggression toward Iran. The poem, in which Grass says he has kept silent on the issue for fear of being labeled anti-Semitic, has sparked controversy within Germany, where relations with Israel are often colored by a sense of national guilt for the Holocaust. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the poem's assertion that Israel poses a greater threat to world peace than Iran a "shameful moral equivalence." The poem also laments Germany's decision to sell submarines to Israel that are capable of launching nuclear weapons.

Grass's history with regards to German-Jewish relations is complicated. The writer, now 84, spent decades pushing his country to confront its Nazi past, making him a hero to many Germans who share his desire to deal honestly with Germany's complicated and painful history. In 2006, he announced that he had served in Hitler's infamous Waffen SS division. He was 17 years old when the war ended in 1945, but the admission, coming so late, has darkened his previously bright legacy.

His poem, "What Must Be Said," is overtly and boldly political. It is not exactly the prettiest prose in its original German, and the English doesn't read much better. Translating it below, I've tried to untangle some of the needlessly Teutonic constructions where it doesn't undo the deliberately winding and parenthetical tone too much. Even more concise German can sound circuitous to an English ear, but Grass's writing here is an extreme example. The poem is, from a purely communicative standpoint, a relatively inefficient denunciation -- akin to writing up a paragraph of solid reasoning and then cutting it up and sticking little bits in fortune cookies.

What Must Be Said

Why do I stay silent, conceal for too long
What clearly is and has been
Practiced in war games, at the end of which we as survivors
Are at best footnotes.

It is the alleged right to first strike
That could annihilate the Iranian people--
Enslaved by a loud-mouth
And guided to organized jubilation--
Because in their territory,
It is suspected, a bomb is being built.

Yet why do I forbid myself
To name that other country
In which, for years, even if secretly,
There has been a growing nuclear potential at hand
But beyond control, because no inspection is available?

The universal concealment of these facts,
To which my silence subordinated itself,
I sense as incriminating lies
And force--the punishment is promised
As soon as it is ignored;
The verdict of "anti-Semitism" is familiar.

Now, though, because in my country
Which from time to time has sought and confronted
Its very own crime
That is without compare
In turn on a purely commercial basis, if also
With nimble lips calling it a reparation, declares
A further U-boat should be delivered to Israel,
Whose specialty consists of guiding all-destroying warheads to where the existence
Of a single atomic bomb is unproven,
But as a fear wishes to be conclusive,
I say what must be said.

Why though have I stayed silent until now?
Because I thought my origin,
Afflicted by a stain never to be expunged
Kept the state of Israel, to which I am bound 

Günter Grass, Israel and the crime of poetry

In his poem, Nobel laureate Günter Grass criticises Israel and condemns German arms sales to the Jewish state. Last Modified: April 10, 2012

- By Hamid Dabashi

Günter Grass, Israel and the crime of poetry

In his poem, Nobel laureate Günter Grass criticises Israel and condemns German arms sales to the Jewish state.

New York, NY - On Wednesday, April 4, 2012, the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung published Nobel laureate Günter Grass’ poem (the German original) that has created quite a stir not only in Germany, Israel and Iran, but also across the globe. As a result Israeli interior minister Eli Yishai has banned the Nobel laureate from entering Israel. 

In this poem, Günter Grass breaks a long standing German taboo and publicly criticises Israel for aggressive warmongering against Iran, identifies the Jewish state as a threat to world peace, accuses "the West" of hypocrisy and denounces his own government for providing nuclear submarines to Israel: 

... Because we - as Germans burdened enough -
Could be the suppliers to a crime
That is foreseeable, wherefore our complicity
Could not be redeemed through any of the usual excuses.

The poem drew much appreciation from those opposing yet another pending war in the region by pointing to the big elephant in the room, but also widespread condemnation by Jewish and non-Jewish groups and public figures in Germany, igniting the irritable Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, in effect corroborating Günter Grass' own assessment that his silence so far had to do with the concern that he would be accused of anti-Semitism. He was accused of anti-Semitism. 

But has the charge of anti-Semitism really silenced the critics of Israel - as Günter Grass suggests in this poem? Not really - or perhaps only so in Germany, for obvious reasons, but certainly not around the globe. The only people who are afraid of being called anti-Semites are the anti-Semites. Yes certain segments of pro-Israeli Zionists, by no means all, hurtle that accusation to silence their opponents. But by no stretch of the imagination has that charge silenced anyone but the anti-Semites - and they better remain silent. 

In the European and by extension North American birthplace of anti-Semitism, anti-Semitism is either perfectly alive and well, or transformed into Islamophobia, or camouflaged into Evangelical Zionism, or else abused by some Zionists to silence any opposition coming towards Israel - certainly to no avail. 

To be sure, the condition in Germany is perhaps different - as indeed it should be. But by overcoming that false fear, Günter Grass can no longer be accused of anti-Semitism - and thus the significance of his poem is not in the straw man he constructs to shoot down (perhaps rhetorically, for after all, we are talking about a poem). It is somewhere else. 

Tomorrow may be too late

In the body of the poem itself, titled "What Must Be Said", Günter Grass, 84, says that he risks the danger of being called an anti-Semite because:  

Aged and with my last ink,
That the nuclear power of Israel endangers
The already fragile world peace?
Because it must be said
What even tomorrow may be too late to say…

Remaining silent at these dire circumstances is irresponsible and dangerous:

I am silent no longer
Because I am tired of the hypocrisy
Of the West…

Now that is good enough a reason to break the silence - and you need not invoke fear of being called an anti-Semite. Günter Grass expresses fear of a pending war that "could erase the Iranian people". He pulls no punches as to the facts that we all know:

Yet why do I forbid myself
To name that other country
In which, for years, even if secretly,
There has been a growing nuclear potential at hand
But beyond control, because no testing is available?

He then points finger at his own country: 

Now, though, because in my country
Which from time to time has sought and confronted
The very crime
That is without compare
In turn on a purely commercial basis, if also
With nimble lips calling it a reparation, declares
A further U-boat should be delivered to Israel,
Whose specialty consists of guiding all-destroying warheads to where the existence
Of a single atomic bomb is unproven,
But through fear of what may be conclusive,
I say what must be said.

Setting the dubious fear of being accused of anti-Semitism aside, Günter Grass provides ample reasons - European hypocrisy, German complacency, American barefaced double-standards, Ahmadinejad's buffoonery and Israeli warmongering - for his poem to assume the global significance that it has. But the importance of the poem is not in stating the obvious - it is in revealing the repressed. 

European Colonialism and Jewish Holocaust 

Given the history that culminated in the Jewish Holocaust, Jews around the globe, including Israel, have every right to get agitated with a prominent German public intellectual lecturing them about violence. But Zionism is chiefly responsible for having wasted the moral authority of the Jewish Holocaust - through what Norman Finkelstein has aptly called "the Holocaust Industry" - on establishing a racist apartheid state called "Israel" - a colonial settlement as a haven for the victims of a whole history of European anti-Semitism, on the broken back of a people who had nothing to do with that travesty.    

With a leading German public intellectual openly criticising Israel, pointing to European hypocrisy, and blaming his own country for aiding and abetting in the aggressive militarisation of the Jewish state - a gushing wound is opened that implicates both Europe and the colonial settlement that in more than one sense is its own creation. In two specific terms, both as a haven for the victims of the Jewish Holocaust and as the legacy of European colonialism, Israel reflects back on its European pedigree. It is here that Grass' poem reveals more than meets the eye. 

For over 60 years, Palestinians have paid with their lives, liberties and homeland for a European crime with which they had absolutely nothing to do.

The Zionist project precedes the European Jewish Holocaust -that ghastly crime against humanity following the horrid history of European anti-Semitism expressed and manifested in systematic pogroms over many long and dark centuries. Palestine was colonised by the victims of European anti-Semitism - as a haven against Jewish persecution. That paradox remains at the heart of a Jewish state that cannot forget the truth of its own founding myth. 

There is a link between the Jewish Holocaust and the history of European colonialism, of which Zionism (perhaps paradoxically, perhaps not) is a continued contemporary extension.

It was Aimé Césaire who in his Discourse sur le colonialisme/Discourse on Colonialism (1955) argued that the Jewish Holocaust was not an aberration in European history. Rather, Europeans actually perpetrated similar crimes against humanity on the colonised world at large. 

With German atrocities during the Holocaust, Europeans tasted a concentrated dose of the structural violence they had perpetrated upon the world at large. Colonialism and the Holocaust were thus the two sides of the same coin: the aggressive transmutation of defenceless human beings into instruments of power - into disposable "things". Long before the Jewish Holocaust, the world Europeans had conquered and colonised was the testing ground of that barbaric violence they had termed the "civilising mission of the white man".  

European guilt about the Holocaust is absolutely necessary and healthy - it is an ennobling guilt. It makes them better human beings, for them to remember what they did to European Jewry. But, and there is the rub, they are, with a supreme hypocrisy that Günter Grass notes in his poem, spending that guilt (when not redirecting it into Islamophobia) on sustaining a colonial settlement, an extension of their own colonial legacy, in supporting Israeli colonialism in the Arab and Muslim world - as a garrison state that further facilitates their renewed imperial interests in the region. Europeans are turning their legitimate guilt into an illegitimate instrument of their sustained imperial designs on the globe, from whom Americans then take their cues. 

European Logic of Colonialism

Israel is a European colonial settlement, the last astonishingly barefaced remnant of European colonialism in a world that calls itself "postcolonial". 

The same people who are with perfect justification enraged by the foolish Ahmadinejad (when he denies the Holocaust) are evidently entirely undisturbed when their Prime Minister Golda Meir or their favourite presidential candidate Newt Gingrich denies the existence of Palestinians. 

The daring imagination of Günter Grass' poem - a heroically tragic act precisely because the poet is implicated in the moral outrage of his own poem - is significant precisely because it captures this German and by extension European logic/madness of colonial conquest and moral cannibalism. A German intellectual exposing the structural link between Zionism and colonialism marks the even more innate link between the Holocaust and colonialism - precisely at the moment of warning against the regional warmongering of Zionism as the post/colonial extension of European colonialism. 

What Prime Minister Netanyahu's reaction to Günter Grass' poem, and many others like him, do not recognise is that precisely when they accuse the German poet of anti-Semitism they are in fact acknowledging the colonial provenance of the Jewish state. The harder they object to Günter Grass, the clearer becomes the fact that the Jewish state is the rhetorical articulation of the very logic of European global colonialism, of which the Jewish Holocaust, as Aimé Césaire rightly recognised, was a local overdose. 

There is one, and only one, definitive resolution for that paradoxical consistency to come to an end: the one state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian dilemma. It is only in that basic, simple, elegant, humane, non-violent, enduring and just resolution that the paradox of Zionism as colonialism, and the structural link between the Jewish Holocaust and European colonialism, can once and for all be resolved.

The fact and the inevitability of that solution, delivering both Israelis and Palestinians from their mutual (however asymmetrical) sufferings, has been staring the world in the eye from day one - and yet the belligerent politics of despair has caused an intentional blindness that prevents that simple vision. So, yes, Günter Grass is right - and in this revelation he could no longer possibly be an anti-Semite: 

Only this way are all, the Israelis and Palestinians,
Even more, all people, that in this
Region occupied by mania
Live cheek by jowl among enemies,
In the end also to help us.

Hamid Dabashi is Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York.  His forthcoming book, The Arab Spring:  The End of Postcolonialism (Zed, 2012) is scheduled for publication in May 2012. 

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect our editorial policy.