[The death toll of 237 reported by the Equal Justice Initiative is a new figure, based on extensive research. In 1919, sources as varied as the NAACP and the Bureau of Investigation (forerunner of the FBI) estimated the number of killed African Americans at 25 to 80. Writer Robert Whitaker, who has identified 22 separate killing sites of African Americans during the massacre, put the death toll at more than 100. NAACP official Walter White, who risked his life in October 1919 to investigate the killings, stated that the “number of Negroes killed during the riot is unknown and probably never will be known.”
Say the number of African Americans killed in Phillips County in 1919 was 25. Or 80. Or 237. The very fact that, almost one hundred years after the massacre, we are still trying to pinpoint the death toll should lead us to a larger reckoning: coming to terms with one of the most violent years in the nation’s history, bloodshed that resulted from efforts to make America safe for democracy.]
Ed Ou, a photojournalist and documentary filmmaker, is currently working as a producer with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation covering indigenous communities in North America and is a TED Senior Fellow
[I didn’t even begin to worry until later, when I was told to hand over my phones. The officer said: “Now we just need to look into your cell phone to be sure there’s no photos of you posing next to some dead body somewhere.”
I told the officer that as a journalist, I have a responsibility to not share information that could compromise my sources. This is the same ethical obligation that doctors have to their patients and lawyers have to their clients. The officer demanded my passwords and threatened that if I didn’t provide them, I could be refused entry into the country.
Journalist Ed Ou
The American government says it can use the fact that you are at a border to take everything about your life, comb through it and store it forever. Police officers need a search warrant. Border officers have more latitude. That latitude has limits, but the officers seemed oblivious to those limits. One of them bragged, “Everything you bring through here is mine to go through and take.”
It felt like deja vu. I’ve heard that line before. It was in Crimea after Russian special forces invaded a Ukrainian military base where I was filming. They rounded up all the journalists and seized our memory cards—“for security.” We protested. They told us the same thing. “You’re in our country now, we can do whatever we want.”
I ultimately refused to turn over my passwords. They confiscated my phones anyway, read pages of my journals and photocopied my notes. I felt like I had betrayed my own consciousness. They asked which “extremists” I have been in contact with and how many people I have seen die. Later, I could see that the phones had been tampered with.
After six hours, I was told I was being denied entry. When I asked why, I was told the reasons were “classified.” I wondered if the real reasons had anything to do with the fact that I was going to cover Standing Rock.
On my way out of the interrogation room, the supervisor had one more thing to add. “You’re probably going to write about this. Well, we’re not scared of you. You can say what you want. It won’t change anything.”
We’ll see.
Editor’s Note: The following is a comment from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection:
Due to the restrictions of the Privacy Act, Customs and Border Protection does not discuss individual travelers; however, all international travelers arriving to the U.S. are subject to CBP inspection.
This inspection may include electronic devices such as computers, disks, drives, tapes, mobile phones and other communication devices, cameras, music and other media players and any other electronic or digital device.
Keeping America safe and enforcing our nation’s laws in an increasingly digital world depends on our ability to lawfully examine all materials entering the U.S. In Fiscal Year 2015, U.S. Customs and Border Protection processed more than 383 million U.S. arrivals and conducted 4,764 inspections of electronic media, including 4,444 cell phone inspections. This equates to .0012 percent of travelers undergoing an inspection of electronic media. Fiscal Year 2016 numbers are not available just yet.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection realizes the importance of international travel to the U.S. economy and we strive to process arriving travelers as efficiently and securely as possible while ensuring compliance with laws and regulations governing the international arrival process.]
Read the full story:
Full story here | HIGH COUNTRY NEWS
[What more can be said? I was one of the hundreds of journalists who went to the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge during the Ammon Bundy occupation, and I saw the same things that all the rest of them did. If there was any difference between me and the other journalists, maybe it was that I went there looking for kindred spirits.
I went to the Malheur looking for kindred spirits. I found the mad, the fervent, the passionately misguided. I found the unknowing pawns of an existential chess game, in which we are, all of us, now caught. Driving home across the snow-packed Malheur Basin, through mile after mile of sage, with towering basalt cliffs in the near distance, herds of mule deer appearing as gray specks in the tongues of slide rock and wind-exposed yellow grass, I did not wonder what Edward Abbey would have said about all of this, or Kropotkin or the lugubrious monarchist Hobbes. I thought instead of the old C.S. Lewis books of my childhood, and of Lewis’ writings on the nature of evil, where evil is never a lie, because lying implies creation, and evil, by its nature, has no creative power. Instead, the nature of evil is to take a truth and twist it, sometimes as much as 180 degrees. Love of country becomes hatred of those we believe don’t share our devotion, or don’t share it the same way. The natural right of armed self-defense becomes the means to take over a wildlife refuge, to exert tyranny on those who work there, or those who love the place for the nature it preserves in a world replete with man’s endeavors. The Constitution, one of the most liberal and empowering documents ever composed, becomes, with just a slight annotation or interpretation, the tool of our own enslavement.
This story was funded with reader donations to the High Country News Research Fund.
Hal Herring is a contributing editor at Field and Stream and wrote his first story forHCN in 1998. He covers environment, guns, conservation and public lands issues for a variety of publications. halherring.com
[AS EDWARD R. MURROW wrapped up his now-famous special report condemning Joseph McCarthy in 1954, he looked into the camera and said words that could apply today. “He didn’t create this situation of fear—he merely exploited it, and rather successfully,” Murrow said of McCarthy. Most of Murrow’s argument relied on McCarthy’s own words, but in the end Murrow shed his journalistic detachment to offer a prescription: “This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy’s methods to keep silent—or for those who approve,” he said. “We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.”
We’ve reached a turning point, and the two criteria for journalists to abandon their objectivity have come to pass: Trump is widely criticized, even by his own party, giving journalists a lot of company in their criticism of him. When Trump suggested that Judge Curiel was incapable of trying a case because of his parents’ birthplace, even House Speaker Paul Ryan, a fellow Republican, called the comments “racist.”
And Trump’s views appear increasingly deviant. No respected journalist would seek a balancing quote from someone who held such a view about a judge or who suggested, as Trump did last month after the Orlando shootings, that a sitting president was in cahoots with a mass murderer.
Murrow felt compelled to end his broadcast by warning his audienceabout the dangers of staying neutral, as journalists too often do, when the stakes are high: “Cassius was right,” said Murrow. “‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.’” If a politician’s rhetoric is dangerous, Murrow implied, all of us, including journalists, are complicit if we don’t stand up and oppose it.]
Read the full article | Columbia Journalism Review
Today | EUOBSERVER (read the full article)
The European Commission on Wednesday (16 March) said the EU-Turkey agreement to return migrants from Greece to Turkey would be “in accordance with the international and EU legal framework”.
The deal, which EU and Turkish leaders want to finalise at a summit on Friday, has been criticised by NGOs and the UN.
“Let me be crystal clear about this, there can be no ‘blanket returns’ and there can be no ‘refoulement’,” the commission vice-president Frans Timmermans said at a press conference.
But commission assurances rely on Turkey amending its legislation to give equal treatment to migrants from different countries as well as on Greece being able to manage a high number of asylum applications.
Many arriving on the Greek islands are likely to end up in holding centres before being sent back to Turkey.
Fears are also mounting that Greek courts will not be prepared for the number of cases and appeals to meet the speedy returns that underpin the agreement.
Cost estimates from the European Commission say at least €20 million a month from the EU budget will be needed to support Greek authorities.
Meanwhile, EU officials describe Turkey’s patchy application of the Refugee Convention as a legal formality. Turkey is signed up to the convention, but only European nationals benefit from its full coverage.
EU lawyers say Ankara will only need to demonstrate an “equivalent” to the convention in order for the draft pact to work. How that “equivalent” is applied in practice is not clear.
According to EU officials, it means Turkey needs to extend protection rights to all non-Syrians such as Afghans and Iraqis. Syrians in Turkey have a temporary status protection. Afghans and Iraqis do not.
That “equivalent” has to be met in order for Greece to start sending them back to Turkey and must be “substantive” and put into practice. But when asked about oversight, an EU official said it was not up to European lawyers to monitor compliance.
Instead, Greece and its courts will determine if Turkey passes the equivalency test.
With Greece under intense pressure, the chances of Athens not giving Turkey the green light, regardless of the facts, appears slim.
Meanwhile, the EU can say its deal follows EU and international law.
Time to Hear Stories of Women and Girls When Shaping Asylum and Integration Policies
Greek Government Rocked by Nationalist Row
Excerpts from Meat Market By DAVID A. BANKS AND BRITNEY SUMMIT-GIL | THE NEW INQUIRY
Bourdain Market, set to open in about two years on Pier 57 in Manhattan’s Meat Packing district, purports to deliver exclusivity and democracy at the same time by putting remarkable food vendors all under one roof, thus consolidating all the hard work of curation and discovery and saving consumers from having to do any of it…. Like the World’s Fairs of the 19th and 20th centuries, the market will invert this business model by bringing people from around the world to a large food court so that they may “do” culture. It will provide what Bourdain calls a “democratic space open to and used by all,” a place where “wealthy and working class alike” can congregate in what promises to be the largest food hall in the city….
AUTHENTICITY, from the Greek authentikós, meaning original or first hand, is also related to authént, which ostensibly means DIY. When referring to something like an artwork or first-edition book, authentic is a relatively straightforward signifier: This artwork was definitely made by this specific person. Authentication, the process by which professionals discern whether a given artifact comes from a specific source, is not categorically different from the way we might seek out authenticity in our food or even our conversations. We seek, in our present experiences, some sort of connection to a past or an elsewhere. “The quest for authenticity,” writes Baudrillard in The System of Objects is also “a quest for an alibi.” The elsewhere or else-when, like an alibi, is only as credible as the teller and one’s own ability to cross-reference and confirm. Bourdain acts as our authenticity detective, ferreting out the provenance of food and dragging the perpetrators onto his show and, now, into his market….
Just as adherence to objectivity is a necessary prerequisite for scientific “truth,” authenticity can seem to anchor taste judgments in some pure transcendent realm beyond the influence of social strategy or economic expediency. Though the aura of authenticity may seem like a matter of the aggressively unique thing in its “real” place, as when Bourdain boasts of tasting exotic foods that “you can’t find anywhere else in the world,” it is actually created in the space between the consumer and the consumed. For Walter Benjamin, aura is born of our desire to bring things closer, to experience the original outside the bounds of technological reproducibility. This desired closeness is two-fold: spatial and emotional, measured in distance and human connection.
Authenticity-as-commodity is difficult to pin down for just this reason. It bridges the gulf between self and other, known and unknown, and fills a nebulous in-between space in ways both strange and satisfying. In Ethnicity Inc. anthropologists John and Jean Comaroff observe that “to the extent that the commodification of culture is refiguring identity, it is doing so less as a matter of brute loss, or of abstraction, than of intensified fusions of intimacy and distance, production and consumption, subject and object.” Such culture commodities blur the boundaries of belonging and are thus engineered not for efficiency or usefulness but for optimal alterity. The perfectly stirred cocktail or the well-balanced soup broth is not the end product of scientific trial and error in some food lab meant to impress you. Rather, the authentic culture commodities invite you to believe you have found something that is indifferent to your existence—the food culture of some far away community—and in that moment when you successfully purchase them, you feel as though you have been invited into a cherished tradition. In other words, authentic goods are produced through the manipulation of social context, rather than some purification process….
But authenticity, which requires an arbiter of authority, runs counter to openness and democracy. Bourdain’s strategy for resolving this tension is to foreclose the moments of openness, restricting democracy to picking from among what he has already painstakingly curated. This sounds less democratic than dictatorial, but Bourdain is interested in “democracy” conceived as a matter of broad access, not decision-making: He wants the market to be a public meeting place for working and wealthy alike, but he can only accomplish this by taking most opportunities for decision-making off the table. Bourdain’s name and reputation assures the quality his fans have come to expect….
By intentionally keeping their rhetoric of transparency, openness and democracy as vague as possible, the creators of Bourdain Market let us fill the discursive void with our own desires to be the authenticators. Thus we can quickly conflate individualism and consumerism with openness and democratic ideals….
By making it physically possible to access foods from around the world, Bourdain Market will let you choose the scenarios for your own food-centered reality TV show. And just like a reality TV show, Bourdain Market will run roughshod over particulars in its restaging of the real. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the New York Times article that announced the project, a short writeup that required three corrections, including one for the artist’s rendering of the future market that contained fake Chinese characters.
As Benjamin and Baudrillard warn, it is impossible to consciously create an authentic experience. The friction between Chelsea Market, the High Line, the conceit of Bourdain’s own shows, and his new market reveals the hypocrisy of the entire project: Bourdain Market is as authentic, transparent, democratic, and open as basic cable TV.
Ever wonder why all those folks in rural, “red” America still vote in droves for the same Republicans who brag about gutting the very social programs keeping them alive? How someone like Matt Bevin can run a winning campaign in Kentucky based on cutting people’s access to affordable health care? How Republican governors can get away with refusing free Medicaid for their own citizens?
In an insightful article about what motivates the rural poor to vote Republican, Alec MacGillis, who covers politics for ProPublica, took a tour through deep red America, asking the same questions. In an Op-Ed for today’s New York Times, MacGillis explains that it’s not all about guns and abortion that drives people in economically-depressed areas to vote Republican. In fact it’s something very basic to human nature, which the GOP exploits at every turn. And Democrats ignore it at their peril.
Here is the article: Who Turned my Blue State Red? | NEW YORK TIMES
The TTIP (Trans-Atlantic Partnership Agreement) TISA, (Trade in Services Agreement) and TPP (Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement) are highly controversial and top secret deals that would affect the lives of citizens worldwide, yet the general public have no right to decide whether we want them- or even know the details of the draft legislation.
TTIP, in particular, is of major concern. As ANONYMOUS have reported, the deal allegedly threatens to allow corporations to sue governments who do not comply with their wishes, compromise online privacy, make fracking a standard procedure across 28 countries, privatize European health systems, force GMO food on unwilling citizens, strip us of our civil liberties, and ensure that corporations have control over the European Parliament.
Julian Assange called TTIP “The most important thing happening in Europe right now,” which is why Wikileaks is raising a 100,000 euro reward for any information relating to the deal. The site says of TTIP:
“It remains secret almost in its entirety, closely guarded by the negotiators, and only big corporations are given special access to its terms. The TTIP covers half of global GDP and is one of the largest agreements of its kind in history. The TTIP aims to create a global economic bloc outside of the WTO framework, as part of a geopolitical economic strategy against the BRICS countries of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.”
Considering the impact all three of these trade deals will allegedly have on democracy, human rights, food safety and the environment, public awareness should be widespread. (ANONYMOUS)
Some more information on the subject:
Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) | OFSE
Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (T-TIP) | OFFICE OF THE US TRADE REPRESENTATIVE
Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership | WIKIPEDIA
What is TTIP, and How Does it Affect Us? | GUARDIAN
The TTIP of the Spear | ECONOMIST
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