I never told my father I was proud of him.

I grew up in the ’60s, another era filled with tears and tear gas and violent clashes about race and class.

I didn’t want to be a hippie, but I certainly didn’t want to be a fascist. I was sheltered in my demure blue school uniform and saddle shoes, watching the world burn.

The National Guard slaughtering students at Kent State. The Chicago police billy-clubbing yippies at the ’68 Democratic convention. Soldiers in Vietnam getting denounced as “baby killers,” and radicals vowing to “barbecue some pork” and spill the blood of “pigs.”

When our school newspaper published an anti-Vietnam War cartoon, the principal, a nun, dumped all the copies into the incinerator.

As a 16-year-old in 1968, I found it hard to balance hating the Vietnam War and wanting racial justice with being part of a family, baked in patriotism, taught to revere uniforms. As Bill Clinton wrote in that infamous 1969 letter, the cool kids were all about “loathing the military”; I was making pocket change by ironing my brothers’ Coast Guard uniforms, being careful to make sure the creases were sharp.

I never told classmates about my father’s long stretch as a police detective. I just talked about his second career, after retirement, as a special assistant to a senator and congressman.

When it was time for the father-daughter lunch at Immaculata, I didn’t sign up. As an Irish immigrant with little formal education, my father had worked terribly hard to afford that fancy girls’ school. But I didn’t tell him about the lunch. I don’t know if it was the cop thing or because he was older and didn’t seem that into raising a teenager. (The day I was born, the other cops at roll call teased him about becoming a new father at 61.)

As it turned out, one of my dad’s closest friends was the speaker at the lunch and called him to find out why he wasn’t there. My dad, hurt, asked my mom why I didn’t want to take him.

And that is something I’m ashamed of.

Full article

posted by f.sheikh

” Whatever Gandhi’s motives, the appeal to Hitler was not new. The year before, American missionaries meeting with Gandhi pleaded with him to condemn Hitler and Mussolini, but he refused, insisting that no one, even these two fascists clearly uninterested in human dignity, was “beyond redemption.” Czechs and Jews were told to engage only in passive resistance, a sacrifice that would redeem them. Passive resistance failed to deliver either group, but Gandhi, for his part, never quite acknowledged this. (It was also not the only strategy they employed: consider the Warsaw Uprising of 1943, or the revolt at Auschwitz-Birkenau the following year.) Gandhi did write another, more vehement letter to Hitler, but this, too, was never delivered. “

“Where the Holocaust was concerned, Gandhi was wrong. But the strategic impetus of nonviolence is to prove the moral virtue of the suffering. Martin Luther King Jr. recognized this. His adoption of Gandhi’s non-violent agitation tactics was likely strategic, for it was well-known that Gandhi was himself a racist, advocating for racial “purity” and against the mixing of races. (He had also supported British suppression of the Zulu uprising in South Africa.)Yet, King saw beyond that: whether it was colonized Indians during the days of the British Empire, or black Americans during the civil rights era, the preservation of virtue through nonviolence was central. The agenda of the dominating powers in both cases was to subjugate and barely permit the oppressed to subsist. Indians in the British Empire, like black Americans during the civil rights era, were allowed to live, but without dignity or humanity, and always with the threat of state-sanctioned violence and incarceration.

During the Holocaust, the strategy was extermination. Hitler was not interested in permitting Jews some kind of minimal existence where they labored for the benefit of the German state; his plan was the active and intentional extermination of all of them from the face of the Earth. There was no question of the relative virtue of the oppressed vs. their oppressors; it was about their actual and pointed and complete extirpation. No amount of moral virtue could save them from the end that had been so meticulously planned for them.

Gandhi failed to see this. But he provided a workable plan for certain liberation movements—and this post-Floyd second chapter of America’s civil rights movement could be one of them. The situation of black Americans today is more similar to that of the colonized Indians. The vast web of subjugations small and large directed toward black Americans insures that their labors will be ignored, their character continually besmirched, their voices silenced in service of white supremacy. The American brand of subjugation is one of not only outright violence—from agents of the state as well as white nationalists—but also deprivation and neglect: excluding many millions of black people from access to health care, functioning educational systems, and countless other privileges that most white Americans enjoy.

Full Article

posted by f.sheikh