This column was supposed to be dedicated to the late civil rights and women’s right advocate Fannie Lou Hamer, highlighting Women’s History Month. But the developments in Libya and President Obama authorizing the launch of Tomahawk missiles at the capital Tripoli and the western city of Misrata changed my mind. It leads me to ask, “Who are the tyrants?”
The reasons given were to force Muammar Gaddafi’s troops to cease fire and end attacks on civilians, but are we getting the real story? There was no mention of protecting the oil fields, or a mention that Gaddafi was defending himself and his country from rebels who were trying to overthrow him and seize power by force.
I am not surprised at the actions taken against Gaddafi because recently radio talk shows and late-night television hosts have been laughing at and making negative references to ‘Khadafy’s bad hair.” I also notice the many ways his name is spelled and pronounced.
In common usage, the word “tyrant” carries connotations of a harsh and cruel ruler who places his or her own interests or the interests of a small group of people over the best interests of the general population, which the tyrant governs or controls. That sounds familiar. Is this the argument that is used to justify the attack on Libya? We must remember that we are getting only one side of the story.
In his book Media Control, Noam Chomsky noted the United States pioneered the public relations industry. Its commitment was “to control the public mind,” as its leaders put it.
Was Thomas Jefferson a tyrant? Did he inflict dictatorship or oppression on Americans? Jefferson wrote, “The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.” Was he a liar and a hypocrite?
On January 10, 1806, President Jefferson addressed a gathering in front of the White House. The occasion was a concluding ceremony following a series of meetings with the chiefs of the Cherokee Indian Nation, and others, who had been invited to Washington as a gesture of friendship.
Seven treaties with the Cherokee later, the United States took all Cherokee land east of the Mississippi River. In exchange the Cherokee were given $5 million and an Indian Reservation in Oklahoma Territory. Of course, the Cherokee were never handed $5 million. That’s the amount that was to be spent on their behalf, for public facilities and “mills to grind your corn.”
But he also wrote about Africans and African Americans in his Notes on Virginia: “Comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me, that in memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior, as I think one black could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid; and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous.” These are the words of slave owner Thomas Jefferson.
America was the model for Apartheid in South Africa, and America created the eugenics movement – ensuring “the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable.” Wealthy individuals from within the highest levels of the American exploiting class funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars into the eugenics movement. Laws were implemented in state legislatures to prevent the procreation of “inferior families.”
Fannie Lou Hamer felt the stings of apartheid, racism and tyranny. On August 22, 1964 in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in testimony before the Credentials Committee at the Democratic National Convention, Mrs. Hamer said, “I question America. Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hooks because our lives are threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings, in America?”
Mrs. Hamer said, “What was the point of being scared? The only thing they could do to me was kill me, and it seemed like they’d been trying to do that a little bit at a time ever since I could remember.”
So who are the tyrants?
Listen the Bernie Hayes radio program Monday through Friday at 7 a.m. and 4 p.m. on WGNU-920 AM or www.wgnu920am.com. The Bernie Hayes TV program airs Saturday night at 10 p.m. and Friday Morning at 9 a.m. on KNLC-TV Ch. 24. I can be reached by e-mail at: berhay@swbell.net.
