Defending Martyrs, Reclaiming Memory & History (was Re: Leonard Peltier + Working within the system)

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

Gordon:

>  > A Pressler writes: << I think he did kill the agent.  >>
>
> Gregory Geboski:
> >  No real evidence has been presented to establish this, even at his trial.
> >  ...
>
> It would not be surprising to find that Peltier had received
> an unfair trial, as Mumia Abu-Jamal certainly did, regardless
> of what he may have actually done.  The cops would see to
> that.  Such cases are guaranteed to excite them with or without
> the facts.
>
> However, a thing I find curious in these two cases and in some
> others is that, in selecting poster children for its causes,
> many on the Left seem to prefer people associated with violence
> to others.  I refer not only to the above but to many other
> cases, going back many years; Eldridge Cleaver the presidential
> candidate, for instance, previously a rapist and subsequently
> a Republican.  There are other cases I need not name.  Meanwhile
> the non-violent labor on uncelebrated in their accustomed
> obscurity.  Theoreticians and agitproppers, is this the best
> way to accomplish our common purposes?  This is not necessarily
> a rhetorical question.

It is not the case that the Left prefers an association with violence
to non-violence.  The Left -- or _any other political force_ for that
matter -- makes a cause out of *martyrs* (in the case of Leonard
Peltier & Mumia Abu-Jamal, martyrs of criminal "justice" as well as
of state repression of radicalism, especially radicalism of people of
color).  Non-violent martyrs have been celebrated as well: Salvador
Allende, a socialist who died defending constitutional democracy, to
take just one example.

What if the Chilean workers, peasants, & intellectuals in support of
Allende had been _armed_?  There would have been a bloody civil war,
probably even bloodier than Pinochet's coup.  Nevertheless, Chilean
leftists might have won.

Have you watched _The Battle of Chile_ (1975, 1976, and 1978), dir.
Patricio Guzman?  If not, see the documentary & think about "what
if"....

Here's a review of _The Battle of Chile_ by Margaret Power:
<http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/mmreviews/showrev.cgi?path=65>.

What follows is my LBO-talk post on the question of memory & history,
which includes my commentary upon Guzman's documentaries:

*****   Date: Thu, 11 Feb 1999 22:55:51 -0500
To: lbo-talk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
From: Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>
Subject: Queer Angels of History (was RE: Butler....)


Catherine wrote to Steve:
> > I don't see any material reason to believe that Foucault et al. really
> > advanced these movements.
>
> It depends who you ask, but a great many 'non-academic' people highly
> invested in changing the lives and contexts of gays and lesbians and other
> groups kept on the outer by ideas about heterosexual normality have found
> Foucault's own work and/or the work of people influenced by Foucault
> exceptionally useful. The same appears also to have been true of Butler. I
> am not sure on what grounds you are dismissing this.

Any oppressed group wants to know its own history.  Mastering
history, it seeks to recover, master, and work through subjugated
knowledge (how it came to be the object of oppression) and suppressed
popular memories (how its forebears or predecessors lived, struggled,
survived, and sometimes even won some victories).  Foucault spoke
very eloquently of how (and to whose benefit) popular memories of
rebellions have been erased from history.

The ruling class and its dominant ideology always seek to deny us our
history and memories.  Walter Benjamin's comments on the 'angel of
history' are an urgent reminder, a warning even, that history is
forever threatened to be 'disappeared' under capitalism, just as
Marxists and other leftists have been 'disappeared' so many times:
"The true picture of the past flits by.  The past can be seized only
as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized
and is never seen again."  One of the most important duties of
intellectuals on the Left is to help us see, to help us remember.

There are, for instance, wonderful documentaries about Chile,
directed by Patricio Guzman: _The Battle of Chile (Part I: The
Insurrection of the Bourgeoisie; and Part II: The Coup d'Etat)_
(1975); and _Chile, Obstinate Memory_ (1997).  _The Battle of Chile_
documents what people -- workers, peasants, students, political
activists, and also reactionary bourgeois agitators against Salvador
Allende -- did and said respectively from the period just before the
election to the last days of Allende and democracy.  Guzman almost
lost his life filming what was happening in an atmosphere of
increasing right-wing terror.  In fact, in one extraordinary scene,
the camera records the death of the man behind the camera, focusing
on a group of revolting soldiers as one of them takes aim and shoots
directly at the photographer (who was an Argentinean TV cameraman.
Guzman's own cinematographer Jorge Muller was also eventually killed
in one of Pinochet's torture camps in 1974).  Even though the film is
about the defeat of the working class and of a dream of socialism in
Chile, anyone who cares about democracy, not to mention socialism,
cannot but be deeply moved and inspired by powerful pictures of
immense masses of people, filling up streets after streets, waving
banners, shouting, "Allende, we will protect you!"  The film is
subtitled "The Story of People Without Arms."  Across time, the
documentary allows us to receive a gift of arms from people without
arms, for memories are weapons for struggles in the present and for
the future.  (But will we accept the gift?  For, as Benjamin says,
"Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.")

_Chile, Obstinate Memory_, on the other hand, depicts a tragedy of
people denied popular memories, even a proper time and place to
grieve the loss of friends, comrades, and their own dreams.  Guzman
returned from exile and visited Chile with the film _The Battle of
Chile_, which he had not been able to show there before, in search of
obstinate memories he might uncover.  One of the most striking
sequences shows a woman whose images were captured by _The Battle of
Chile_.  When asked if she could recognize her in the film, she
hesitates and cannot answer the question.  She goes on to deny that
it was her, even.  Then, in the next shot, she recounts the names of
her disappeared family members, as the camera focuses on her face.
The sequence (as well as the entire film) is an eloquent testimony to
the difficulty, possibility, and finally necessity of recovering
history.

The same arduous task of uncovering our own history (without knowing
how to do so properly, for sexuality has not existed 'out there,'
merely waiting to be discovered) still faces all of us who refuse to
be 'straightened out' by the heterosexual mystique (to use Jonathan
Ned Katz's words): the idea that heterosexuality as we know it has
always existed and will remain till the end of the earth.  Foucault's
genealogy & archeology of course did not give us all answers, but
they were not meant to yield any such things.  He told us (along with
Marx & Engels, only in a different way) how to look and where we
might search.  That is more contribution to our struggles than we
have the right to expect from one intellectual.  We'll need more
queer angels of history.

Yoshie   *****

The defense of left-wing martyrs is part of the project to reclaim
memory & history of the Left (the AIM, the Black Panthers, la Unidad
Popular, etc.), not to let them become "disappeared" by the weight of
the ruling-class ideology, not to let them rot in prisons, masked by
our silence & indifference.

Yoshie