Compromising position
Raytheon employs 11,000 and supports many of our local charities. Can that be the reason for the total lack of coverage by our local media of an orderly and enthusiastic demonstration for peace that took place Oct. 27?
Despite the fact that Raytheon is a major contributor to our economy, most Tucsonans are opposed to the wars of aggression that are being planned by our ruthless leaders. It is not easy to “bite the hand that feeds us,” but that is what Tucson must do to restore its self-respect.
Gretchen Nielsen
Tucson AZ
Genocide is genocide
In the article about “Bury My Heart” by Pepe Lozano (PWW 10/27-11/2), TV producer Dick Wolf was quoted as saying “the Indian experience is really one of near-genocide and is not a proud moment in our history.”
The American Indian story is one of genocide, plain and simple. I checked a dictionary which defined genocide as “the deliberate killing of a large group of people, especially those of a particular ethnic group or nation.”
Why call what the U.S. did “near genocide”? It was genocide.
Jacob Polasky
Baltimore MD
Remembering Ish Flory
I read online with much interest and enthusiasm the article by Carolyn Black and Bill Applehans, “Ish Flory, lifetime champion of equality” (PWW 8/10/02).
Due to my location in a farm/rural area, I rely on the computer to get a taste of the energy as well as the magnificence of the movement for freedom. Flory’s story is one that needs to be told again and again and then retold yet again and again.
I remember meeting Ish back when I was a founding member of the Young Worker’s Liberation League (founded in Chicago), and even then I remember him as a stalwart of the proletariat’s move for freedom and justice. He probably never remembered me, but I will always remember him, and that is the important thing.
Tony Ulen
Via e-mail
More jobs
Additional jobs need to be created. Plus cutting jobs needs to go down the drain. Labor cuts are an attack on the workers so that the bourgeois can have more in their already extensive wallet. Many workers cannot afford a place to live because of this. I myself got fired because of labor-saving cuts. The “slow” season was their excuse. I call it greed. Many people at all kinds of places of work are losing their jobs or working less hours. This has to stop. If it was up to me, job cuts would be against the law. Plus the minimum wage would be increased so the workers would be able to afford housing, food, etc. All workers should join a labor union or start one.
Patrick McColloch
Allen TX
Che’s hair
Thanks for publishing the Venezuelans’ comments about the living legacy of Ernesto “Che” Guevara. There have been a lot of comments here in Dallas downplaying his place in history and his continuing effect on the movements for social change.
While they were pretending that El Che didn’t matter, though, a Dallas auction house put some memorabilia on for sale. Apparently, one of the CIA operatives who murdered Che was greedy and perspicacious enough to have kept a tiny lock of the dead hero’s hair, his fingerprints, a few photos, and Che’s battle map. According to the Oct. 27 daily paper here, a Houston bookstore owner paid $100,000 for these tawdry reminders!
Jim Lane
Dallas TX
A former CIA operative (Gustavo Villoldo) has sold what he claims to be a lock of Che Guevara’s hair. I don’t think that CIA agents, or any other government employees, should be allowed to sell clothes, blood, personal effects or body parts from people that they have imprisoned, tortured or executed. I guess everything is for sale, for the right price.
Chuck Mann
Greensboro NC
Important facts to the story
The recent historical article about the Armenian genocide during WWI by Norman Markowitz is to be commended (“Bush-Cheney vs. the Armenian genocide,” PWW 10/27-11/2).
However, it was lacking a very important component. In addition to the savage barbarity against the Armenians, matched only by Hitler’s death squads in eastern Europe, the Turks also targeted many Christian towns and villages in southeastern Turkey and northern Iraq, which was then a province of the Ottoman empire. These towns and villages were mostly inhabited by Chaldean, Assyrian and Syriac peoples, all Aramaic-speaking of the same ethnicity, separated only by church affiliation.
Tens of thousands perished at the hands of the Kurdish Hamidiya death squads, and their towns were destroyed, later to be resettled by Kurds who were being used by their masters and co-religionists, the Turks.
When I was a teenager (I am now 73), my dad was in the habit of sending me to my grandfather’s village in northern Iraq for the summer school break. My grandfather, a dirt-poor farmer, with tears in his eyes, told me of the capture of his two brothers, who were wanted as conscripts in the Ottoman army, and how they were murdered and their bodies mutilated.
History may be repeating itself. Under the very nose of the American occupation, half the Christian population of Iraq has fled Iraq seeking refuge all over the world. They are being killed, kidnapped for ransom and their churches bombed. It is ethnic cleansing at its worst.
The Bushites, the neocons and the American media have ignored and suppressed this fact.
Hazzim Yousif
Detroit MI
Norman Markowitz responds: Yousif is right. I focused on the Armenian genocide since that was the topic but non-Armenian Christians also suffered great persecution. I was also aware that the Ottomans used Kurdish death squads against the Armenians and others, the way that the Nazis used Ukrainian and other recruits to massacre Jews. The Turkish and Iranian and Iraqi history of discrimination and outright persecution of the Kurdish minority (which is Muslim) is also an issue in contemporary events.
Comments