MEDIA ROOTS- The revolution starts in your own backyard.

Cindy Sheehan, along with over 160 other leading peace advocates held a conference call on February 6th, 2011 to strategize for a new collaborative effort of localization called “Re-creating Revolutionary Communities”, or RevComs.

The plan is to put words into action. Cindy’s book, Myth America: the Twenty Greatest Myths of the Robber Class, breaks apart the societal and cultural myths that keep the oppressed dependent on their oppressors, and lays out the case for communities to revolutionize their environment, economy and society.

RevComs intends to overwhelm and permanently overcome the corporate controlled political and economic system that perpetuates exploitation and destruction by providing resources and guidance to local communities as they connect and build outside the grid. It is a truly grassroots effort that requires people to get active and to work collectively and creatively with their neighbors.

In the conference call, Cindy described the vision of how citizens can re-claim the resources in their environment and communities:

“We can do this by appropriating for ourselves what should already be under our control: community banking, community farming, supporting farmer’s markets, electing progressive revolutionaries to local school boards and city councils, having a barter/trade economy and creating cooperatives for every system we can…”

Cindy also emphasizes the necessity for people to look outside of the “use and throw away” paradigm of the current consumerist, capitalist institutions. Citizens who want to create a self-functioning community need to re-evaluate the way they consume and must focus on waste reduction: re-using what we already have and recycling that which we already use.

RevComs aims to be the umbrella organization that helps to guide and connect community initiatives happening across the nation and eventually the world. There are already hundreds of projects happening all over the country– the first step is to discover what they are, followed by getting involved and helping to strengthen them. If your community lacks this foundation, Cindy stresses the need to get creative with entrepreneurial endeavors and new collaborative projects in the community.

Re-creating Revolutionary Communities believe that the answer to globalization is localization. People need to see the fruits of their labor and the benefits of community involvement. Waiting for federal change every four years keeps people disempowered and disillusioned with actions that struggle to affect visible change. Undoubtedly, there will be people who dismiss the potential of RevComs to help emancipate citizens from the ties of multi-national corporations or corrupted policies, and still others who disregard the movement as ‘doomed to fail’. Cindy responds to the naysayers:

“With this we cannot fail, because we will be touching people’s lives in a positive way… when Yoko [Ono] was on my show she said we have to drop the pebble in the pond and the ripples will go to infinity… Everybody that went before us that tried to make positive change did make positive change. They did not fail. I shudder to think where our society would be today if we didn’t have people like Martin Luther King Jr… I know that many of those people… were thinking the same way that we thought. They were thinking that they failed, they were thinking that they didn’t change society. But they changed it in a very profound way. The only way we are guaranteed failure is if we don’t do anything. That is the beautiful, wonderful miraculous thing about this project: that we will have a 100% success rate.”

RevComs will begin putting this plan into action during the first round of community gatherings slated for the first week in March 2011. The meetings are going to start locally, with anticipation of then going regional, and eventually national.

The seeds of revolution are already being sewn, now it’s up to you to join in.

To learn information, gather resources or to get involved with Re-creating Revolutionary Communities, please visit their website at http://cindysheehanssoapbox.blogspot.com/2011/01/re-creating-revolutionary-communities.html or become a part of their facebook community here.

Writing and art by Abby Martin

Check out an exclusive Media Roots interview with Cindy Sheehan.

Resist, collage and acrylic, 2010

MEDIA ROOTS- I pull a lot of inspiration from Kurt Vonnegut. The sentence “Here it is: the end of the world” from Cat’s Cradle stuck out to me, and this image is what came out of it. It made me picture a beautiful resistance blooming out of a bleak, dystopian society that had been pushed to the moral and economic brink by a hypothetical doom.

Vonnegut had the ability to put so much thought and emotion into so little words. He always managed to pepper some dry wit throughout the characters’ inner dialogue too, even when portraying some wretched and hopeless war torn scene.

To me, resistance means freedom- the act of breaking away from the institution. It means emancipation from societal, cultural and poltical chains and limitations. To resist is to liberate your mind, and to embrace knowledge, truth, enlightenment.

When society pushes you to the brink- will you peacefully resist? Would you surrender yourself in the struggle to save humanity?

Abby

nthWORD– Naomi Wolf’s book, The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot, argues that there are ten steps common to every state that has made the transition into fascism. One step is the targeting of key individuals or demographics: artists, academics, activists, civil servants, gays, Jews; the public blacklisting of those who don’t tow the party line. Another move towards fascism is the control over the press—all dictatorships and would-be dictators target journalists and make sweeping media reforms to increase their control and their ability to censor information.

Her book conveys the inklings of fascism here in America, but in a globalized society, the West sets the tone for policy and culture that influences the rest of the world. As Orwellian rhetoric becomes commonplace– wars are being waged to maintain “peace” and draconian bills that curtail civil liberties are being litigated as “patriotic”—countries worldwide have been enacting Wolf’s ten steps, some with more haste than others.

After decades of post-Soviet, post-Holocaust political and economic strife, Hungary is starting to embody Orwell’s dystopian portrayal. This April, Fidesz, Hungary’s center-right conservative party, won 2/3rds control over Parliament, putting the conservative party in power for the first time since World War II. Moreover, Fidesz now controls 22 out of the 23 major cities in the country. This complete takeover by one party is significant, because the Hungarian Constitution can be effectively changed with a 2/3rds majority in Parliament, an advantage now regularly enacted by the new party in power.

Read more about Hungary’s new nationalism at nthWORD.

Abby Martin is a freelance writer for nthWORD magazine, citizen journalist, activist and artist living in Oakland, CA. You can find more of her writing at www.MediaRoots.org and view her artwork at www.AbbyMartin.org

photo by flickr user Habeebee

Read more of Abby’s views here.

MEDIA ROOTS– In George Orwell’s 1984, Britain is depicted as a totalitarian police state that is ruled by the Party, or Big Brother– an enigmatic, ubiquitous elite that controls society through heavy surveillance, nationalist propaganda and historical revisionism. The concept seems like a far-fetched portrayal of a Democratic nation’s demise into totalitarianism, but in America’s “post 9/11” climate of fear, the United States government has been building a comprehensive grid of surveillance and control that bears frightening similarities to Orwell’s fictional narrative.

The glaring difference between the two is that Orwell’s dystopian society is overtly totalitarian. America, conversely, operates under a “soft fascism” – an insidious, systematic method of preventative action and corporate top-down control over society’s media, economy and politics – while maintaining the necessary illusion of personal choice and freedom. A populous with little to no concept of their subjugation makes them the perfect subjects to rule.

Many Americans might not feel the government’s hand or Big Brother’s watchful eye directly in their lives. However, with the use of GPS, cell phones and the Internet, every move we make can be tracked, cataloged and divied into demographics that are used to increase corporate advertising efficiency and to create a “chilling effect” throughout our culture, stifling dissent and diminishing activism.

During times of war, governments are notorious for capitalizing on their ability to suppress dissent and manipulate the masses. In the wake of 9/11 hysteria, the Bush administration enacted several controversial pieces of legislation that severely curtailed Americans’ freedoms under the pretext of “security” and “protection”. With the help of a consistently compliant and unquestioning media, his administration also instituted a legal framework to circumvent citizens’ civil liberties and target their free speech. Bush’s cabinet adopted Orwellian rhetoric and Nazi style propaganda to litigate sweeping measures that further eradicated liberty: The Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act’s (USA Patriot Act) warrantless domestic wiretapping, and the Homegrown Terrorism Act & Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act’s criminalization of thought and peaceful activism.  

Nine years after 9/11 and two years into Obama’s reign, the vague threat of terrorism still hangs in perpetual balance as the justifying cliché for the administration’s continuation of such Bush-era policies. Obama has followed the same Bush trends of illegal detention, rendition, wiretapping, spying, state secrets, demonization, persecution and fear mongering against the population. Obama has aggressively cracked down on whistleblowers exposing military corruption as well as given a green light to assassinate US citizens abroad without due process of law. One of the most disturbing trends in the ever-expanding police state are the new Z Backscatter vans, vehicles that are giant X ray machines, designed to discreetly scan through people’s houses and cars without their knowledge – a surveillance tool that blatantly violates fourth amendment rights.

Like Orwell’s portrayal, the US government’s expanding power structure relies on nationalist propaganda to manufacture and cultivate the fear of an enemy. Although the War on Terrorism has consumed the political climate for almost a decade, the chances of actually dying in a terrorist attack in the United States are statistically insignificant. This little mentioned fact undermines the current administration’s justification for their extension of state powers and secrecy in order to protect the country’s “national security”.

It’s critically important to create dialogue about America’s covert slide to fascism. Absolute power corrupts absolutely– our politicians and their corporate puppeteers will continue their greedy power grabs unabated unless our society starts speaking out against the dehumanization and the unconstitutionality of the emerging police state.

Writing and Photography by Abby Martin

Do We Know the Truth about 9/11?