intheheartist writes:

This emerging figure, spoken-word artist, American Indian Movement speaker, is beginning to achieve a well-deserved respect. Unlike most of today's known demystifyers, John Trudell's insights and analysis goes much deeper towards demystifying what few, even Chomsky, have done in helping individual people understand the *War Games* played upon all of us systematically, and it's about time we started to understand, just like so many indigenous peoples of the world have been FORCED to understand.

Listen to the entire interview (about 30 minutes):

http://atlanta.indymedia.org/local/webcast/uploads /metafiles/trudell.mp3

Excerpts from the Atlanta, GA IMC interview (NOTE: edited for clarity and inserting points made in the audio interview, but left out in the text version at Atlanta IMC):

(...)

...[The ruling order is] not really fighting a war on terrorism - they're fighting a war for resources and domination - political domination and economic domination. They create these enemies.

What's happening now - the patriot act and all of these laws that they're passing. Right now it's against Muslims and others. But the real intent of these laws is against the citizens of America. Fifteen, twenty years down the road, when the economic shifts truly start to make a big impact. Right now, a lot of people are living on the fringe, through the credit system. But that's all going to change. All the mechanisms are in place.

So the workers won't get to unionize in the future. The environmentalists won't have a say in the future. What I find interesting about this war on terrorism now - the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs…this is what created the World Trade Organization. It has maybe 190 member nations. But in order to join the GATT each nation had to agree that they would go by the final decision makers and any disagreements that came up would go through the World Trade Organization which is the bureaucracy for the GATT agreement.

And each nation agreed to submit to the decision-making process of the World Trade Organization, which means that any economic dispute, American sovereignty will be submissive to an economic decision made by corporate appointees.

So taking this to an extreme…let's say in Atlanta we've got a company that wants to do something but environmentally they can't get after. Theoretically, they can make a complaint to the World Trade Organization that they can't compete with the people in Romania. In Atlanta, in Georgia, we have too strong environmental standards, and in Romania, they have no environmental standards.

What these people can say to the World Trade Organization…they can say to Atlanta, or the state of Georgia and the U.S., you have to lower your environmental standards. And you have to do it. And whether it's about living wage - if they say you have to lower it. And I was thinking about this, and I was wondering - what are the American people going to do when they understand?

They're not going to like what's going on, right? They're going to rebel. And then after knocking down the buildings in New York City and the Pentagon, all the laws are set in place now…they've legalized how to keep the American people from rebelling. And as a side thing - from 1999 to 2000, the false millennium - I was watching this T.V. show on the history channel of New Years Eve and they were talking about the number of people who are in the legal system, from Death Row maximum security to probation. It's over three million people. But they are projecting that by the year 2100, there will be 33 million people.

So in a hundred years, they are already projecting to incarcerate thirty million more people. And I thought about that, and I wondered where they came up with this figure. They are anticipating something, right? That we don't even have a clue that they're anticipating.

What Americans don't really quite get yet, is that the American ruling class, they needed the white people to kill the Indians and enslave the blacks to work the land. So they gave them certain privileges. [(NOTE: Howard Zinn also backs this statement in A People's History of the United States-ed]]

They [gave non-elite white people?] a little more say because it's all internal competition, made progress go. But the technology has advanced, they have globalized the planet now through trade and the military. When they realized this, maybe 20, 30 years ago, that the American people, the citizens, are too fuckin expensive.

They want to make a living wage, they want health care, they want childcare, they want days off to have babies, fuck--they want everything. That's just too expensive. Because they're into maximizing profit. So the world has opened up globally. So they have markets globally and they don't need the American consumer the same way they needed them before. Because there's two billion of them in the planet right now, and out of that 2 billion, one-and-a-half billion of then can pick up the slack that the Americans have to let go. And this is really what's going on.

So when I think about the war on terrorism, they were ready, they had this legislation ready. Do you know what else is interesting - that it's about Talibans…the Afghani Taliban, of which Osama Bin Landen and all them are a part of, but then I think that America has its own [style of?] "Taliban" - and that's George Bush and Ashcroft and all the right-wing...

It's interesting, all this positioning that goes on. These attacks wait until after the American taliban has come in.

See, the American Taliban, these people - they believe in the Armageddon, they believe in the Rapture. They believe that they will persevere and they believe that the state of Israel, the only ones that will survive are the ones that will take Jesus Christ as their savior. It's insane stuff going on, but it's violently insane. It's interesting, that this doesn't happen until the American taliban is in there, that's extremely interesting.

There's a group called the Carlyle group, this business group, and their tentacles are into the military industrial complex, and it's been around since the end of the first Bush administration, and it's made up of cabinet members it was created by the Reagan, Bush Administrations. And George, Sr. is one of the consultant advisor's representatives.

Anyway, this war happens to be very good for them, financially. Anyway, the point is that the Bin Laden family and the Bush family, they're investors in this thing. And I read this in the L.A. Times, and they hardly ever tell
you anything…but nobody really picks up on that and pursues it.

(...)

And what I see right now is America, the patriot act - and it's not just America. It's happening in Europe, it's happening in the industrialized, civilized world. It's not about just the capitalists, it's not about just the socialists, or communists, or any of these things. These are just different colors of the painted face of the industrial ruling class on this planet.

So each one of these systems that's been devised, they're just there to feed us, control us, [get us to say] "this is how I like to be controlled as a mass". Tell me, promise me...false socialism and whatever, In reality, all of these things - there is always a ruling class of decision makers.

(....)

There is always that class separation where someone is better than somebody else. And they paint it up differently, so it might be attractive to us, but the problem is the industrial ruling class that dominates the perceptional realities of the people on this planet.

So the patriot act is just a minor little tool in this thing they are fixing, so what's happening in this revolutionary western civilization is that we are coming back to the dark ages but people don't see that because we have neon and electricity. But what I mean by the dark ages…if one looks historically on the dark ages of Europe, the people of Europe, they were serfs and peasants. They were owned by whoever owned the land and they were owned by the royalty. Maybe they apprenticed and learned a trade, the lucky ones. The landlord could do whatever he wanted with you.

The Europeans, the reason it was easy for them to enslave the blacks was because it had fucking happened to them. The landlord owned them. If the landlord wanted some man's wife or some man's daughter, he got that. If he wanted some man's son, he got that. When the Europeans arrived here, this is what had happened to them for so long, they just behaved that way.

What I see now is that the Western civilization has gotten back to the dark ages. Where the individual is the property. I mean, the landlord will wear different clothes now and say it differently. But the landlord's the landlord.

(...)

George Bush is an idiot: he didn't think all this stuff up and everybody knows it. But yet we pretend that he's the problem. But he's not a problem. He's the Peter Jennings. He's the anchorman for the real problem. And this has been going on for awhile. So I think that the war with Iraq is inevitable. Because the Americans, the West, they need a stronghold. Israel isn't enough now. They need to have a stronghold in that Muslim population.

On one hand, it's about Iraq and oil, but it's about more than that. The largest untapped resources are in Central Asia, on the other side of Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan. So it's about that part. But the other part - the Muslim consciousness, because of globalization--electronically and everything--is starting to re-emerge again after having been subdued after a hundred or a thousand years, however long this last thing…this has been going on between the Christians and the Muslims and the Jews for two-thousand years. Or less than two thousand - for the last fifteen-hundred years.

The Muslim thing is starting to re-emerge because it's a revolutionary civilization, so different [governments] take turns doing their thing.

(...)

Mali: What are some major issues that indigenous people face today and what can non-indigenous people do to act as allies?
Trudell: The major issues facing native people today is that Americans don't get it. So the best thing the American people can do - smarten up. Use their intelligence clearly and coherently - get it. In a way, that really is what it is.

Because this comes up. On one hand, people should do what they do. If people are supporting native issues through the political system, or collecting things, or organizing to help them with environmental issues, however one is doing it, I don't think any of that should stop. At some point, the American people have to look at their systems - their systems being political, religious, military, business - they have to look at their systems more realistically.

(...)

Every individual truly needs to use their intelligence clearly and coherently, not emotionally. Not reactionary. Because we've been programmed to react. We've been programmed to believe what we've been taught. And then out of that program of belief, we've been programmed to react to those beliefs.

So somewhere along the line, we need to bring in something fresh, which I'm going to call *initiated thought.* By having an understanding of who we are individually, and therefore collectively at some point, and I mean really understanding who we are as human beings. Because our relationship to reality power is in our relationship to the human and the being.

And I personally don't think that we use our intelligence clearly and coherently anymore. To me, it's obvious that the society we live in - it's not the result of clear and coherent thinking. I'm 56 - I started in the late 60s with this, and we were the majority, the baby boomers. And our intentions were good. Our motives - sometimes maybe we didn't understand our motives. But our intentions…weren't bad. It wasn't bad we wanted. It was good we wanted, and we wanted it for everybody. I mean collectively, interracially, all of it - we wanted it to be better.

And now, 40 years later, and it's worse. Now why is that? Exactly what the fuck happened? This wasn't what we wanted! The closest conclusion I can come to on this - somehow manipulated our thought. Somehow they affected [?] how we perceive reality, and the way they affected how we perceive reality - we were doing many things that were built in for them to absorb.

We weren't thinking differently. They knew how we were gonna think. They knew how we were gonna react. Because this has been going on for such a long time. The way this system seems to work…If you can fool the worker generation, if you can keep them off balance...then by the time they get old, they won't pass on what they learned to the next generation. So you can just gotta recycle the generations.

Every three generations, you can do the same damn thing you did before, because the third generation doesn't know. It's got something to do with our perception of reality.

(...)

It comes to a point where we're not using our intelligence clearly and coherently…and the more unclear and the more incoherent, then that sets the pace at which we will evolve ourselves out of the evolutionary reality. And so it's about perceptions of reality. And the whole civilizing process has been to alter our perception of reality. So what I'm saying, about that we cooperate with them sometimes unknowingly - demonstrating. I'll just use that as an example.

If we have a violent civil disobedience, we're cooperating with them - it's war games. All the people that beat you up -they get paid overtime for it! They're making extra money! Whatever our tactic is, they learn that tactic. And then the next time, it's harder.

What happened with the World Trade Organization stuff in Seattle, well, by the time it got to D.C., that wasn't happening anymore, was it? So it's all war games for them. So even though we're having this [Seattle protest, etc.] we're cooperating with them. If we do it nonviolently, then we get permits! Again, we're cooperating with them. I'm not saying we shouldn't do those things, because we've gotta be doing something. But we really need to start thinking about ways not to cooperate.

(...)

One way of not cooperating, is not believing anything they say. But that's difficult to do, because it's so layered into us. We can say we don't believe, but it's so layered into us, right? Not believing is a form of non-cooperation, because I think it's about non-cooperation.

Maybe if we organized to get people to agree to not spend any money for one day. Spend your money the day before, the day after. But not spend any money for one day. And if you get thirty percent of the population to do it, it has an economic impact. I guarantee, because I'm not cooperating. I'm not going to help the cash flow. I'm not helping your blood run today. I'm not spending any money today. Credit card, check, cash, whatever.

We all agree and know it's being done for profit. Every bit of it. Whatever it is we protest or oppose, we know it's being done for profit in the end. Here's one way that we can affect that. They'll blow us off and make fun of us, but I guarantee you, once we get it down, we can get the numbers to 30 or 40 percent, they have to deal with us. And it's not illegal to do this.

And the churches can't go against it. And the majority of the people in this country don't have money to spend every day.

So when you look at the natural things when you fight your guerilla war in [an] environment [you're familiar with?]. So when you look at what's there for you to do this with. Many things are there…it's time hasn't come with. But something like this, I think it becomes an exercise in non-cooperation.

You don't have to over-centralize. Because when you over-centralize, they'll kill you. Either figuratively or literally, you'll get attacked. But with something like this, the network agrees "this is the day we don't do it". And if their issue is different from your issue, well, then fine - they do it around their issue.

You don't need to create a new command, you don't need to create anything new. You just use the existing things that are there. It's about clear and coherent agreements are made and understandings. So nobody has to raise money for a national organization or anything!

(...)

For more information on websites about and set up to inform, on the topic of John Trudell, see the following:



www.dickshovel.com/JTT.html

www.intheheart.net/letter2trudell.html

(both are non-commercial sites)