http://www.truthout.org/when-institutions-rape-nations/1306158556
Excerpt:

When Institutions Rape Nations

Monday 23 May 2011

by: Rebecca Solnit, TomDispatch

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the leader of the International Monetary Fund, is escorted from a New York Police Department station in Harlem after being formally arrested, in New York, on May 15, 2011. (Photo: Robert Stolarik / The New York Times)

Some thoughts on the IMF, global injustice, and a stranger on a train.

How can I tell a story we already know too well? Her name was Africa. His was France. He colonized her, exploited her, silenced her, and even decades after it was supposed to have ended, still acted with a high hand in resolving her affairs in places like Côte d’Ivoire, a name she had been given because of her export products, not her own identity.

Her name was Asia. His was Europe. Her name was silence. His was power. Her name was poverty. His was wealth. Her name was Her, but what was hers? His name was His, and he presumed everything was his, including her, and he thought he could take her without asking and without consequences. It was a very old story, though its outcome had been changing a little in recent decades. And this time around the consequences are shaking a lot of foundations, all of which clearly needed shaking.

Who would ever write a fable as obvious, as heavy-handed as the story we’ve just been given? The extraordinarily powerful head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), a global organization that has created mass poverty and economic injustice, allegedly assaulted a hotel maid, an immigrant from Africa, in a hotel’s luxury suite in New York City.

When Institutions Rape Nations

Monday 23 May 2011

by: Rebecca Solnit, TomDispatch

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the leader of the International Monetary Fund, is escorted from a New York Police Department station in Harlem after being formally arrested, in New York, on May 15, 2011. (Photo: Robert Stolarik / The New York Times)

Some thoughts on the IMF, global injustice, and a stranger on a train.

How can I tell a story we already know too well? Her name was Africa. His was France. He colonized her, exploited her, silenced her, and even decades after it was supposed to have ended, still acted with a high hand in resolving her affairs in places like Côte d’Ivoire, a name she had been given because of her export products, not her own identity.

Her name was Asia. His was Europe. Her name was silence. His was power. Her name was poverty. His was wealth. Her name was Her, but what was hers? His name was His, and he presumed everything was his, including her, and he thought he could take her without asking and without consequences. It was a very old story, though its outcome had been changing a little in recent decades. And this time around the consequences are shaking a lot of foundations, all of which clearly needed shaking.

Who would ever write a fable as obvious, as heavy-handed as the story we’ve just been given? The extraordinarily powerful head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), a global organization that has created mass poverty and economic injustice, allegedly assaulted a hotel maid, an immigrant from Africa, in a hotel’s luxury suite in New York City.

When Institutions Rape Nations
Monday 23 May 2011
by: Rebecca Solnit, TomDispatch

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the leader of the International Monetary Fund, is escorted from a New York Police Department station in Harlem after being formally arrested, in New York, on May 15, 2011. (Photo: Robert Stolarik / The New York Times)
Some thoughts on the IMF, global injustice, and a stranger on a train.
How can I tell a story we already know too well? Her name was Africa. His was France. He colonized her, exploited her, silenced her, and even decades after it was supposed to have ended, still acted with a high hand in resolving her affairs in places like Côte d’Ivoire, a name she had been given because of her export products, not her own identity.
Her name was Asia. His was Europe. Her name was silence. His was power. Her name was poverty. His was wealth. Her name was Her, but what was hers? His name was His, and he presumed everything was his, including her, and he thought he could take her without asking and without consequences. It was a very old story, though its outcome had been changing a little in recent decades. And this time around the consequences are shaking a lot of foundations, all of which clearly needed shaking.
Who would ever write a fable as obvious, as heavy-handed as the story we’ve just been given? The extraordinarily powerful head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), a global organization that has created mass poverty and economic injustice, allegedly assaulted a hotel maid, an immigrant from Africa, in a hotel’s luxury suite in New York City.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebecca_Solnit
Excerpt:
Rebecca Solnit (born 1961) is a writer who lives in San Francisco. She has written on a variety of subjects including the environment, politics, place, and art. ^[1]
She skipped high school altogether, enrolling in an alternative junior high in the public school system that took her through tenth grade, when she passed the GED exam. Thereafter she enrolled in junior college. When she was 17 she went to study in Paris. She ultimately returned to California and finished her college education at San Francisco State University when she was 20.^[2] She then received a Masters in Journalism from the University of California, Berkeley^[3] in 1984 and has been an independent writer since 1988. Prior to this she was a museum researcher and art critic.^[4] She has worked on environmental and human rights campaigns since the 1980s, notably with the Western Shoshone Defense Project in the early 1990s, as described in her book Savage Dreams, and with antiwar activists throughout the Bush era.
Solnit has received many awards for her writing: a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan literary fellowship, two NEA Fellowships for Literature, and a 2004 Wired Rave Award^[5] for writing on the effects of technology on the arts and humanities. In 2010, Utne Reader magazine named Solnit as one of the "25 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World."^[6]
Her writing has appeared in numerous publications in print and online, notably at the website Tomdispatch.com. She is the author of twelve books as well as essays in numerous museum catalogues and anthologies.


Rebecca Solnit and Peter Coyote in Conversation: LIVE Shorts
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgoWiHzUNmE

http://www.alternet.org/authors/5857
Excerpt:

Stories by Rebecca Solnit

Rebecca Solnit is the author of 'Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities'.

Vision: Revolution Is "Unpredictable and As Beautiful as Spring"

Posted on Mar 20, 2011, Source: Tomdispatch.com

When do the abuses that have been tolerated for so long become intolerable? When does the fear evaporate and the rage generate action that produces joy?

http://www.alternet.org/story/82222/men_explain_things_to_me/
Excerpt:
Men Explain Things to Me

Facts didn't get in their way.

April 14, 2008  |    

LIKE THIS ARTICLE ?

I still don't know why Sallie and I bothered to go to that party in the forest slope above Aspen. The people were all older than us and dull in a distinguished way, old enough that we, at forty-ish, passed as the occasion's young ladies. The house was great -- if you like Ralph Lauren-style chalets -- a rugged luxury cabin at 9,000 feet complete with elk antlers, lots of kilims, and a wood-burning stove. We were preparing to leave, when our host said, "No, stay a little longer so I can talk to you." He was an imposing man who'd made a lot of money.

http://www.amazon.com/Savage-Dreams-Landscape-American-afterword/dp/0520220668
Excerpt:

Review

"A beautiful, absorbing, tragic book. . . . Rebecca Solnit tells this story with the passion and clarity it deserves." -- Larry McMurtry

"Savage Dreams is about many things: despoliation and restoration, finding a voice between contemporary noise and silence, making friends and enemies. Most of all, though, it may be about a journey into history: about how understanding history and making it are not really very different." -- Greil Marcus, author of Lipstick Traces

"Savage Dreams summons us to the campfires of resistance." -- Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz

"Solnit's intelligent meditations may awaken us from our self- congratulatory coma. [Her] mind is fertile, wide-ranging and capable of integrating the bewildering deluge of fact, political delusion, flights of genius, inconceivable danger and cunning deceit that [have] characterized the nuclear age." -- Los Angeles Times

Product Description

Is this a man's point of view?

Is this a woman's?     

In 1851, a war began in what would become Yosemite National Park, a war against the indigenous inhabitants that has yet to come to a real conclusion. A century later--1951--and about a hundred and fifty miles away, another war began when the U. S. government started setting off nuclear bombs at the Nevada Test Site, in what was called a nuclear testing program but functioned as a war against the land and people of the Great Basin. Savage Dreams is an exploration of these two landscapes. Together they serve as our national Eden and Armageddon and offer up a lot of the history of the west, not only in terms of Indian and environmental wars, but in terms of the relationship between culture--the generation of beliefs and views--and its implementation as politics.

http://www.wrm.org.uy/bulletin/62/parks.html
Excerpt:

  Wilderness Parks or Community Conservation?

Conservation through the establishment of 'National Parks' was an idea born in the United States during the 19th century at a time when it was waging war on Indians and colonizing the 'Wild West'. The world's first National Park, Yosemite, was established on the lands of the Miwok people after a bitter war and was followed by the eviction of the remaining people from their land. Setting up the park at Yellowstone also triggered conflict with the local Indians. Nearly all the main National Parks in the USA today are inhabited or claimed by indigenous peoples. Yet according to US law these areas are 'wildernesses', defined by the US Wilderness Act as places 'where man himself is a visitor who does not remain'. It is this wilderness model, exported by western conservationists, that became the dominant approach to nature conservation throughout the tropics during the era of 'development' after the second world war.

Though fundamental to much western thinking about nature, many indigenous peoples reject the notion of wilderness, as Jakob Malas a Khomani hunter from the Kalahari, whose lands were classified as the Gemsbok National Park, has noted: