NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

My entire trip last month to South Korea was almost completely overshadowed because of the sinking of the South Korean ship the Cheonan, and the killing of 46 South Korean sailors. The South Korean Government was quick to assume it was North Korea and eventually a report was released confirmed that. The sinking of the ship became something which allowed the government to stall or crackdown on all sorts of activities that they perceived to be weakening the national security of South Korea. The main targets became social democratic and civil society groups, primarily those who have a core precept that the two Koreas should be someday ( puede ha' ti apmam) reunited. For just the week that I was in South Korea, I could see it in the eyes of so many activists, that the sinking, regardless of what the truth behind it was, would be used against them, would be something which Right wing elements could twist into turning the country into a blind nationalistic and militaristic frenzy. I wr

"When I first sat in the Armed Services Committee, my first meeting. They said now, the question you ask, I was on the lower tier, the first row, now I'm on the second row. They said the question should be kind of generic and not too specific. So I had this question written out.Then I heard the rest of them, "my base" and "my state." I says, "Hey!" So when it came down to me, I said, "I want a carrier sent to Guam." Guam Congresswoman Madeleine Bordallo in an interview on the Convention Floor, Wednesday "John McCain may pay hundred of dollars for his shoes, but we're the ones who will pay for his flip-flops." New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson during his speech on Thursday. "We can't simply drill our way to energy independence if you drilled everywhere, if you drilled in all of John McCain's backyards, even the ones he doesn't know he has." Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer from his speech on energy indepe

Guam and the Marianas Islands don't get much respect, especially in terms of the media in the United States, which consistently forget that these islands belong to the United States or are attached to them. This amnesia is of course very convenient for those wishing to avoid having to refer to the United States as "colonial" in a very ordinary and regular sort of way. Its possible to give the United States labels such as this in extreme cases, but even for some of the most critical people, such labels have to be kept from Guam, since their is nothing extreme about its relationship to the United States. The colonialness of it, is always there, and never really mentioned or dealt with. Guam basically proves that the United States is not an "extreme" or rare case colonizer, but an everyday one. Interestingly enough though, the Marianas Islands do however make regularly appearances in what I guess you could call the world wide web of American progressive/liberal web

Published on Thursday, July 26, 2007 by The Nation Clinton, Kissinger and the Corruptions of Empire by John Nichols Of all the corruptions of empire, few are darker than the claim that diplomacy must be kept secret from the citizenry.This hide-it-from-the people faith that only a cloistered group of unelected and often unaccountable elites - embodied by the nefarious and eminently indictable Henry Kissinger - is capable of steering the affairs of state pushes Americans out of the processes that determine whether their sons and daughters will die in distant wars, whether the factories where they worked will be shuttered, whether their country will respond to or neglect genocide, whether their tax dollars will go to pay for the unspeakable. It allows for the dirty game where foreign countries are included or excluded from contact with the U.S. based on unspoken whims and self-serving schemes, where trade deals are negotiated without congressional oversight and then presented in take-it

I wrote a few years ago a letter to the PDN which asked that those of us on Guam please rethink our relationship to the United States. I noted that the best time to reposition, rearticulate and rework this relationship was when, despite the powerfully charged rhetoric of Guam’s Americaness and patriotism and partnership with the US, we get slapped in the face with our colonial existence, our subordinate status. I called this moments “scandals.” One common response that I receive from this point, is that no such scandals exist, that I was merely making it up. The relationship between Guam and America is as smooth and equitable as ever. In exchange for not paying taxes, and not being able to have any sovereignty, we get to enjoy being a strategically important appendage of the greatest country left in the world! If that can’t explain the high levels of Chamorro patriotism towards the United States, then nothing can! Naturally, this isn’t the case. Life as a semi-American in Guam is a te