A People's History of Robin Hood

From the United Kingdom to the United States,
activists fighting for myriad causes carry on the
tradition of Robin Hood.
(photo: Oxfam International)

By Paul Buhle, YES! Magazine

18 February 12

For hundreds of years, he's fought tax injustice, tyranny, and the seizure of the commons. Why we still need him today.

"Man has an insatiable longing for justice. In his soul he rebels against a social order which denies it to him and whatever the world he lives in, he accuses either that social order or the entire material universe of injustice ... And in addition he carries within himself the wish to have what he cannot have - if only in the form of a fairy tale."-- Eric Hobsbawm, Bandits (1981)

n the late 1950s, a handful of peaceniks protested mandatory ROTC on a major U.S. university campus by carrying signs and wearing green buttons. Back when The Adventures of Robin Hood was a giant hit on television, most everybody knew that green was Robin Hood's color and that Robin could not side with the king's soldiers or future soldiers of any empire. Five decades later, the lead protagonist of a cult favorite American cable show, Leverage, announces at the beginning of each episode: "The rich and the powerful take what they want; we steal it back for you."

It's a fitting motto for heroes of the 21st century. Admittedly, resistance to injustice has not as yet returned to the level of the apprentices and craftsmen in Edinburgh, Scotland, who in 1561 chose to come together "efter the auld wikid maner of Robene Hude": they elected a leader as "Lord of Inobedience" and stormed past the magistrates, through the city gates, up to Castle Hill where they displayed their unwillingness to accept current work-and-wage conditions. But as a global society, we are clearly still thinking about the need for Robin Hood.    READ MORE

 

Thanks to Our Military Debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan, America's 'Superpower' Status Has Officially Ended

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have not only drained American treasure, but exposed the relative helplessness of the "sole superpower."

January 3, 2012

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It was to be the war that would establish empire as an American fact.  It would result in a thousand-year Pax Americana.  It was to be “mission accomplished” all the way.  And then, of course, it wasn’t.  And then, almost nine dismal years later, it was over (sorta).

It was the Iraq War, and we were the uninvited guests who didn’t want to go home.  To the last second, despite President Obama’s repeated promise that all American troops were leaving, despite an agreement the Iraqi government had signed with George W. Bush’s administration in 2008, America’s military commanders continued to lobby and Washington continued to negotiate for 10,000 to 20,000 U.S. troops to remain in-country as advisors and trainers.

Only when the Iraqis simply refused to guarantee those troops immunity from local law did the last Americans begin to cross the border into Kuwait.  It was only then that our top officials began to hail the thing they had never wanted, the end of the American military presence in Iraq, as marking an era of “accomplishment.”  They also began praising their own “decision” to leave as a triumph, and proclaimed that the troops were departing with -- as the president put it -- “their heads held high.”

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