I also understand that because of sloppy imagery you took the ‘contagion’ post as a call for ‘regime change’, which it was in no way meant to be. Or rather, it was in no way meant to be taken as a call for ‘regime change’ understood as military intervention on the part of the U.S./allies. Quite the opposite. I was merely remarking (celebrating?) the rise of North African / West Asian uprisings against autocratic regimes sponsored, in many cases, by the U.S. As a (complicit) U.S. American the only kind of regime change I really call for ‘starts at home’. Developments in N. Africa / W. Asia, at least until NATO in Libya, could can be seen as a partial dismantling of the imperial status quo, and that was / is heartening.

I don’t want you to take a more BRIC perspective, but I do think that you and I and any U.S. American who agrees with us MUST try to rebuild this country on a foundation that is basically internationally humanist. That is, that International Humanism is the movement we share, me and you and all the other good U.S. Americans I have met. We’ve shared it for the three decades I’ve been an American. We need to read these views as more tuned to our own and we need to SHOW U.S. AMERICANS HOW THESE VIEWS ARE REALLY MORE IN KEEPING WITH OUR BASIC CREED AS A NATION.

To that end International Humanism demands we be honest about the genocide of the Natives of this land, about the economic farce of the slave trade and the continuing racist agenda of a System designed to care for its own – white males who authored it and their families – above all others.

International Humanism demands we be more critical and condemning of policy that we witness and pay for. It is a moral righteousness I am talking about here. (Call it Gandhian, satyagraha, whatever, but we are responsible for the murder of millions, just like Hitler or Mussolini and we use the EXACT SAME PROPAGANDA LANGUAGE to make our murders palatable).

International Humanism had successes and a lot of people of our generation don’t know that. It was International Humanism that ended Apartheid in South Africa. We, protesters all over the world, demanded that they release Sisulu and release Mandela. I was demanding the divestiture of my University, the University of Texas – an immense oil and mineral endowment with deep ties to the fascist racist South African regime – through strong activist protests in the 1980′s and as I and my friends were doing this they were protesting in England, France, Spain … all over the world.

And then in February of 1990, Mandela walked.

Then came the chill. The Ice Age for progressive thought that Dr. West described to me in April of 2004.

We may be a minority, reduced to a focus group at our greatest moment, but we refuse to roll over, to go away quietly and die.

This means that no matter what the current of thought we are obliged to maintain the tiny heartbeat of International Humanism.

The BRIC view in the case of Libya that Dilip Hiro describes as “the first time the major powers denoted by the acronym BRIC – Brazil, Russia, India and China – adopted a unified stance on a matter of war and peace.” – should be an extremely significant moment for us as well. We should think profoundly about sovereignty and remember what we once stood for.

I am only asking you to be willing to escape the “current” more – because I think you are extremely sharp as an editor of what exists about the present, but that you don’t interject calculation about the current in relation to history effectively enough, so you are participating in the current – which is fundamentally flawed.

a metaphor, when I first arrived in USA it was far more common to hear US Americans complain that a President or candidate was way out of line to try to interfere in the foreign policy of elsewhere. People protested Reagan’s Grenada farce and he had to get shot to save his image!

Then by Bush’s time – Noriega first, then Saddam, it was still bad politics to do this.

Clinton (via Madeleine Albright – a raving Polish paranoid) authored the violence in Kosovo – which was protested by – you guessed it, the 3 billion people living in Russia, India and China (Brazil wasn’t big enough to count, but I am sure by them as well)

Then 9/11 – the polarizing events.

and Bush/Cheney were given license by our silence to just start making it policy.

The god damn piece of shit Parker/Stone idiots made Team America and the South Park movie, calling it satire, but really it all just sold the idea that we SHOULD police the world, force regime changes.

Your contagion post was actually a US American clamoring for regime change, to me.

SOVEREIGNTY is gone. The UN is a tool of the USA/UK to make the world in its image.

Nobody loves the USA anymore and we all want the fucking USA to STAND DOWN and shut the fuck up. It would be nice to receive an apology and to hear compliant talk from the White House. This country is as fascist in its military dealings as any in history.

It has made Huns, Communists and now Muslims into hated inhuman enemies. It’s ridiculous what it gets away with. Holding its people in fear, paranoia and ignorance to a world at large that is communicating and flowering like never before. THAT world is the BRIC countries – more than 4 billion people – asking the less than 100million that make up the military policy of the USA to stfu and stand down.

so I feel you should condemn the USA more for these things. You should step up to that in your posts by making a more pointed attack at the USA mentality that allows this – rather than seek to inflate the revolutionary desires of those in another place that you really know very little about. There is plenty of work to do here and it isn’t being done.

We should be taking to US Americans harder that we are US Americans and we hate what our country has become and that we demand a new way, demand a new perspective, that we AGREE with the BRIC cpountries and some 4 billion people – against our own government.

we should be making and writing more like the MLK you quote from Riverside Church so often – against the USA and against our own policy.

The World’s Got Problems, yes. and the biggest one is the USA.

In conclusion, thank you for doing what little good work that is being done.
mtk

Regarding your criticism, I must admit that I am not sure what you mean when you say that I “need to address the political viewpoints from a wider angle and accept the responsibility of being smarter than the President, Congress and the System or you are complicit by an accidental effect, or a coincidental effect or co-accidental ( a term I coined in my first novel, Mood, back in 1997).”

Which political viewpoint do i need to address from a wider angle? (I strive to address things from as wide an angle as my abilities admit, so I guess I agree with you there in principle.)

But what would it mean to “accept the responsibility of being smarter than the President / Congress / System”? I’m not sure what standard of intelligence you would use that would put me ahead of the P/C/S, or even if it is meaningful to compare the intelligence of myself with that of a System or imperial functionary. My own view is that there are very smart imperial functionaries, even if they don’t share my/our commitments.

Generally speaking, I sounds like you want me to consider things more from the BRIC perspective. I guess I can strive to think things thing things through from such a perspective, but it is not my native perspective, i.e., a U.S. American citizen, who is without question complicit (via taxes, consumption, passivity, etc.) despite my modest efforts to liberate myself from complicity.

But what specifically do you feel I need to address from a BRIC perspective? And in any case shouldn’t I expect diversity of thinking among “people living among BRIC nations”?

Maybe I don’t understand what you are getting at, and in any case you are clearly mad as a hatter. But not necessarily about this, I should add.

I have been a fan of this writer for years. and this is an amazing piece.
mtk

You and I have been leaders of the Peace Movement to the extent that the ENTIRE movement listened to our broadcasts between February 5th and June 5th of 2003 – the period of the Gulf War II and its opposition (a focus group as per Bush) that gathered in the single largest global protest against any one thing on February 15th, when more than seven million people in cities all over the world protested the impending War on Iraq.

We were journalists, we used hard journalism principles and we were willing to cover what corporate media wouldn’t. That was hard. And I was strict. A lot of people don’t know that and I think it’s important. That act is important and should be recognized and it still hasn’t. Patrick Burke, yourself, Page Getz, Monica Lopez, Aura Bogado, others, we took the risk, as it were, to make that our journalistic expression. And the peace movement has been who has buried that – almost as though “losing” made the connecting of all those people irrelevant. It has been terrible.

Our efforts and those of the people we covered never materialized into coherent policy.

Instead, we have been neutralized by the system using a method that was defined by the founders of the USA. In the Federalist Papers #10, Madison warns that unless the system is made a specific way (refined and enlarged) the people will never be able to be controlled by the elites. He predicts what we are a “faction” and is the one who gave Bush/Cheney they’re ability to marginalize us.

Thus, the system is fundamentally the problem, right? because certainly Bush/Cheney-Americans were a faction, too. And a despotic one at that, which acted unilaterally to use the resources of USA to do whatever they wanted. And they got away with it because we weren’t able to inform enough of our fellow Americans in time or with enough depth.

I admire this site because you continue that hard work. I am proud of you, you have far exceeded my efforts as an active resistor to tyranny and anti-intellectualism these last two years.

Still, one of the reasons our faction is easily marginalized is because the interests of the USA system are favored by much of the “peace movement”. Whether its Labor or Gay Americans or Black Americans, over and over again, I have tried to get people here to think bigger than their interests and than the USA itself and I’ve met resistance. People have disregarded the viewpoint – actively. They have been conditioned and programmed and brainwashed to do this. I am talking about intelligent people on the progressive left here now.

There is a specific moment when it happens – I can physically and emotionally call out the exact moment when a U.S. American disengages with me because they presume my viewpoint to be of Indian- or other- origin and therefore not accessible by them as a person of the US, or an unwillingness to consider it.

The paradox is, I am not espousing Indian values or political protection. I am attempting as an American to author a New America and using truth and information delivery and activism and progressive use of contemporary tools to do it.

In fact, I have put change ahead of every one of my goals, including making money – and US Americans cannot handle that idea at all. The place has changed Rosencrantz – and the foreign policy agenda that used to be buttressed by this country’s generosity of spirit and humanitarian concern has totally yielded to the selfish interests of the contemporary US American – a being who cannot deal with the fact that they are no longer the best, not by a longshot and is unwilling to be responsible for their part of what is going on. That being on the left thinks that going in to get rid of Ghaddafi is a good thing, as though the world will thank us?

You, Rosencrantz, I exclude of course. Again, I admire your dietary and transportation choices and the way you try to live a conscientious life though in the USA. It means something. But sometimes, I question whther you totally get what I am talking about when I resist YOU or one of your viewpoints expressed here.

IMO, you need to address the political viewpoints from a wider angle and accept the responsibilty of being smarter than the President, Congress and the System or you are complicit by an accidental effect, or a coincidental effect or co-accidental ( a term I coined in my first novel, Mood, back in 1997).

do you understand what I am saying? I mean in these last three specific posts meant to address this?

or am I mad, mad, mad as a hatter?
[btw, anyone who says so is an agent, or jealous, or too dumb to understand anything at all]
mtk

My issue is that, though a member of the Peace Movement here in USA, I think much more like a member of the BRIC nations than other US Americans that I meet – perhaps yourself included.

It was Afghanistan. Then Iraq. Then Af-Pak was added under Obama. and now Libya.
and there is a US delineation about the “right” wars.

“well we had to go into Afghanistan.”

“We can’t just let that crazy guy kill his own people”

All of this is an abomination and a direct result of the Bush Doctrine – an illegal, corporate, imperial and despotic policy. We have been lulled into a belief that we have rights over the sovereignty of others.

There are numerous and nuanced responses to the US/French intervention in Libya, which I firmly oppose along with the many billions of people living in the BRIC countries. Dilip Hiro in Yale Global elucidattes that this “crisis” may be the first to expose the global repositioning of power between the BRIC and USA/UK/Israel/neoLiberal Europe axis.

http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/libya-bombs-fall-allies-fall-apart

“On 17 March Resolution 1973 authorized UN member states to “take all necessary measures” to achieve theses aims, but ruled out the presence of foreign troops on Libya’s soil. Although the resolution called for an immediate ceasefire, the US ambassador to the UN later said that it would permit helping the rebel forces with weapons.

“Proposed jointly by Britain, France and Lebanon, seconded by the US, it was backed by the three non-permanent members of Africa, raising the total yes vote to 10. The remaining five members abstained.

“Russia and China questioned the merit of using force when other means had not been exhausted, an argument backed by Brazil and India. The four nations pointed out the lack of clarity about who would enforce the measures. Thus, for the first time the major powers denoted by the acronym BRIC – Brazil, Russia, India and China – adopted a unified stance on a matter of war and peace. Brazil’s ambassador raised the prospect of the resolution exacerbating current tensions and “causing more harm than good” to the civilians targeted for protection.”

check it out

mtk