In the last two days I watched with amusement Richard Dawkins’ pointed The Root Of All Evil?, lambasting some of the most simple-minded and shocking aspects of religion via his simple-minded take on where that instinct is actually leading, and I went to a Wednesday (fantastic) class on the philosophy of yoga with my longtime teacher of the Vedas, Jeffrey Armstrong, who always says several things that blow my mind, and keep me remembering…

A poem resulted. Feel free to read it by shouting in a highly affected pompous English accent:

A THOUSAND SONGS

A million words may pass my lips
Ten thousand dreams may fill my hips
But die indeed if I can’t remember
To the force of love always surrender

Refine me, life, define me, love
Fill all the thoughts I’m thinking of
With the consciousness that brought us here
That allows this beauty to appear

Religion rapes this gorgeous thought
Pillages where the mind is caught
While science denies its own limitation
Thus sees the world as procreation

Says consciousness is born from brain
But can matter alone really explain
How clay and dirt have come to life
To give us animated strife?

To give us every song and dance
Death and love, time and chance
But does faith in only stops and starts
Leave us all as broken parts?

Or is that really all we are
At best created from a star?
Or from a God who plays a game
That sets us up to take the blame?

There is indeed much idiocy
Found in most theology
But science are you true salvation?
While building nuclear devastation?

How ironic to rebuke one side
For hatred both have so denied
Our religions fight most all the time
With weapons science did design

So what I’m trying to understand
Is how neither saw the hell they’ve planned
By forgetting who we may just be
Bodies wrapped round mystery

I’m talking about the fire of being
That brought to life all that we’re seeing
There is in fact no explanation
Thus all our words are defamation

Except of course for poetry
Which lives only for mystery
And knows the reason we’re so muddled
Is when we fought we should have cuddled

So what I’m trying to figure out
Is how neither side believes in doubt
Both claiming to have solved this life
In doing so create more strife

Is there not some irony in this
Is there not an aspect still remiss?
Is there something else that sets us free
I ask in all humility

Are we only bone in a layer of skin
Or souls yet born and full of sin?
I think we’re rather more than this
Not born but never-ending bliss

That know not hell nor death as such
I know this might be all too much
But if God nor science are fully real
What beauty do they both conceal?

Alas, poor Darwin and Yaweh too
You’re theories may be killing you
Let go, sweet Lover, and you will see
Before this mud came mystery

____________________________

For another thought, check this out.

I wrote this essay a month and a half ago. I haven’t had much feedback on it because I think it’s difficult for people naturally attracted to the Scientific Method, in all its wonder, to relax into ideas slightly more esoteric (although scientists always fall for love, with no empirical evidence for its existence whatsoever).

At the same time, I think it’s hard sometimes for people with a spiritual bent on the world to ask, or care about, certain questions of logic (although they accept a latte maker or a flush toilet as natural).

Anyway, if there are any scientists, doctors, sociologists, theologians, political scientists, artists, writers, dreamers, cab drivers, ski-bums or anyone else out there who can relax a belief system enough to consider these ideas merely as starting points for a conversation—or just to call me a nut or a “radical loose cannon” (that would be great)—I would love thoughts on this.

What a species, huh? But beautiful too. Anyway, good love to ya…

An excerpt:

“Any theory deserves to be given its best shot…”
—Richard Dawkins

 
Reading over an interview I did with Samantha Power for the film Uganda Rising, and her Pulitzer prize winning history of American policy with regard to genocide, “A Problem From Hell,” and then looking into a few thoughts from philosopher Ken Wilber on the subject, I keep coming back to the same thought:

Is it possible that an individual who acts in a genocidal fashion has a disease?

The definition of a disease is “…a condition that results in medically significant symptoms in a human.”

Genocide exhibits multiple disease symptoms that at least in terms of mental illness could be categorized as clinical: temporary psychopathology, a collapse of compassion (and a loss of what is known as humanity), a systematic expression of brutal violence (often accompanied by a joyful “fever”), obsessive compulsive disorder, and a drastic reversal of one’s nature under normal conditions.

To continue with the full essay…

Needless to say, I am intensely grateful for the opportunity to have been so involved in the creation of the film Uganda Rising, as co-director with Jesse, and writer, and in relationship with producer Alison Lawton and the rest of the Mindset Media team—not to mention getting so much creative freedom.

The last couple of days have been eventful.

Yesterday, Jesse and I watched the final layback (layback means “layback and pray the computer doesn’t crash as the final sound and final picture get married”) of the full feature 82 minute version of Uganda Rising, with Kevin Spacey’s narration now in.

On the same day, the cutdown 45 minute version of the film played on Discovery Times for the first time. Later that night, I received an e-mail from a viewer—an African History PhD student from New York who I neither know nor paid!—who was so generous with feedback:

In all these years, Uganda Rising is among the very best documentaries/books/anything treatment of Africa I have seen. I have never seen colonialism in Africa ( and the impact it has had) explained in such a way—thorough, accessible and uncompromising, and in about 5 minutes. Unbelievable. I will show this in all my classes, and encourage everyone I know to watch it.

They say the way to a person’s heart is through their tummy. Mine, as luck would have it, is through deeply praising the clarity and precision and value of the colonial/history section in the film.

Joking aside, it was so important to Jesse and I to try and set a context with meaning, and we were humbled by how to do that. That it may have worked is inspiring and fulfilling.

That things may change…

A brief excerpt:

The conflict [in Northern Uganda] officially began in 1986 when the first northern rebel movement took up arms against the southern based Museveni. But the deeper roots of this North-South divide can be traced back to the late 1800s, during what was called by the Imperial European Powers: “The scramble for Africa…â€?

Colonization was motivated by the European hunger for African resources. The subsequent exploitation of the African people and the uprooting of their spiritual values by Christian missionaries would leave a permanent European stamp on the continent.

NOAM CHOMSKY (Author/Social Critic):

The mind-set is the barbarians are backward and inferior and for their own benefit we have to uplift them, and civilize them and educate them and so on.

The psychology behind it is kind of transparent.

When you’ve got your boot on someone’s neck and you’re crushing them, you can’t say to yourself: “I’m a son of a bitch and I’m doing it for my own benefit.â€? So what you have to do is figure out some way of saying “I’m doing it for their benefit.” And that’s a very natural position to take when you’re beating somebody with a club.

Britain cut the largest piece of African cake, from Cairo to Capetown, in addition to Nigeria and a few West African regions.

It was also the British Empire that in 1894 imposed an arbitrary boundary around the many diverse ethnic groups and kingdoms that would make up Uganda.

The southern Bhantu-speaking people were given economic, political and educational advantage. The Northern ethnic groups, two in particular—the Acholi and the Langi—were the main recruits for military and police positions.

By exploiting linguistic, ethnic and cultural differences between the peoples of the North and South, Britain’s divide and rule policies created a tension between them that helped maintain British rule…

The French took an east-west slice of the continent, as well as Madagascar. The Belgians took Rwanda, Burundi and the Congo in what Joseph Conrad called “the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience.� Slave labour took over 5 million lives.

In Rwanda, Belgium entrenched the idea of the Hutu as a work force and the Tutsi as extenders of Belgian rule. The politicization of these two cultures would profoundly contribute to the Genocide of 1994.

In Sudan, the British ruled the Arabs in the north and the blacks in the south as separate colonies—only to combine the areas before independence in 1956. The result has been relentless civil war, the Darfur massacres being the latest tragedy.

The Portugese decimated Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau well into the 1970s. The Italians took Libya, Eritrea and Somalia. The Germans added Cameroon and Tanzania and committed the first genocide of the 20th century against the Herero people.

MAHMOOD MAMDANI (Director African Studies, Columbia University):

No colonial power is going to succeed unless it’s going to play on existing divisions, and sharpen them, increase them, exacerbate them.

So one of the first questions after the end of colonialism is who belongs, and who doesn’t? Who was part of the colonial struggle, and who betrayed?

And this is time to settle scores.

It was this colonial legacy that Uganda carried forth into its independence in 1962.

But what made me quote this section on my blog today, other than a bloated ego?

A 1946 essay I read an hour ago, on the Palestinian question, given by a one Tony Cliff (born Yigael Gluckstein!) during The Fourth International.

1946, before Israel was given statehood—just at the end of World War II, as Britain was finishing its tenure as the world power and America (and the USSR) were moving in.

I don’t really know precisely what Marxism is (I could never get past the first page of Das Kapital, which for me was Das Tedious), but seeing as this essay is on a “Marxist Internet Archive” I assume it is Marxist leaning (being the supergenius I am). The repeated use of terms like Trade Unions and Workers mentioned later in the piece make it obvious.

What I assume to be true about Marxist ideology is it’s a hairpin turn to the Left (Marx could have used a hairpin), unpopular in the West, lacking in humour and the feminine principle, a big part of many ’60s and ’70s Liberation Movements (related, as Mahmood Mamdani has said, to “a particular twist to the Cold War”), and a surefire conversation stopper.

Not only that, one could argue with considerable irony and facts that it was Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and the rest of the Vanguard “orthodox Marxist” masterminds behind the Bolshevik “coup”—not Americans, Imperialists, capitalists or anyone else—who really destroyed any hope of socialism being attempted, let alone blossoming.

For the record, this last notion has much opposition from people more learned than I.

Either way, for reasons better left to historians, after the revolution/coup in Russia, Workers’ Councils, Soviets and all vibrant, progressive democratic opposition was undeniably crushed under Bolshevik vanguard rule.

In the words of singer Bruce Cockburn: “And they call it a People’s Republic…”

To speak the obvious, dictatorships are hateful; I like poetry and I find nothing poetic about dictatorship and suppression of thought.

So thanks, at least in part, to the Bolsheviks and the soul-destroying sickness that followed, socialism became the Fatty Arbuckle of ideologies, disgraced—and has never recovered.

Similarly, I’m fundamentally opposed to Castro’s ruthless hold on power, too, regardless of universal health care and literacy; I’m also opposed to the relentless, often criminal, American bleeding of Cuba—leaving, of course, the people to suffer.

I’m also sitting here in a warm room, well-fed and free to speak my thoughts, thus making a lot of what I say arrogant, questionable and trivial.

Where was I? Oh yeah.

Marxist history notwithstanding, given the Divide-and-Rule policies of colonial Britain, the ongoing agonies in the Middle East, a pathological lack of historical context—then and now—plus the recent confidence placed in Uganda Rising’s colonial section, I feel (I’m joking here) validated enough to say this 1946 essay makes interesting reading.

Here’s an excerpt:

British imperialism, for years on end, has attempted to direct the ire of the Arab masses against the Jewish population of the country. For this purpose the policy of Zionist expansion has been supported, a policy which results in the eviction of Arab tenants from the land, drives Arab workers from jobs, and strengthens the Zionist fortress which is determined to establish a Jewish State in Palestine.

Imperialist support for Zionism is calculated to achieve two results: One, to establish a power which directly supports it, which will constitute a faithful ally against the Arabs in every instance of an anti-imperialist uprising of the Arabs of the Middle East; the other, to have Zionism serve as a means of diverting the ire of the oppressed Arab masses away from imperialism onto a side issue—clashes with Jews.

But in order that Zionism be a buffer between the Arab masses and imperialism it is essential, first, that the weight of this population remain relatively small so that it should feel dependent on imperialist good-will and not become an independent factor; and secondly, that the Arab masses should be deceived into believing that it is only because of imperialist patronage that this factor does not become stronger and dislodge them still further from their positions.

In other words: Between the imperialist master and his Zionist servant there are both common and antagonistic interests. Zionism wants the establishment of a strong Jewish capitalist state.

Imperialism, it is true, wants a Jewish capitalist society shut up in itself and surrounded by the hatred of the colonial masses, but it is not at all interested to have Zionism become too strong a power.

Admittedly, divide-and-rule policies are not the whole story, and yet the technique is very much alive. Human nature, racism, cruelty, history, poverty, ignorance and countless other variables play huge roles, irrespective of imperialism, socialism, religion and so on.

In terms of hope? Solidarity, compassion, and seeing the world beyond the tribe surely can play a large role, even personally. Doesn’t this include some sort of “solidarity” with opposition found disagreeable?—some relationship that doesn’t involve cluster bombs and blind hatred.

With its convolusions and name-callings (bourgoisie etc), the writing hints at what would continue to be witnessed in the decades to come (imperialists in support of fundamentalists when useful, for example, in 1980 Afghanistan and countering Arab secular nationalism rising in the 60s).

It speaks of what is seen today (divide-and-rule policies, as in getting rid of the heinous secular dictatorship and fomenting hatred between already vengeful religious sects), and the ongoing switching of allies (support for Saddam Hussein in the 1980s while he gassed the Kurds, animosity when he invaded Kuwait).

It reiterates some of my innate inclinations, aversions and distrusts of and for illegitimate power, which is virtually all power (and the use of any method, propaganda, violence, terror, lies, to protect, control or steal geostrategic resources).

What that force of power actually is, and where it comes from, and what makes it so prevalent, remains a mystery.

The full piece.

And to finish, if I may quote that great yet somewhat bloated anarchist Kropoopoff: “We are all sisters and brothers! Educate your extraordinary mind, love the Divine if you feel it, and don’t forget to call your mom!”

In an interview with Pulitzer Prize winning author Samantha Power (for Uganda Rising), she said this about the individual role in building awareness and changing policy:

[T]he times genocide has risen up and become the subject of high level policy debate and even action is when there is—perceived by a politician or policy maker—a domestic political cost to doing nothing.

That’s one example, one criteria—and that comes as a result of political pressure. And you see this again in Darfur: Christian groups, Jewish groups, student groups, middle school students who have seen documentaries about Rwanda, who have seen Hotel Rwanda, writing their congressman; members of congress counting letters and saying, “Huh, who knew?�

There seems to be, oddly, noise in America around Darfur. What that succeeds in doing is convincing policy makers who might be otherwise indifferent or uninterested or unaware that this issue belongs on the policy radar. When you put it on the policy radar, you depend on something else, which is either a self-interested calculation that, ‘Gosh, doing something about this is better for me or better for my government than not doing something.’ And that’s rare because usually the idea of doing something carries with it the risk of finances or troops or just the investment of political and diplomatic capital.

Or, it takes an individual like you or me—because people in government aren’t that different or they don’t start off that different—actually just getting that kind of sick feeling in their tummy. That is hard to make happen without some kind of proximity between that individual and the horrors that are, ultimately, truly awful but also truly abstract if you are insulated within a bureaucracy.

So the hope for me comes from the existing domestic constituency that is often latent but does occasionally bubble up as it did in Bosnia, as it did in East Timor at a certain point, and as it did and has been in Darfur.

But it also lies in the fact that individuals within government are human beings too. So when you’re thinking of advocacy, you have to think about maximizing the moments, the opportunities for serendipity.

What has to happen is, the one reason for doing anything—namely the dead people—has to kind of rise up in order for a government official, whose got a very logical, well-reasoned account of all the itemized reasons for why you should stay far away from atrocities, [to do something]: because there is no payoff in terms of economic interest, no payoff in terms of security interests, no payoff in terms of professional advancement within the system. You’re probably even going to lose points at home with your wife because you’re not going to get promoted.

There are so many reasons not to act. In order for all those things to be overcome, it often takes an emotional connection and that is very hard to manufacture, given the geographic distance between people within government and people in the field.

So: trips to refugee camps, bringing survivors of massacres from the field to Washington to testify, using film, using images—if it’s a sterile account in a White House memo, the likelihood of it puncturing those walls is very, very slim. It has to be a kind of synaptic, human, almost kinetic thing that happens. And it happens very, very rarely.

The question of how to maintain vigilence, whether through conscience, duty, or by really feeling that people we don’t know are still sisters and brothers—or however—remains one remarkable unanswered question.

How to be more loving with action. How to love family more, friends, colleagues, strangers, even enemies, more, with discernment.

How to listen with sympathy in an incomprehensibly complicated world.

Samantha’s mention of the individual reminds me of what Noam Chomsky has said—as cited in Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media, (pg 109)—in an Interview he did with Joop van Tijn on Humanist TV, Holland:

There was actually one person [Arnold Cohen] in the United States who, in my view, would get the Nobel Peace Prize if it meant anything, which, of course, it does not. He was a graduate student at Cornell University, who simply devoted his life trying to get this [East Timor] issue known. And it was through his efforts that I began to become involved.

Now, my name is known, his name is not known, he is the leader, I am the follower.

And what it says about intellectual life is that there are a lot of important people who do very serious work and when they build up to a point where someone can help them gain visibility, there are people like me around who are able to help, but that is a supportive role.

From Arnold Cohen (also from MC, pg 109):

Our goal [a small group of people based in the Cornell community] was to ensure that publications such as these [the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe] noticed the issue and put out as much accurate information on the situation as possible. Obviously, we did not always succeed but we did create a network of contacts that was ultimately available to East Timor’s Catholic Church, refugees, human rights organizations and others. We did this by strict attention to accuracy, professionalism and politeness. There is really no substitute for this. And it does pay off.

Aren’t people—so many people—remarkable? I am perpetually amazed by the kindness, beauty, heart, efforts, talent, drive and love of so many people. All very humbling.

Change, by its nature, is mysterious. Change is ongoing. Change takes time.

Believe.

See Bishop Carlos Belo and Jose Ramos-Horta for more about East Timor.

I know I mentioned Kissinger recently, but I just read this excerpt of a transcript in Christopher Hitchen’s book The Trial of Henry Kissinger, and then found it on line. I actually felt uncomfortable reading it, even for Kissinger.

So many confusing thoughts come to mind. What is justice? What is truth? What is a war criminal, and why won’t the United States’ Government allow their own (elite) citizens to be placed under this microscope?

I am unable to understand why Kissinger’s knowledge, style, power and charisma—and the fact that he has natural impunity and immunity by his position—make him for so many intelligent human beings (as I mentioned, the brilliant Paul Kennedy) innocent of charges and attacks that seem valid, at the very least in their proposal; charges that I can’t imagine would scoot under the radar of these scholars, journalists or thinkers, were the accused outside their propaganda system.

Anyway, the recent historical events in East Timor (from the 1970s to the present) are heart-breaking, brutal and criminal.

I am reminded how fragile we all are, by life, time, death and circumstances that come with a force of their own, beyond our understanding, and how much compassion and humilty is needed to remember this. Even Dr Kissinger couldn’t have planned the events that would confront his life, regardless of how much drive he had to get where he is.

I am further reminded by this excerpt how the whim, folly, neglect, belief, rational, unintentional over-sight, or even intentional disregard of (or animostity towards) a given country/conflict by one or several persons of power can lead to absolute catastrophe arriving upon the bodies, hearts and lives of thousands, even millions, of citizens with no say or control over the situation in which they find themselves.

If there is something resembling karma in the human experience, I wonder not what karma Kissinger or anyone in a similar position (or me, for that matter) now will have to face—for who knows the deepest roots of all these things?—but what ongoing karma has helped lead Kissinger to where he is today; to have so much say, over and over again, even in Iraq today, in situations that on paper and in reality, have caused immeasurable misery to so many.

Granted, Kissinger in many ways is symbolic. That is to say (and forgive me those who have lived and died under his and his colleagues’ decisions), one perhaps should not dwell endlessly with sadness or outrage on one individual, without contributing in a postive way to ameliorating injustice, inequality or sadness somewhere—nor without understanding the incredibly complex nature of the human condition for everybody, including the accused, temporary as we all are.

But why we react positively or negatively to a given person, ideology or set of facts can always use—with love, compassion, curiousity and wider understanding—reexamination.

See East Timor and Indonesia Action Network.

See Elaine Briere’s website/photos.

Wishing you compassionate insight and the spreading of love, joy and remembering.

This is a beautiful, honest and heartfelt essay from my friend Tim Hardy, who just got back from another trip to Africa—and here he speaks at first of Rwanda. The girl he mentions, Safi Dengu, from the DRC, whose parents died of AIDS—and who has only recently been told she has HIV, though she has been on ARVs for some time—is in the little film that Tim and I (with Mindset Media and UNICEF) worked on together called “Hope In The Time Of AIDS.”

So this is Tim returning and seeing her again.

This is Tim returning to the billion cultures, flavours, agonies and joys of Africa, and seeing Her again.

This is Tim seeing himself again and, of course, seeing ourselves, for we are all sisters and brothers, trying to make our way to the most beautiful borders of the human condition:

I AM THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY
Tim @ Wed, 11/16/2006 – 15:07

I hate this place.  More importantly, I hate what I have become here in Africa. The G8, World Bank and IMF would have been proud of me today as I stood atop a wet winding road en route to the DRC, and peered down a 500-foot ravine where a truck with 3 passengers had plunged moments before we arrived – and I did nothing. 

I was told they were surely dead. Nobody could have survived that fall. There was nothing that I could have done. Right?

To read the whole essay, click here.

I’ve realised, and continually forget, that whenever I get the blues, the best thing I can do is something for someone else, with love, without strain. Why is that?

The last Chapter, Eighty-One, of the Tao Te Ching:

Truthful words are not beautiful.
Beautiful words are not truthful.

What does that mean? That is to say, is that true or just beautiful—or both, and is there a relationship woven therein?

Good men do not argue.
Those who argue are not good.

I get that. Although “Armed with yoga, stand and fight.”

Those who know are not learned.
The learned do not know.

The sage never tries to store things up.
The more he does for others, the more he has.
The more he gives to others, the greater his abundance.
The Tao [the Way] of Heaven is pointed but does no harm.
The Tao of the sage is work without effort.

I don’t know why, at 1:48 this morning, I felt like writing that. I’ve just been off lately, repeating old stories, if you know what I mean.

I think the last line—”The Tao of the sage is work without effort”—also means:

Whenever you do anything, relax your tummy.
Relax your tummy, and all will be well.
Breathe deeply before bed.

‘Night.

…waves of memories come back, lining up to be remembered or washed away…

who can imagine inside another’s head, stumbling into karma: death, joy and legs running towards meaning…

some pulled by black nights, others by neutrinos from the sun, demanding answers in a spinning world, ghosts in an expanding cosmic jar, looking through glass at the mirror image of work, glistening in the blink of the sun, trembling in the kiss of the moon, soaked into the ground of being, rising up in an expansion of hopes…

six and a half billion of us…a BILLION more than we were ten years ago…

the snows of Kilimanjaro fade, slums that used to be are fertilizer for dreams to come; we were dinosaurs once, fucking…

i send love because everything else is in a time dance; we are here in the Divine experience of gathering moments of permanently changing light on rivers and faces, reflected in the evening news.

we are mystics because we are: those that don’t know it will get a glimpse in a passing thought, a longing for that which they can’t disect or purchase; those who know, know about the Supreme Being of wonder, and when the light is right, for that eternal moment, captured then gone, souls emote before Her in gratitude and celebration, and weep at all the forgetting…

love your beautiful self for a day of Bramha, and into the night too.

“To every season…â€? and this is ours, I swear to God.

“The most incomprehensible thing about life is how incomprehensible it is…”
—Albert Einstein

“Because I have immortal longings, I believe in the immortality of the soul…”
—Helen Keller

As the snow continues to envelope Vancouver, I thought I’d give those hunkered in their abodes the heads up on Uganda Rising, coming soon to a TV set near you.

With Kevin Spacey narrating, an hour long version of the film (45 min and commercials) will be aired on Discovery Times channel on the following dates:

(et): (today!) Monday, NOV 27 2006 @ 08:00 PM, NOV 27 2006 @ 11:00 PM, Tuesday NOV 28 2006 @ 10:00 AM.

This might mean Eastern Stadard Time, which would put the times three hours earlier in the West.

Check out the Uganda Rising trailer.
A little essay.
Visit GuluWalk.

A little interview in Only Magazine pertaining to Uganda Rising. I confess, of course, that ultimately the whole interwoven madness/lies/violence is beyond anything I’m certain of, but being human, I offer a few thoughts anyway, on the heinous brutality of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in Northern Uganda…

An excerpt:

For his own purposes, Kony [LRA leader Joseph Kony, indicted by the ICC for Crimes Against Humanity] uses the most militant form of Christian theory mixed with animistic religion, and we see a bastardisation of both. [It’s] the long-term fallout of the colonial legacy, dictatorships, and the resulting decimation of cultures. Kony is the extreme perversion of this.

Kony is the outward, obvious perversion. One must never forget that colonization was (and still often is) considered civilized, and civilizing.

Unless I’m misunderstanding, historians as terrific as Paul Kennedy seem to think the American Government’s first motive in engaging war with other countries is to bring the barbarians peace, freedom and democracy, regardless of how brutal and how often American military aggression is imposed with catastrophic results, and regardless of how insane is the military budget and resulting deficit—problems Kennedy so lucidly explained in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.

It seemed in Kennedy’s book that the reasons all the Great Powers (rising and falling) intervened from 1500 onwards was virtually always for economic gain (resources, power, control…), not to civilize. Why for Kennedy his theory doesn’t hold in the present is unclear to me…

And then in an interview Kennedy strangely offers that he and his peace-and-stability-loving “friend Henry Kissinger” don’t agree this technique is the best way to spread democracy.

Some people say we [Americans] know how to run democracy and we have solved the greatest constitutional and political problems. All others need to do is imitate us! Thus we have a policy of spreading democracy throughout the world. I don’t agree with that and my friend Henry Kissinger dislikes it also. He dislikes the neo-conservative crusaders who promote spreading democracy from Saudi Arabia to China. Kissinger sees it does not work. What you want is peace, stability and a chance to give individuals and families opportunity to grow [my italics].

What am I missing? Isn’t it remarkable how relatively intelligent human beings can see things so differently. Granted, Kennedy obviously has about 50 IQ points on me, but Kissinger offering us a moral and intellectual compass on the world…?

I know I’m naive, but jiminy…

By endless accounts, Henry Kissinger had a profound influence in Indochina (3.4 million deaths), Chile (“I don’t see why we have to let a country go Marxist just because its people are irresponsible”), covert support for apartheid South Africa and countless other invasions, involvements and accusations, and suddenly (and without question) he doesn’t agree with the neo-conservative ideology.

According to the cited source, Journalist Bob Woodward (All the President’s Men) in his book State of Denial even wrote about Kissinger’s silent but relevant involvement in the Bush II war in Iraq.

I realise I’m mixing, not metaphors, but conflicts. Yet on some sort of historical level they feel related. Maybe I’m crazy, but like millions of others, I really see these invasions as, first and foremost, geo-political strategising and resource grabbing, just as (admittedly) the Scramble for Africa was in the 1880s.

I think once again this excerpt from David Lamb’s book The Africans is in order—and remember, this was written before the continent’s decimation by AIDS:

If Africa’s quest for unity has failed so far, if Africa’s presidents get along no better than the European powers did with one another during the colonial period, no one, least of all historians, should be surprised. Let’s step back a century [the book was written in 1983] to the time when Africa was Balkanized and brought under European domination. It happened in Germany at a conference that not a single African attended…

The acrimonious disputes [between the European powers], though all were solved peacefully, caused much apprehension in Europe, and it was finally decided the world’s powers had better sit down to determine some game rules for Africa. Delegates from fourteen countries assembled for the Conference of Great Powers in Berlin in October 1884. Four months later, on February 26, 1885, they signed the general Act of the Berlin Conference, which provided that any power that effectively occupied African territory and duly notified the other powers could thereby establish possession of it. The Berlin treaty, along with other accords signed during the next fifteen years, defined “spheres of influence,� which partitioned the continent among European governments and reduced their rivalry for domination.

After a flurry of public debate, anticolonialist protests subsided in France and Italy. Conservative governments ruled in England and Germany, Policies of mercantilism were prevalent from Rome to London. Europe was assertive and nationalistic. Its mood favoured colonialism.

Anyway, here’s hoping for peace…

See the Uganda Rising trailer.
Visit GuluWalk.

Oh yeah, love more.