I was hoping to write a little more about Africa before I left, but research and preparations proved busy.
I did happen to see a film by Aaron Russo called AMERICA: From Freedom To Fascism. Russo, for the record, was the Hollywood producer of the blockbuster films Trading Places and The Rose.
This documentary is, to say the least, a departure. AMERICA gives a lot of information on things Orwellian spreading across the United States and the world: being taxed (illegally) towards serfdom, the fact that the Federal Reserve is not a government institution, but a private bank that—in the feelings of the filmmaker and others—controls much of what happens in the world.
It is a curious yet passionate and diverse group that follow certain bits of information to the conclusion of a conspiratorial group of elite. They include atheists, fundamentalists, the extreme Left, conservatives and everyday folks who just seem to instinctively believe that something is really strange.
The film also goes further into that next level of control (and conspiracy), discussing the inevitable and soon-to-be coming implants under the skin and controlling devices that will make one’s whereabouts and shopping desires available to Big Brother and who knows who else. As mentioned in the film, these implants echo the Bible’s famous idea of the “Mark Of The Beast” in Revelations (the last book of the New Testament).
So tonight, in a hotel room in Nairobi, I go to the top draw of the bedside table, remove the ever-present Gideon’s Bible, and write out Revelations 15-17—a text supposedly giving prophetic signs of the end of the world.
Try, for a laugh or a cry, replacing the term the “beast’s image” or the “beast’s statue” with the term “market place.”
For the record, in terms of cosmology, I tend to think more in circular terms than in the end of the world; that love and consciousness continues eternally. But who really knows?
Either way, in Revelations it is written:
He was further permitted to infuse breath into the beast’s statue, so that the beast’s image might speak and to bring it about that those who did not worship the beast’s statue should be killed.
He also compelled all, the small and the great, the rich and the poor, the freemen and the slaves, to have a mark put on their right hands or on their foreheads, so that no one might be able to buy or sell unless he bore the mark of the beast’s name or the number corresponding to his name.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it, as my Nana used to say, and she lived until she was a hundred and one. She also said, on my Trust CD, in fact, and I quote: “Sodom and Gomorrah: that was very bad. This [world today] is definitely worse.�
How she concluded that, I don’t know.
For Russo and thousands, perhaps millions, of others, America is thought to be in a sharp turn away from its travel brochure, becoming deeply undemocratic, its civilians increasingly gullible, and disconcertingly, yet subtly similar to things Communist, with a big C—like their USSR Cold War nemesis from days of yore.
I wouldn’t wholly disagree. These are strange, myopic, debt-riddled times. Welcome to the human condition.
The grand mistake of the film—and it is huge, in my opinion—is that Russo suggests the United States was a country based in liberty and freedom until certain changes took place via the congress in 1913 (namely, the forced taxation of the average American worker). Indeed, taxation may have massively changed the direction of the country for the worst, but I don’t know how much the average black person (or women) would have in 1913 called America free.
Thus, the endless poetical waxing with regard to the Founding Fathers echoes throughout the film without one mention of slavery and the disenfranchisement of women et cetera.
For the record, I’m not questioning whether or not men like Thomas Jefferson were minds of great ideas, courage and foresight. Many clearly were. But as John Jay, one of the signatories of the original declaration, put it: “The people who own the country ought to govern it.â€?
This was not a Woody Guthrie’s This Land is Your Land, This Land Is My Land sentiment. Jay was referring to the property owners (and, of course, was one himself). I’m not sure how many slaves or women were invited to the head table of the Declaration of Independence. The answer “none” comes to mind.
Indeed, for some of the Founding Fathers and many others, having slaves was one of the essential keys to the freedom and prosperity of the land owners, the elite. I have no one to quote off the top of my head, but it sounds right.
This ideology, one could argue, is believed by many people today—and evident all over the world. From sweatshops to taxing and/or owning everything, control of resources (from land to water to ideas) is considered essential to controlling people.
Speaking of control—and I will write about it tonight if I can keep my eyes open—from about 1:30 today until dusk, we were filming in Kibera, in Nairobi, Kenya, which is thought to be the largest slum in sub-Saharan Africa. It seems to me that people there are effectively controlled by poverty, a lack of human rights, gangs within and politicians without—among other problems.
Formed in the early 1900s as a Nubian soldier’s settlement, Kibera is sort of slammed or painted onto a Nairobi hillside and beyond, a sea of stick, brick, cardboard and clay shanty houses, covered with rusted corrugated roofs, garbage everywhere—and teeming with people eking out survival. The colours, smells and hopes explode into the eyes and senses.
We plan to go back tomorrow around five AM to shoot a sunrise across its 2.5 square kilometre expanse—where between an estimated 600,000 to over a million people dwell—but monsoons have arrived this evening. Dense rain is pounding outside my hotel room window like a bathroom shower. Kibera’s roads of clay and filth are surely flooded quagmires, and on the slope of the mountainside, god knows what these rains do to sanitation.
According to Wikipedia—and I find it difficult to believe—1/5 of the 2.2 million Kenyans who are HIV infected live in Kibera. If true, that works out to some 440,000 people.
But back to Woody’s original lyrics. If extended, they remain acutely accurate for a vast percentage of the world’s people. They state the disparity more than the solidarity of the US—even in 1940, when the song was written—despite sugary alternative versions sung in American and Canadian schools for decades:
THIS LAND IS YOUR LAND
words and music by Woody GuthrieChorus:
This land is your land, this land is my land
From California, to the New York Island
From the redwood forest, to the gulf stream waters
This land was made for you and meAs I was walking a ribbon of highway
I saw above me an endless skyway
I saw below me a golden valley
This land was made for you and meChorus
I’ve roamed and rambled and I’ve followed my footsteps
To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts
And all around me a voice was sounding
This land was made for you and meChorus
The sun comes shining as I was strolling
The wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling
The fog was lifting a voice come chanting
This land was made for you and me
I don’t ever remember being taught either of these last two verses. Anybody else?
As I was walkin’, I saw a sign there
And that sign said: “No tresspassin’�
But on the other side, it didn’t say nothin’!
Now that side was made for you and me!Chorus
In the squares of the city, in the shadow of the steeple
Near the relief office, I see my people
And some are grumblin’ and some are wonderin’
If this land’s still made for you and me.Chorus (2x)
Russo’s grand mistake notwithstanding, I admire his passion, and his stating what seems to me brutally obvious: that the Democrats and the Republicans are essentially one business party with marginal (and virtually irrelevant) differences.
It’s ability to not be common knowledge speaks wonders of the propaganda system, however it came to be.
There are some priceless quotes in the film, that would be outrageously funny by their audacity were they not glimpsing reality. If they are even close to the truth, we really are a gullible lot—yet wonderfully beautiful, too.
One of the shocks of being in Africa was how close and similar I felt to everybody—that sense of inherent relationship and interconnectedness, sisters and brothers.
Such a large percentage of the children I have seen all over are deeply resilient, not yet fully tainted or oppressed by the limitations of being human, and perhaps more importantly by limitations imposed externally. Clearly only a very few of them will be able to change their own circumstances.
This quote from author Michael Ruppert:
You must understand the Federal Reserve is a cartel made up of the major banks in America—and they are the ones running the show, not the Federal government…
The Federal Reserve is no more federal than Federal Express…I’ve never seen a full list of ownership for the Federal Reserve. I don’t think anybody has…
And then later:
People talk to me about the issue of Republican and Democrat as if they don’t get it. I say, “Look, here’s how you get it: it’s organized crime. All you do is call the Republicans the Genoveses and the Democrats the Gambinos.�
The people at the top treat it like a crap game—like it’s their crap game. Like they’re making lots of money. Occasionally somebody at the table shoots each other, but the moment anyone threatens their crap game, they all unite to protect it.
They’re both controlled by the same financial, economic and corporate interests.
And G. Edward Griffin, author of the The Creature from Jekyll Island, stated:
You must understand the Federal Reserve is a cartel made up of the major banks in America, and they are the ones running the show, not the Federal government.
The President really has no control, nor does the congress have any control, over this cartel.
It just has the appearance of control.
Really what most people in this country have become is food for the debt machine.
And so on, if not with conclusive evidence, a lot of compelling, undeniable facts that remain outside the conversation and debate possible in modern mainstream media, which by so many people’s estimation—smart, eloquent people with senses of humour—is a bona-fide disaster of endless propaganda.
Anyway, this is a few extra bits on the end of a blog I started but did not complete the day I left for Africa. Tomorrow night and on the plane home, I will write about things like Malawi, poverty, circumcision as it relates to HIV, genetics, Kenya, Mozambique, conspiracy, micro-financing, welfare, ingenuity, love, warmth, hope and many of the wondrous sisters and brothers I met in four African countries: people full of joy, love and solidarity.
In an impassioned interview with Graca Machel, she summed up the world succinctly.
“This world is crazy.�
It’s also full of infinite joy and love.
Graca added that we must still do all that we can, with love, hope and compassion. I couldn’t agree more.
My apologies for a lack of links. I can’t keep my eye-lids open.
Love Pete