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.
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