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Reading Around

Well, the Nobel Peace Prize-recipient United Nations, promising as it is, will need revamping before it can fulfill its mandate:

“In 1968, two months before a bullet killed him, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. declared that his country was ‘the world’s greatest purveyor of violence.’ Thirty years later the figures bear him out: of every ten dollars spent on arms in the world, four and a half end up in the United States. Statistics compiled by the International Institute of Strategic Studies show the largest weapons dealers to be the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Russia. China figures on the list as well, a few places back. And these five countries, by some odd coincidence, are the very ones that can exercise vetoes in the UN Security Council. The right to a veto really means the power to decide. The General Assembly of the highest international institution, in which all countries take part, makes recommendations, but it’s the Security Council that makes decisions. The Assembly speaks or remains silent; the Council does or undoes. In other words, world peace lies in the hands of the five powers that profit most from the big business of war."

Since well before the last Gulf War, the Bush family has been embroiled in personal financial dealings with the bin Laden family as well as the Saudi royal family, which runs that country as a fiefdom.

“For many years that oil-rich monarchy has been the top client for U.S. weapons and British war planes. Arms and oil, two key factors in national prosperity: the healthy trade of oil for weapons allows the Saudi dictatorship to drown domestic protest in blood, while feeding the U.S. and British war economies and protecting their sources of energy from threat. A skeptic might conclude that those billion-dollar purchase orders bought King Fahd impunity.”

The quotes (above) are from Upside Down (now out in paperback from Picador) by Eduardo Galeano. As he has done in previous books, this Uruguayan author succinctly and wittily encapsulates nasty but necessary facts. If you are only sketchily aware of this information, as I was, you might consider taking your medicine (much easier than the other, whoever’s serving).

[If you’d like to respond to this or any other blog (below), send an e-mail to PaulBackhurst@msn.com.]

posted by Paul at 2:45 PM

 
God’s Country (a rant)

If I have to wrap myself in a flag, let it be a green field with the circular blue earth as seen from space, with some swirling white cloud cover. After economic and significant political globalization, and with the consciousness that war—rather than solving any human problem—exacerbates often-legitimate grievances, now cultivated with war’s effects (not least being landmines and depleted uranium), this is where I live. What Betsy Ross once pieced together is bright but facile, and served the barber pole best.

The nation-state is over. Uniformly from Western poles flutter the pennons of free-market capitalism, with its many subsidiaries. In the Middle East (as in Africa) national boundaries reflect a former colonialist’s power’s political expediencies rather than ethnic or religious demarcations. Besides the terrorists, behind bin Laden’s messianic mug gather throngs with legitimate grievances: Why isn’t there a state of Palestine and real justice for its people? Did the last Gulf War ever end? Wasn’t that also a “crusade” against evil, or just a temporary shoring up of our oil supplies? Who trained the Mujahedeen/Taliban in terrorist methods, supported them in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union, and then left them dangling once the U.S. geopolitical purpose had been fulfilled? What entity should decide the governance of Kashmir? —to avoid another war between India and Pakistan, still third-world countries but now armed with nuclear weapons.

How will we preserve inestimable cultural treasures—religions and languages—facing the global onslaught of Western culture and market values? Can these questions be fairly answered by the world’s only remaining superpower? Isn’t it past time to strengthen the feeble existing institutions, the United Nations and the International Court of Justice in The Hague, to begin the immense task of world governance? Time to wrap ourselves in the untainted light-blue folds of its hopeful banner, with sheaves of wheat (Let the hungry be fed! ) clasping the earth's land masses, as seen from the northern pole.

[Today Berkeley became the first U.S community to officially oppose the bombing of Afghanistan. I knew there was a reason why I live here.]

posted by Paul at 10:52 AM