Opinion: Moral bankruptcy in Libya war = Foreign intervention, Magic realism

[L. Coyote]

Opinion
Moral bankruptcy in Libya war
Foreign intervention in Libya is fueled by ulterior motives, not goodwill.
Hamid Dabashi Last Modified: 01 Apr 2011 15:54
http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/03/201132771814130985.html


The US lacks any moral authority to pretend to be on the side of these democratic uprisings

In Gabriel García Márquez's The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975) one of the outlandish (literally) antics of the General of the Universe is the selling of the Caribbean Sea to Americans who have kept the demented monster in power.

"Your excellency, the regime was not being sustained by hope or conformity or even by terror, but by the pure inertia of an ancient and irreparable disillusion, go out into the street and look truth in the face, your excellency, we're on the final curve, either the marines land or we take the sea, there is no other way, your excellency, there was no other way."

The General ends up selling the Caribbean to Americans:

"They took away the Caribbean in April, Ambassador Ewing's nautical engineers carried it off in numbered pieces to plant it far from the hurricanes in the blood-red dawns of Arizona, they took it away with everything it had inside general sir."

Like his fictive prototype in The Autumn of the Patriarch, 'General' Gaddafi will sell the Mediterranean to Americans and their European allies, only if he could, in order to stay in power. His trouble is they are no longer buying it – from him.

Magic realism is ahead of history. We are catching up with it.

The world community – the real world community, not the diplomatic charade code-named the UNSC – is thrown into a psychosomatic stupor and forced into a moral dilemma to choose between letting a psychotic tyrant maim and murder a nation (usually called "his own", as if he owned Libyans) or else stand still and witness the hypocritical abuse of that fact by US and its European allies in order to consolidate a military foothold into the dramatic unfolding of democratic uprisings in North Africa and beyond.

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[msongs]

1. what economic collapse in the USA? look! over there! Libya nt

[xchrom]

2. excellent. nt