JackRiddler
JackRiddler's JournalYou mean Clinton regrets his active role in the civil war? Doubt it!
People using Rwanda as an example should at least bother to inform themselves.
The US was heavily involved in that conflict by organizing and arming the Tutsi revel army, the RFP, from bases in Uganda. Kagame was being trained at Fort Leavenworth when he was called in to take over the RFP because the previous leader had died.
Meanwhile, France had been backing the Hutu majority government all along. As the RFP invaded, the two presidents were assassinated, the Hutu Power genocide of the Tutsis unfolded, and the tide turned to the US-backed RFP's favor, French special forces INVADED Rwanda so as to secure the retreat of the Interamhamwe (Hutu Power) genocidaires into the Congo.
This was a classic imperialist proxy war involving heavy interventions by both the US and France, as is well known to the readers of the press most everywhere outside the tightly controlled and self-censored United States.
In the US, however, it has been absurdly spun by the liberal-humanitarian neoimperialists into an example, not of how the West's intervention contributed to causing a genocide, but of how "the West failed to intervene" to prevent a genocide. All you need to buy that is total ignorance of the actual events and the entire history of "the West" in Africa.
I suppose a hero-worshipping willingness to uncritically accept whatever bullshit Clinton says can also help.
Is that all you can see - armed uprising or elections?
What a limited perspective. The most important political changes in this country in the last century have come through social movements. Everything that happens here is due to money power or people power. Time for the people power to come back to the streets, to civil disobedience, to self-organized centers, to strikes and "one big union" and broad, multi-issue coalitions.
Obama 2008 involved a very large social movement of its own, in fact, and immediately ended it: the order from on high was to go home (leaving a vacuum for the Tea Party), "we got this," and now look. All the Bush surveillance and police state programs have been developed five years further, and are justified as necessary and good.
No I am not saying the government could not overturn this system. I am saying they won't, they are bought, they are implicated. They won't, without people power demanding it. Rather than asking me questions that make little sense, how about you discover some justified outrage at this machinery of repression and go encourage your neighbors to do the same?
Rationalizing an authoritarian surveillance state is naive.
Making up stories about why Big Brother is necessary and good is not realistic, not pragmatic, not hard headed. It is naive.
Delusions that it's bad when China or Iran do it but not the USA are naive.
Delusions that it's bad under Bush but okay under Obama are naive.
The surveillance beast, the militarized police and the military as police, the gradual melting together of all security, intel and law enforcement agencies through "fusion centers" and JTFs, the empowerment of warrantless lawlessness by the rollback of FISA and unconstitutional laws like the PATRIOT Act and the Indefinite Detention Clause... this has been the direction of USG development for decades. A president who resists it will be ground up.
Believing that we the people should accept all and that it will not set up ever-worse tyranny is naive.
Accepting secret government is naive. Not fighting it is naive.
The idea that the national security state "defends" this country when it has evidently created most of the "enemies" is naive.
Don't be fucking naive means, wake up, this is a business. National security is a racket of the military-industrial-intel-LEA complex.
Those of you work in it may not be running the racket, but don't come tell those of us who see the racket and want it to end that we are naive.
If it's naive to prefer constitutional government over the arbitrary power of a national security state made up primarily of corporate contractors who profit from fear mongering and war, then I AM NAIVE.
The national security state is highly compartmentalized. By definition most people in it have only a tunnel vision of their small part, don't even know what's going on next door.
I do not consider experience in this state to be a special qualification that makes your justifications of an unaccountable national security state to be any more worthwhile than some pundit's.
I consider people who reject this state and courageously stand up for the right thing to be the real experts. If Snowden was an Iranian or a Chinese, he'd be this board's new hero.
Laura Poitras, Snowden, Greenwald, these are titans. We should all aspire to a fraction of their courage to fight wrongs when we see them, and not to come up with cheap conformist excuses for evil.
ON EDIT - PS - When I hear about a Snowden or a Manning, the last question I ask myself is going to be, "Oh no, how did this happen?" (Despite all our best efforts to brainwash people into blind patriotism since childhood?) If freedom and justice and democracy and transparency and humanity mean something, then the sad question has got to be, "Why are there so few of them?" Why aren't there more Snowdens, more Mannings? During the US invasion of Indochina, resistance to the essentially genocidal war eventually became widespread within the US military itself. There are several possible causes for why it's different today. So far, it's different. Let's hope that also changes.
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