Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Obama's Peace Dividend: War Profiteering in the land of Gandhi

by Chris Floyd from Empire Burlesque

The author contrasts Obama's recent trip to India, where he was peddling more weapon sales, to comments from Arundhati Roy whose report suggests that many of these weapons will likely be used by the oppressive Indian military against the people of Kashmir and other areas of India.
The Nobel Peace Laureate Barack Obama, who in his prize-claiming speech boldly claimed the mantle of Mahatma Gandhi, is now visiting India. And why has he made this pilgrimage to the homeland of his spiritual mentor? Has he come to drink more deeply of the wellsprings of satyagraha, to steep himself more thoroughly in the Gandhian principles of courageous, active, non-violent resistance to evil, to the Mahatma's ceaseless dedication to the poor and the outcast?

No: he has come to seal the deal on the sixth largest sale of war weapons in the history of the United States: $5 billion for the bristling, burgeoning Indian military, currently waging war on millions of its own people in Kashmir and the poverty-devastated state of central India, where the despair is so deep that suicide among the poor is epidemic.