We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Monday, January 2, 2012

End of the pro-democracy pretense

Click here to access article by Glenn Greenwald from Salon. 

This astute journalist sees the Empire for what it is--an imperial, hegemonic enterprise to dominate the world. The propagandists for the Empire often use the rhetoric of freedom and democracy as a cover to legitimatize their imperial actions to mostly its own populations, but when the contradictions between rhetoric and facts become too obvious, they have no difficulty dispensing with the rhetoric. 
...the right of the U.S. to dictate how other nations are governed is one of the central, unchallenged precepts of the American Foreign Policy Community’s dogma and it thus needs no defense or even explicit acknowledgment. It simply is. It’s an inherent imperial right.
The only criticism I have of his essay is that he doesn't make clear when he mentions "American interests" that the concept is a reference to the interests of the ruling One Percent of Americans. This obscuring of the class structure of our society is typical of liberal critics. Also, and more importantly, it is required to have access to mainstream media.