Surviving Capitalism (Not) : The Rise of a New, Revived Form of Liberal Interventionism

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

Sunday, December 2, 2012

The Rise of a New, Revived Form of Liberal Interventionism

Click here if you wish to access the source - by Seumas Milne from MRZine.

In this 17:35m video Milne, a Guardian columnist and editor, at a recent conference in London reviews the history and provides an assessment of the War on Terror. Included are all the myths used to justify it and all the horrors that it created. Because this "war" has been so discredited, the political operatives of the Empire are creating new forms of intervention which we are now seeing.

Seumas Milne: We've seen the rise of a new, revived form of liberal interventionism, or humanitarian interventionism, in the last couple of years, and the key to it is the idea that there mustn't be too many boots on the ground because that was the problem with Iraq and Afghanistan. You've got to be seen to be targeting the bad guys. You've got to be seen to be saving civilians and in the fight for freedom again. It's a bit of a sort of a rewind to the Kosovo war and the story that was told at the time. . . . The new, rebranded war on terror has to be seen to be arm's length, proxy wars. And, of course, the Arab uprisings have provided the mechanism and opening for new forms of war on terror to be pushed forward. First of all we saw it happen in Libya. Now, the intervention, the NATO intervention in Libya, which is the first step in the new war on terror, was -- we were told -- a war, an intervention, to protect civilians. As a result of that intervention, the death toll in Libya increased by a factor of between ten and twenty times. The result of the intervention in Libya, the NATO bombing and bombardment in support of rebel forces in the civil war in Libya, has been 8,000 political prisoners, torture across the country, mass ethnic cleansing, the creation of a warlord and militia regime which is unable to run the country and manage the election process, which, if you look behind the curtain, was not a genuine election process at all. Now, we have a growing, creeping intervention in the horrific civil war in Syria and the threat of an increased intervention through the channeling of weapons by the United States, Britain, and France, in alliance with the Saudis and the Gulf dictatorships . . . , to particular factions in the opposition, increasing the bloodshed all the time.