Directory of Lost Causes (By Quentin S. Crisp)

I have a dream

Insomnia strikes again. So, in that sense I don't actually have a dream. Or not tonight. Josephine.

However, as Robert Plant once said (almost):

I have a crazy dream, in which turquoise, yellow, black, white, copper and brown are all united, as one, in tearing their leaders limb from limb.



I'm finding David Korten's The Great Turning to be increasingly stimulating reading, and, as the slogan goes, don't just take my word for it. Here's an excerpt:

The public version of the Grand Area strategy, which was intended to rally the support of those who would be the imperial subjects, called for the creation of a free and equal community of nations and gave birth to the United Nations.

The real intention of the United States was articulated in U.S. State Department Policy Planning Study 23, a top-secret document written in 1948 by George Kennan, a leading architect of the post-World War II world:

"We have about 50% of the world's wealth, but only 6.3% of its population... In this situation we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity... To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our intention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives... We should cease to talk about vague... unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better."

This was the real agenda, and the agencies of its implementation would be the Bretton Woods institutions: the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). In 1995, the World Trade Organization (WTO) replaced the less powerful GATT.

Here's another:

In 1823, even as the westward expansion was still in progress, President James Monroe enunciated the Monroe Doctrine as a cornerstone of U.S. policy. The publicly expressed intent was to protect independent Latin American and Caribbean nations from efforts by European powers to recolonize them; the implicit message was that the United States claimed hegemony over the Western Hemisphere.

Theodore Roosevelt took the Monroe doctrine a step further during his presidency (1901-9), announcing that the United States claimed the right to intervene in the internal affairs of any nation that engaged in "flagrant and chronic wrongdoing." Future U.S. administrations defined this to mean any nation that transgressed against a U.S trade or investment interest. A 1962 U.S. State Department report to the Congress listed 103 U.S. military interventions in the affairs of other countries between 1798 and 1895, including interventions in Argentina, Japan, Uruguay, China, Angola, Hawaii, and Nicaragua. The reasons were often obscure but usually related to the investments of one or more U.S. corporations.

I've written a little about racism in recent months. Perhaps I'm slow on the uptake, but I am coming more and more to see racism as something deliberately engineered by our leaders to divide us. I hope that we, the deceived and exploited, shall soon reverse this situation by dividing them. With machetes.

Labels: America, David Korten, imperialism, Racism