Debate on How Nice USA IS: Arundati Roy Article
by david wilson
[Nice fotos from other A. Roy versions at:
http://www.phillyimc.org/article.pl?sid=03/03/10/0912238 and
http://www.vermontindymedia.org/media/all/display/437/index.php and
http://baltimore.indymedia.org/newswire/rate/3047 http://nm.indymedia.org/newswire/display/426/index.php Dear distinguished readers and editors,
Nothing can stop Mr. Bush of the US from committing the world to suicide and tragedy.
I have written innumerable essays on the fallacy of security through war and I ask you to review these documents and sentiments along with my final essay on DEAF Zombies.
Thank you for the years and your ears,
In memory of what might have been,
A. ROY Kerala, India
Debate on How Nice USA IS: Arundati Roy Article
A. Roy wrote at
http://dc.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=54604&group=webcast Oh Love, Where art Thou?
The Struggle for Self Defense:To Kill and Empire
ARE YOU LISTENING YET US ZOMBIE FASCISTS?
The addicted zombies known as the US citizenry need a few more 911 wakeup disasters.
They don’t listen to the world that keeps telling them to stop killing in Palestine, Colombia, Iraq and Afghanistan. They don’t listen as the world tells them to stop consuming 7 to 10 times their share of the world’s resources and to stop polluting 8 to 12 times their share of toxic pollutions.
In the orgy of decadence known as the USA Empire almost 500 billion dollars of drugs are force-fed to make the year pass by. An equal cost is paid defending the right of the US citizenry to this madness. Enraptured in this un-Holy stupor, the citizenry cruise elegantly in their fancy cars and imagine they are the pinnacle of human development.
They are not. The US restricts civil liberties and spends trillions of dollars on its security. They will lose. They will suffer terribly. They will not listen. They cannot care. They are deranged beasts. If USA leaders listened they would ask for forgiveness for all the murders, the destructive economic policies and for all the weapons they have lent to evil governments like Israel, Colombia and Indonesia.
The USA is simply another word for the violence of the evil lies. It is not a war for oil or a war of the Euro currency versus the US Dollar, this is a war that engulfs the whole of the world at this time. It infects our hearts and no transplant can heal the damage. The Bush war is the endgame for domination and enslavement. As a USA Zombie you receive its lifestyle of addictions and death worship.
The world works through symbolic stories. These stories and our faith in them creates existence and identity. For many centuries these stories were from the Bible and the improved version: the Quoran. For a hundred years the story has been of progress, technology and the western values. Now there is no story and existence is threatened.
The self-defense 911 bombings of New York and Washington DC were the greatest artistic performance in modern history. Like the sacking of Rome, the Fall of Saigon and Custer’s Last Stand, these performances echo on to inspire artists and warriors everywhere. Time stands still.
911 combined the white magic of the cinemascape with the black magic of righteous terrorism. 911 combined the white light of creative expression with the black light of a destructive martyrdom. 911 erased all of the stories of the world. The thousand points of light and George Bush Sr.’s City on a Hill are obliterated and forever dead. Never again will people anywhere fall for such vile beguilements, the wicked entrancement of a sucker’s story.
The smoke and confusion of the 911 battlefield is the vacuum we now inhabit. Only one story leads away from the madness of the USA, the Yankee gringos and the Gods of the Corporations. The new story and the symbolic existence that can power good people forward is the story of a permanent war, the never ending story of resistance in solidarity and victory. AND so we shall see who is the stronger and the faithful.
From Guantanamo Bay, Kundoz, Shatilla, the Bay of Pigs, the prisons of Pinochet and the Shah, Colombia’s mass-gravesites, the US-John McCain-bombed hospitals of Hanoi, the killing-fields of Central America and a narrow strip of Palestinian existence and death in Gaza, … spirits soar. We man the cockpit of your guilt. We are coming. YOU are without hope.
This is our story…
Roy Shoots From Wide Hips by Steven Ames 2:43pm Sat Mar 8 '03
info@circleoflifefoundation.org Roy is the only author who puts it together. Wish we had more like her, wish I lived in India. The backup documents show her consistency in shaming the US record of atrocities. I agree with great sadness that the US has not, cannot learn its lesson. Fire with fire - sometimes force only listens to force, even Gandhi recognized this. History should judge the European leaders more harshly than the derranged Bush and his US zombies.
Why don't people talk much more now about how to punish the US - how to extend the conflict - how to bring the war home???
??? Steve
http://www.circleoflifefoundation.orisreview.org crackpot [Comment] by Soldier 3:58pm Sun Mar 9 '03
"Antony [Bin Laden] arrives and volunteers to die with his noble ruler"
The noble ruler of course being Sadam.
How could anyone take the rest of this "article" seriously after a line like that?
One Sentence Doth not a Poet Unmake [Comment Response] by Dave Wilson 12:46am Mon Mar 10 '03 address:
http://www.bluegreenearth.com deafword@hotmail.com How can indymedia allow dimwits to leave 9 word comments that don't really say anything? The first article - a parody and excerpt from Julius Ceasar by Shakespear is obviously a lighthearted teaser that has nothing to do with the other article - so - MR. Wisely Anony=mous "Soldier" come on I bet you can make two complete sentences in a row and let us know what you think - or don't waste space and eyes with the 12 year old snipes at thin air. You don't like Roy or you don't like the truth - or you don't like being reminded that the US is a 100 times worse than Hitler - Eh?
no Shakespeare by Holland [Second Comment] 3:32pm Mon Mar 10 '03
You are not on stage at the Globe, that is most certain. [He means A. Roy, I guess – as he keeps switching around and not properly addressing the commentators clearly] You made the assertion that the US is 100 times worse than Hitler, on what basis? You simply chose to list military conflicts that have involved US forces. How about a comparison of US military involvement to other Western countries/governments? [Why change the subject? Let’s debate the US]
If I am correct, did not the War of 1812 start as a result of the USS Chesapeake having been fired on and boarded by the HMS Leopard off Norfolk, Virginia? If I am not mistaken, was the US involvement in WWII a direct result of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor December 7th, 1941 that claimed 3,000 American lives?
Dave Wilson Response [interjected here]
Please review:
http://www.fpif.org/justice/media/1011goodman-bs.html http://www.fpif.org/commentary/0110cia.html http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/McCollum/ I also rely on my mother’s statements that everyone knew the attack had been allowed to happen. A die-hard Republican (except for Nixon) she wouldn’t lie and there are numerous testimonies and suggestions of this crime by FDR. In fact every major war that the USA has been involved in was avoidable and contrived to happen (the USS Maine, World War I, Gulf War I – Bush is so proud of that one! – tricked our buddy Sadam right into Kuwait we did…)
Holland continues:
The conflict in Afganistan was a result of the Taliban's support for Al Qaeda and their subsequent refusal to turn over Bin Laden after the 9/11 attacks, was it not? Shall I go on?
Dave Wilson response [interjected]
Well Holland (sic) apparently you don’t read Time magazine or AOL.com or you would know that not only had Clinton been in hot pursuit of Al Qaeda and the Taliban, but that Pakistani intelligence had warned the Afghanis that Bush would attack them almost 9 months before 911.
Holland response [continued]
Your attempts at making the US into some type of warmongering, big bully are obviously misguided. [where am I guiding you to?] The number of US military operations does not define US foreign policy nor does it define US sentiments [How not, or what does, or what does this have to do with anything???]. After all there have been benefits of US military involvement abroad [oh yeah, great benefits – just like Hitler envisioned!]. Or do you chose to simply overlook the benefits of US involvement? [I know he can do more than spout rhetoric – come on Holland or Soldier – speak up with examples – bet you are afraid, eh?]
Holland continues: And what do you mean by the statement: "Why don't people talk much more now about how to punish the US - how to extend the conflict - how to bring the war home???" [Well, I never said that, Steve Ames did – please read more carefully! But if you answer my other questions, I will respond to this too]
I think there was an attempt to do just that on 9/11/01, or have you forgotten?
Wilson responds: Well that is what Ahrundati Roy suggests, isn’t it – that blind and stubborn people like you haven’t heard yet, cannot listen or have committed themselves to an easy – across the ocean – fascism.
That is another reason why – as Damon stated - the USA is a 100 times worse than Hitler – the German people didn’t know for years just what Hitler was up to – and many of them resisted and died fighting the Nazis. But people in the US have no justification for their ignorance – they willing choose to join in an illegal, immoral and terroristic war – that the whole world condemns, despite US-Bush extortion and pressures.
How Much do they Pay These RWing ThinkTankers
by Damon Scott 5:16pm Mon Mar 10 '03
The USA is infinetly worse than Hitler. The US entererd WWII becaise the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor? They bombed Pearl Harbor first because the US shut off their oil , second becuase we refused to allow their colonialism in the East, and third because AFDR let them bomb Pearl Harbor - just like everyone now knows that GW Bush let Bin Laden bomb New York - they had this Iraq-Anti-Terror-Imperialist plan all set years (some docs suggest decades) earlier and were just waiting, praying and doing everything they (both Bushes, US milit-Indust-Complex) could to provoke and allow an attack. I know you are not as dumb as you try to sound - I have debated and responded to U-CIA_or_off-the-shelf-Rightwing-Terrorist-Think Tankers for decades - U are so easy to spot. And it is all so fun for you to get paid to make us sincere journalists waste our time.
The US killed 5 million in South east Asia, the US nuked Japan to send a message to the USSR, the US supported the Indonesian slaughter of East Imor (twice!), Nicargua contras - who the world court called terrorists, the raping of nuns and the assassination of Arch Bishop Romero, - actually the list id almost infinite - BUT what makes the US so much worse than Hitler is that the Germans had little choice to start their terrible war because they lacked colonies and the reparations of WW I had impoverished them and they saw Stalin's shadow stealing their way - don't be so ignorant if you want to learn - brush up on history a bit - Iknow - I am sorry that you got an intentionally demented education at a US university - and of course you deserve my sympathy for growing up in the US in this culture of drugged out zombies - it isn't your fault - but wasting the readers time with your fabricated ignorance is not funny or excusable.
The US doesn't have to kill millions of people - they already rule and control the world - oh yeah - the economic system of the US also kills about 20 million people a year - just ask the Pope...
missed that in my Liberal History Book
by Holland 12:02pm Tue Mar 11 '03
Well my classes here at the CIA seemed to skip over the section that discussed the 'fact' that: "the Germans had little choice to start their terrible war because they lacked colonies and the reparations of WW I had impoverished them and they saw Stalin's shadow stealing their way." Can you enlighten me about the apparent lack of German choice regarding WWII and the lack of choice regarding the rise of the Third Reich? [Sorry this time I want you to answer this one – show us your skills – or address the points that I and other commentators brought up}
Holland continues: "How about the documented historical 'fact' of FDR allowing the Japanese to bomb Pearl Harbor? [ see above] "
Supporting documents citing the 'fact' that GWB allowed Bin Laden to attack on 9/11?
You like to point and shake the finger at the two Bush Presidents, however, you chose not to fault the Clinton administration for anything leading up to 9/11. Why is that?
David responds: Well again you haven’t been doing your homework or you would know that Clinton was all over Al Qaeda and the Taliban, He bombed Sudan and drove Ossama out, he hit Kabul, Afghanistan with 100 cruise missiles just as the Taliban were about to annhilate our Largest-Heroin-Dealers-In-The-World – our buddies the Northern “Alliance.” And Clinton was about to kill Ossama bin Laden [praise Allah] when the USA drones quit working. Then Clinton officials tried desperately to get Bush jr. to follow up but Bush was too arrogant [and clever] and decided to focus on Star Wars and ignore Clinton’s warnings until it was (intentionally ) too late !!!
– This is all common knowledge having been published in major magazines all over the world – not to mention all of the other evidence that Bush knew about 911 befroe it happened and the warning he received.
Holland goes on (and on) : “Regarding your assertion of our current economic status. Wise up and simply look at economic factors as a result of 9/11, the following government bail out of the airline industry, the increased spending on national security at all levels, the military deployment and action in Afganistan, and increased spending in aid to countries such as Afganistan to name a few. These things cost money sir. "Freedom is not free" to use the words of others. See I studied in the US university system which you refer to as "intentionally demented," and for the most part I was taught by left-wing professors who could only seem to stress one thing, take nothing for face value. I take little of what you posted at any value, let alone face value. Your assertions are undocumented and are supported as being 'fact' because they are 'well known.' What great philosophical whit. It must surely be a fact because you 'know it to be true' right?
Cutting and pasting the ideas of others does not make one a 'sincere journalist.'
Wilson response: "Well I hope this clears these attacks by Hollow-Holland up a bit – there are many more references – [come on readers help out – I have classes to teach and serious articles to write ] What is a sincere journalist? – Not too sure myself – except that I have been published more than a dozen times and never had a single significant complaint about my factoids!
See also :
Amnesty International, United States of America: A Safe Haven for Torturers
http://www.amnestyusa.org/stoptorture/safehaven.pdf A strange story on Kundoz found at:
http://www.observer.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4306995,00.html
WAGING PEACE
http://www.wagingpeace.org/articles/01.11/011118royarundhati.htm When he announced the air strikes, President George Bush said, "We're a peaceful nation." America's favourite ambassador, Tony Blair, (who also holds the portfolio of Prime Minister of the UK), echoed him: "We're a peaceful people."
So now we know. Pigs are horses. Girls are boys. War is Peace.
Speaking at the FBI headquarters a few days later, President Bush said: "This is our calling. This is the calling of the United States of America. The most free nation in the world. A nation built on fundamental values that reject hate, reject violence, rejects murderers and rejects evil. We will not tire."
Here is a list of the countries that America has been at war with-and bombed-since World War II: China (1945-46, 1950-53); Korea (1950-53); Guatemala (1954, 1967-69); Indonesia (1958); Cuba (1959-60); the Belgian Congo (1964); Peru (1965); Laos (1964-73); Vietnam (1961-73); Cambodia (1969-70); Grenada (1983); Libya (1986); El Salvador (1980s); Nicaragua (1980s); Panama (1989), Iraq (1991-99), Bosnia (1995), Sudan (1998); Yugoslavia (1999). And now Afghanistan.
The International Coalition Against Terror is largely a cabal of the richest countries in the world. Between them, they manufacture and sell almost all of the world's weapons, they possess the largest stockpile of weapons of mass destruction chemical, biological and nuclear. They have fought the most wars, account for most of the genocide, subjection, ethnic cleansing and human rights violations in modern history, and have sponsored, armed, and financed untold numbers of dictators and despots. Between them, they have worshipped, almost deified, the cult of violence and war. For all its appalling sins, the Taliban just isn't in the same league.
The Taliban was compounded in the crumbling crucible of rubble, heroin, and landmines in the backwash of the Cold War. Its oldest leaders are in their early 40s. Many of them are disfigured and handicapped, missing an eye, an arm or a leg. They grew up in a society scarred and devastated by war. Between the Soviet Union and America, over 20 years, about $45 billion worth of arms and ammunition was poured into Afghanistan. The latest weaponry was the only shard of modernity to intrude upon a thoroughly medieval society. Young boys-many of them orphans-who grew up in those times, had guns for toys, never knew the security and comfort of family life, never experienced the company of women...
There is as little chance that the people of the world can all become middle-class consumers as there is that they'll all embrace any one particular religion. The issue is not about Good vs Evil or Islam vs Christianity as much as it is about space. About how to accommodate diversity, how to contain the impulse towards hegemony-every kind of hegemony, economic, military, linguistic, religious, and cultural. Any ecologist will tell you how dangerous and fragile a monoculture is. A hegemonic world is like having a government without a healthy opposition. It becomes a kind of dictatorship. It's like putting a plastic bag over the world, and preventing it from breathing. Eventually, it will be torn open.
Put your ear to the ground in this part of the world, and you can hear the thrumming, the deadly drumbeat of burgeoning anger. Please. Please, stop the war now. Enough people have died. The smart missiles are just not smart enough. They're blowing up whole warehouses of suppressed fury.
It wouldn't make any sense at all to make cheaper missiles, for example, to the Carlyle Group-described by the Industry Standard as 'the world's largest private equity firm', with $12 billion under management. Carlyle invests in the defense sector and makes its money from military conflicts and weapons spending.
Carlyle is run by men with impeccable credentials. Former US defense secretary Frank Carlucci is Carlyle's chairman and managing director (he was a college roommate of Donald Rumsfeld's). Carlyle's other partners include former US secretary of state James A. Baker III, George Soros, Fred Malek (George Bush Sr's campaign manager). An American paper-the Baltimore Chronicle and Sentinel-says that former President George Bush Sr is reported to be seeking investments for the Carlyle Group from Asian markets. He is reportedly paid not inconsiderable sums of money to make 'presentations' to potential government-clients.
Ho Hum. As the tired saying goes, it's all in the family.
Then there's that other branch of traditional family business-oil. Remember, President George Bush (Jr) and Vice-President Dick Cheney both made their fortunes working in the US oil industry. Turkmenistan, which borders the northwest of Afghanistan, holds the world's third largest gas reserves and an estimated six billion barrels of oil reserves. Enough, experts say, to meet American energy needs for the next 30 years (or a developing country's energy requirements for a couple of centuries.)
In America, the arms industry, the oil industry, the major media networks, and, indeed, US foreign policy, are all controlled by the same business combines. Therefore, it would be foolish to expect this talk of guns and oil and defense deals to get any real play in the media. In any case, to a distraught, confused people whose pride has just been wounded, whose loved ones have been tragically killed, whose anger is fresh and sharp, the inanities about the 'Clash of Civilisations' and the 'Good vs Evil' discourse home in unerringly. They are cynically doled out by government spokesmen like a daily dose of vitamins or anti depressants. Regular medication ensures that mainland America continues to remain the enigma it has always been-a curiously insular people, administered by a pathologically meddlesome, promiscuous government.
And what of the rest of us, the numb recipients of this onslaught of what we know to be preposterous propaganda? The daily consumers of the lies and brutality smeared in peanut butter and strawberry jam being air-dropped into our minds just like those yellow food packets. Shall we look away and eat because we're hungry, or shall we stare unblinking at the grim theatre unfolding in Afghanistan until we retch collectively and say, in one voice, that we have had enough?
As the first year of the new millennium rushes to a close, one wonders-have we forfeited our right to dream? Will we ever be able to re-imagine beauty? Will it be possible ever again to watch the slow, amazed blink of a new-born gecko in the sun, or whisper back to the marmot who has just whispered in your ear-without thinking of the World Trade Center and Afghanistan?
Perspectives on Terrorist Attacks
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4266289,00.html
Here's the rub: America is at war against people it doesn't know, because they don't appear much on TV. Before it has properly identified or even begun to comprehend the nature of its enemy, the US government has, in a rush of publicity and embarrassing rhetoric, cobbled together an "international coalition against terror", mobilised its army, its air force, its navy and its media, and committed them to battle.
The trouble is that once America goes off to war, it can't very well return without having fought one. If it doesn't find its enemy, for the sake of the enraged folks back home, it will have to manufacture one. Once war begins, it will develop a momentum, a logic and a justification of its own, and we'll lose sight of why it's being fought in the first place.
Box-cutters, penknives, and cold anger are the weapons with which the wars of the new century will be waged. Anger is the lock pick. It slips through customs unnoticed. Doesn't show up in baggage checks.
It's reasonable to wonder why the symbols of America's economic and military dominance - the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon - were chosen as the targets of the attacks. Why not the Statue of Liberty? Could it be that the stygian anger that led to the attacks has its taproot not in American freedom and democracy, but in the US government's record of commitment and support to exactly the opposite things - to military and economic terrorism, insurgency, military dictatorship, religious bigotry and unimaginable genocide (outside America)? It must be hard for ordinary Americans, so recently bereaved, to look up at the world with their eyes full of tears and encounter what might appear to them to be indifference. It isn't indifference. It's just augury. An absence of surprise. The tired wisdom of knowing that what goes around eventually comes around.
The September 11 attacks were a monstrous calling card from a world gone horribly wrong. The message may have been written by Bin Laden (who knows?) and delivered by his couriers, but it could well have been signed by the ghosts of the victims of America's old wars. The millions killed in Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia, the 17,500 killed when Israel - backed by the US - invaded Lebanon in 1982, the 200,000 Iraqis killed in Operation Desert Storm, the thousands of Palestinians who have died fighting Israel's occupation of the West Bank. And the millions who died, in Yugoslavia, Somalia, Haiti, Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, Panama, at the hands of all the terrorists, dictators and genocidists whom the American government supported, trained, bankrolled and supplied with arms. And this is far from being a comprehensive list.
(While talks are on for the extradition of CEOs - can India put in a side request for the extradition of Warren Anderson of the US? He was the chairman of Union Carbide, responsible for the Bhopal gas leak that killed 16,000 people in 1984. We have collated the necessary evidence. It's all in the files. Could we have him, please?)
The terror that stalks the world was sculpted from the spare rib of a world laid to waste by America's foreign policy: its gunboat diplomacy, its nuclear arsenal, its vulgarly stated policy of "full-spectrum dominance", its chilling disregard for non-American lives, its barbarous military interventions, its support for despotic and dictatorial regimes, its merciless economic agenda that has munched through the economies of poor countries like a cloud of locusts. Its marauding multinationals who are taking over the air we breathe, the ground we stand on, the water we drink
http://csf.colorado.edu/envtecsoc/2002/msg00603.html Since it is September 11th that we're talking about, perhaps it's in the fitness of things that we remember what that date means, not only to those who lost their loved ones in America last year, but to those in other parts of the world to whom that date has long held significance. This historical dredging is not offered as an accusation or a provocation. But just to share the grief of history. To thin the mist a little. To say to the
citizens of America, in the gentlest, most human way: Welcome to the World.
Twenty-nine years ago, in Chile, on the 11th of September 1973, General Pinochet overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in a CIA-backed coup. ``Chile shouldn't be allowed to go Marxist just because its people are irresponsible," said Henry Kissinger, Nobel Peace Laureate, then the U.S. Secretary of State.
After the coup President Allende was found dead inside the presidential palace. Whether he was killed or whether he killed himself, we'll never know. In the regime of terror that ensued, thousands of people were killed. Many more simply `disappeared'. Firing squads conducted public executions. Concentration camps and torture chambers were opened across the country.
The dead were buried in mine shafts and unmarked graves. For seventeen years, the people of Chile lived in dread of the midnight knock, of routine `disappearances', of sudden arrest and torture. Chileans tell the story of how the musician Victor Jara had his hands cut off in front of a crowd in the Santiago stadium. Before they shot him, Pinochet's soldiers threw his guitar at him and mockingly ordered him to play.
Some people think that international law gives the U.S. the right to bomb Afghanistan. It does not. In fact the U.S. has a long history of disregarding international law.
The United Nations Charter, under Article 51, gives a state the right to repel an attack that is ongoing or imminent as a temporary measure until the UN Security Council can take steps necessary for international peace and security. This does not include the right to retaliate after an attack. And it certainly doesn't give the U.S. the right to attack Afghanistan in retaliation for a crime it believes (but has yet to prove) was committed by someone living there.
The United States remains the only western democracy opposed to the creation of a permanent and independent International Criminal Court (ICC). "The American Servicemembers' Protection Act"(approved by the House on May 10th, 282 to 137) threatens to cut off military aid to countries that ratify the ICC treaty (except for NATO, Israel and Egypt), and forbids the US military from supporting any UN peacekeeping missions unless they were exempted from ICC prosecution. It would prohibit U.S. co-operation with ICC inspectors even in a case of international terrorism and give the U.S. President "all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release from captivity of U.S. or allied personnel detained or imprisoned against their will by or on behalf of the Court, including military force." In other words, if U.S. servicemen were found to be terrorists, the U.S. would not turn allow them to be tried.
The U.S. does not even recognize the jurisdiction of the World Court. It withdrew from it in 1986 when the Court condemned the U.S. for attacking Nicaragua, mining its harbors and funding the contras. In that case, the court rejected U.S. claims that it was acting under Article 51 "in defense of Nicaragua's neighbors" and found the U.S. guilty of terrorism.
The Bush administration has refused to support the biological weapons treaty being drafted at the United Nations which 143 nations have already ratified. George Bush has announced that the U.S. plans to withdraw from the 30-year-old Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, and violate a ban on weapons in space with his national missile defence system.
The Bush administration has refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol to cut emissions of six greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons and sulphur hexafluoride), an important first step toward reversing global warming and climate change. The Protocol only required the U.S. to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by seven percent. With four percent of the world's population, the U.S. accounts for about 25 percent of the Earth's greenhouse gas emissions.
Last September, the Bush administration refused to join 163 other nations at the UN World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance in Durban, South Africa.
The United States is the only nation to ever use nuclear weapons during war.
Since World War II, the United States has bombed the following nations:
During the last 20 years the United States has committed the following acts of terrorism: The shooting down of two Libyan planes in 1981; the bombardment of Beirut in 1983 and 1984; the bombing of Libya in 1986; the bombing and sinking of an Iranian ship in 1987; the shooting down of an Iranian passenger plane in 1988; the shooting down of two more Libyan planes in 1989; the bombing of Afghanistan and Sudan in 1998, the latter destroying a pharmaceutical plant which provided for half the impoverished nation's medicine.
The government of the United States is the major obstacle to international law and to peace and justice on our planet today.
(According to a report written in October of 1993, Instances of Use of United States Forces Abroad, 1798 - 1993 there have been 234 instances in which the US has used its armed forces abroad, including five declared wars: the War of 1812, the Mexican War of 1846, the Spanish American War of 1898, World War I declared in 1917, and World War II declared in 1941. Adding Iraq, Bosnia, Sudan, Yugoslavia and Afghanistan from Arundhati Roy's list brings the total to 239, -if you count the war on the people of Iraq from 1991 to present as one instance.)
http://www.bluegreenearth.com MORE DEBATE - YES-YES-YES
by Juanita Morena 6:43pm Tue Mar 11 '03
address: Ecotopia, California
juanitamorena@lycos.com YES Yes please concerned friends can we have a lot more debate? Let's hash out all da issues, indentify what we agree on and think - Think goals, strategy, tactics.
Wouldn't it be fantastic if we could move way beyond THE PROBLEMS - of which there is almost global consensus that the US and its lifestyle are the main culprit. Could we next agree on what our goal is - what kind of world we must have - and then how do we get there. WOW - that would be great - concrete analysis, plans, goals and then "How do we get THERE///
Tactics come after strategy - and we have to consider all the tools in the tool box - this is not a game - it looks and smells like the end of the world! Do it! Act up.
So what if the end is near - we still have to do something - we can't let nin-come-poops like soldier or HOLLAND confuse or diswade our power, can we?
sf-frontlines.com
[ from IMC-DCat :
http://dc.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=55069&group=webcast http://www.rebelion.org 