By Ezrah Aharone 12/09
While President Obama revs-up the war machinery during this holiday season as he simultaneously holds the Nobel Peace Prize, it brings ponder to the possibility of lasting peace, considering that this conflict also embodies a borderless ideological “collision of religions.”
Although 9/11 makes the US feel justified in droning Afghanistan into submission, a few factors are worth noting since the groups known as Al Qaeda, Taliban, and Islamists are not all regional members of some Lodge-like fraternity who attend annual conventions to blow-up airplanes. Just as Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden weren’t “colleagues,” they don’t all know each other or have close bonds. I’d bet that 9/11 was just as surprising to Americans as it was to many of the very combatants that the US now targets in the mountains of Afghanistan.
If you read A History of God by Karen Armstrong, you’ll find that the autonomous tribes and clans throughout this region have been warring and exacting “rough-and-ready” justice on themselves and invaders for centuries. Afghanistan is not only called the “Graveyard of Empires” because of its war victories, it’s a land where loyalty can be “rented” to the highest bidder. In fact, Afghans have a term called “Turning Turbans” to signify the switching of sides and loyalties.
But in this case, the one uncompromising factor is their Islamic belief and obligation to rid-out Westerners whom they regard as foreign occupiers and infidels. Before resigning his State Department post, former Marine Captain, Matthew Hoh, aptly assessed that Afghans are fighting in some areas only because the US military “is there.” If American soldiers weren’t “there,” many Afghan fighters would have a pre-9/11 outlook when America was not a “declared enemy.”
Meantime, despite the public’s mounting war outcries and economic anxieties, Obama has done something that can potentially reserve him a seat among the pantheon of the greatest commander-in-chiefs – He has become a “wartime president.” Many of the most renowned American presidents have the “glorified” distinction of being war leaders.
America’s warped fascination with war is openly boasted in its national anthem, which puts a twist of splendor on the butchery during the War of 1812 – “the perilous fight,” “ramparts gallantly streaming,” “rocket’s red glare,” “bombs bursting in air.” If you want instant success, just make a blood-spattering war movie that depicts American bravery and greatness. Don’t make the mistake though of featuring Black heroes like Spike Lee’s Miracle at St. Anna because that lacks comparative box-office appeal.
This cancerous love affair with blood, circulates the veins of society and manifests in everything from the highest crime rate and gun homicides in the world; to belligerent television, movies, and video games for “entertainment” pleasures; to routine abortions and capital punishment; to random mass murders of schoolchildren; to over 90,000 annual rapes of women.
A nation’s true character is defined – not by fluffy words in its constitution – but by the moral and cumulative sum of its historical conduct. Yet America, with its enduring history of questionable wars and centuries of racialized misconduct, has a false self-perception of being a nation of peace. Dr. King called the US government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world” . . . and said God hasn’t “appointed America as his messianic force, a kind of policeman of the whole world.”
America has a national holiday recognizing Dr. King and his nonviolent philosophy, but nonviolence is certainly not America’s philosophy. Nonviolence is something that Black America is conditioned to practice towards Euro-Americans, but nonviolence is considered a cardinal weakness by this establishment. Heck, America isn’t even fond of compromise, and it definitely doesn’t “love its enemies.” It practices an unrepentant “eye-for-eye” variety of Christianity that “lives by the sword.”
The religious notion that God endorses the US military is reinforced in the “Oath of Enlistment” that all soldiers must “swear,” which evokes “Faith” and eerily concludes with the words, “So Help Me God.” As Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia affirmed, “A religious-neutral government does not fit with an America that reflects belief in God in everything from its money to its military.”
If the reverse occurred whereby the Christian streets of America were stormed by Muslim soldiers with Blackwater-like mercenaries, ordinary Americans would fight no less fiercely than Afghans. Call them terrorists or whatever else, but based on their longstanding heritage and religious convictions they have no intentions to allow America, via the corrupted Hamid Kharzi government, to institute a Plymouth Rock-like presence in Afghanistan.
Consequently, the decade of 2010 launches with an outright, but undeclared, “Religious War” with Crusaders on one side, Jihadists on the other, with no negotiating table between these two Abrahamic faiths that originally share spiritual commonalities without today’s political complexities. So, as with Iraq, it’s near-certain that Afghanistan won’t become a vacation destination for Americans in your lifetime.
Ezrah Aharone is the author of two political books: Sovereign Evolution and Pawned Sovereignty. He is also a founding member of the Center for Sovereignty Advancement. He can be reached at Ezrah@theCSA.org.
Showing posts with label War. Show all posts
Showing posts with label War. Show all posts
Friday, December 25, 2009
Saturday, November 21, 2009
Placebos of Black Political Leadership
By Ezrah Aharone 11/09
The election of President Barack Obama is shifting America’s axis of race in ways that have yet to be politically quantified. But from a standpoint of Black political leadership, it signals a definite “changing of the guards.” The once-popular preacher/protester ilk of leadership from the 1960s finds itself gasping for 21st century oxygen, as young Black leaders are card-carrying democrats who can now “eyeball” whomever they please.
Perception suggests that African Americans are finally becoming politically powerful as a people. But every industrialized nation with an ethnically diverse population has a general “pecking order” of power, starting with the dominant group most able to leverage capital might into political influence that shapes foreign, domestic, and military policies. All other simulations of power (freedoms of speech, press, assembly etc.) are like political window-dressings of democracy that may boost patriotism, but lack utility for minority people to command such influence.
Similarly, people who’ve taken “Placebo” sugar pills, sometimes experience boosts in health, being that they psychologically expect and believe the tablets contain “medicinal properties” to cure them. In much the same way, America’s placebos (civil rights, integration, citizenship) have given us expectations and beliefs of power, when in reality, they lack the “political properties” of control (sovereignty, independence, statehood) wielded by Euro-Americans . . . Which is exactly why our centuries-old ailments remain largely uncured.
Although upcoming generations of Black leaders are digesting Americanization more easily, I’m reminded of Winston Churchill who once remarked that Euro-Americans will always “do the right thing, after they’ve exhausted all alternatives.” And so, racial progress and the rise of Black political leaders cannot be disconnected from America’s habitual militarism and its 21st century requirements for economic survivability . . . Honestly, how much longer could we be coaxed into voting for White multimillionaires and fighting ambiguous wars abroad if we still faced stark Jim Crowness here?
But whether you believe it or not, there remains unvoiced resentment towards civil rights leaders for pricking lasting nerves. Euro-Americans have a known nationalist tendency of not liking to be cited or corrected of their political flaws and flagrances. So naturally this establishment welcomes fresh, race-neutral Black leaders who skillfully steer around the systemic/endemic nature and ramifications of America’s racial inequities, which Obama faultlessly personifies.
Part of his ascension involved soothing the historical burdens of White guilt, while keeping civil rights leaders at arms-length to prevent staining his political immaculacy of White acceptance. As such, he cryptically foretold during his campaign that “he’s rooted in the Black community, but not limited by it.”
My question is – What crime did we commit as a people where someone would have to present such a political defense for himself? If everyone is “equal” why then, conversely, is he “not limited by the White community” since he’s also half-White? Most troubling however is the unseen, unchallenged “source” that compelled him to make this disclaimer since it holds proven capabilities to diminish us, as Black people, beneath the respect and political worth that all people deserve.
Despite such subliminal credence to Whiteness, the repercussions of centuries of Euro-American greed and immoralities are heading homeward to roost. Not only is America experiencing an internal crisis of leadership and financial upheaval, its international integrity and superpower image are jeopardized, as the world community frowns upon its brash war escapades. In response, it has become strategically expedient for Euro-American males to deflect the government’s aggression away from themselves.
Similar to the Lone Ranger designating Tonto “the leader” (after being surrounded by angry Indians) the establishment hopes Obama and other Black leaders like Attorney General Eric Holder and UN Ambassador Susan Rice, can convey a “placebo appearance” that the US government is no longer a big, bad, all-White wolf with the blood of Black and Brown people dripping from its fangs. Together, they put a converted face of “change” on what otherwise is a contiguous history of “Euro-American hegemony as usual.”
Yes, America is multicultural. Yes, Africans in America are making progress. But in our honest pursuit of political power – via the leadership tutelage of Euro-Americans – it is our spiritual responsibility to question if we, in the process, are becoming proxy participants in a 21st century continuation of the same “interloping for resources” that initially barbarized us and Native Americans, under the pretext of “freedom and democracy.”
Ezrah Aharone is the author of two political books: Sovereign Evolution and Pawned Sovereignty. He is also a founding member of the Center for Sovereignty Advancement. He can be reached at Ezrah@theCSA.org.
The election of President Barack Obama is shifting America’s axis of race in ways that have yet to be politically quantified. But from a standpoint of Black political leadership, it signals a definite “changing of the guards.” The once-popular preacher/protester ilk of leadership from the 1960s finds itself gasping for 21st century oxygen, as young Black leaders are card-carrying democrats who can now “eyeball” whomever they please.
Perception suggests that African Americans are finally becoming politically powerful as a people. But every industrialized nation with an ethnically diverse population has a general “pecking order” of power, starting with the dominant group most able to leverage capital might into political influence that shapes foreign, domestic, and military policies. All other simulations of power (freedoms of speech, press, assembly etc.) are like political window-dressings of democracy that may boost patriotism, but lack utility for minority people to command such influence.
Similarly, people who’ve taken “Placebo” sugar pills, sometimes experience boosts in health, being that they psychologically expect and believe the tablets contain “medicinal properties” to cure them. In much the same way, America’s placebos (civil rights, integration, citizenship) have given us expectations and beliefs of power, when in reality, they lack the “political properties” of control (sovereignty, independence, statehood) wielded by Euro-Americans . . . Which is exactly why our centuries-old ailments remain largely uncured.
Although upcoming generations of Black leaders are digesting Americanization more easily, I’m reminded of Winston Churchill who once remarked that Euro-Americans will always “do the right thing, after they’ve exhausted all alternatives.” And so, racial progress and the rise of Black political leaders cannot be disconnected from America’s habitual militarism and its 21st century requirements for economic survivability . . . Honestly, how much longer could we be coaxed into voting for White multimillionaires and fighting ambiguous wars abroad if we still faced stark Jim Crowness here?
But whether you believe it or not, there remains unvoiced resentment towards civil rights leaders for pricking lasting nerves. Euro-Americans have a known nationalist tendency of not liking to be cited or corrected of their political flaws and flagrances. So naturally this establishment welcomes fresh, race-neutral Black leaders who skillfully steer around the systemic/endemic nature and ramifications of America’s racial inequities, which Obama faultlessly personifies.
Part of his ascension involved soothing the historical burdens of White guilt, while keeping civil rights leaders at arms-length to prevent staining his political immaculacy of White acceptance. As such, he cryptically foretold during his campaign that “he’s rooted in the Black community, but not limited by it.”
My question is – What crime did we commit as a people where someone would have to present such a political defense for himself? If everyone is “equal” why then, conversely, is he “not limited by the White community” since he’s also half-White? Most troubling however is the unseen, unchallenged “source” that compelled him to make this disclaimer since it holds proven capabilities to diminish us, as Black people, beneath the respect and political worth that all people deserve.
Despite such subliminal credence to Whiteness, the repercussions of centuries of Euro-American greed and immoralities are heading homeward to roost. Not only is America experiencing an internal crisis of leadership and financial upheaval, its international integrity and superpower image are jeopardized, as the world community frowns upon its brash war escapades. In response, it has become strategically expedient for Euro-American males to deflect the government’s aggression away from themselves.
Similar to the Lone Ranger designating Tonto “the leader” (after being surrounded by angry Indians) the establishment hopes Obama and other Black leaders like Attorney General Eric Holder and UN Ambassador Susan Rice, can convey a “placebo appearance” that the US government is no longer a big, bad, all-White wolf with the blood of Black and Brown people dripping from its fangs. Together, they put a converted face of “change” on what otherwise is a contiguous history of “Euro-American hegemony as usual.”
Yes, America is multicultural. Yes, Africans in America are making progress. But in our honest pursuit of political power – via the leadership tutelage of Euro-Americans – it is our spiritual responsibility to question if we, in the process, are becoming proxy participants in a 21st century continuation of the same “interloping for resources” that initially barbarized us and Native Americans, under the pretext of “freedom and democracy.”
Ezrah Aharone is the author of two political books: Sovereign Evolution and Pawned Sovereignty. He is also a founding member of the Center for Sovereignty Advancement. He can be reached at Ezrah@theCSA.org.
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