Aftereffect of Western aggression (denied) rises in the East

Consequences of U.S. "missions" in  Africa, Middle East, South Central Asia

By Carolyn Bennett

I believe a person or group’s right to freedom ends when that "freedom" breaches rights of others in society: when it becomes, when it is by definition, and or when it intends or effects threat or intimidation.

Rights end for culprits who use or abuse rights under law; breach human rights of others, rights to live free from tyranny, terror, fear, threat, intimidation.

There are and must be limits on “freedom,” the notion of freedom. 

Freedom is not whatever power or the powerful say it is. 

Freedom does not mean doing whatever ─ anything, any way, any time, for whatever motive, to anyone ─ a person or group, State or high official or corporate CEO wants to do. 

 Freedom must be conceived and construed with reflective, insightful consciousness of and concern and regard for social context and society.

Regardless to propaganda or what some of us choose to believe, we do not live barricaded, islanded in the sun or on a hilltop. 

We live in society ─ from local communities to the world.  No Land is an Island. No People are Apart.

I returned to these thoughts today when leaving a comment as I signed a petition (to ‘Selma City Council: No More Monuments to KKK Hate!’) posted at the Freedom Socialist Party website (http://www.socialism.com/drupal-6.8/?q=node/38)

Afghanistan's dead

Later in the day, while listening to a rebroadcast of clips from the latest ridiculous statement by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, I again connected as part of a whole: cycles of violence in foreign relations and violence in domestic affairs together with an obliviousness and failure to care.

  

In the aftermath of foreign invasion and occupation of Libya, a U.S. “diplomat” reportedly has been killed, this incident occurring as the death toll of foreign soldiers continues to rise in the Middle East and South Central Asia. So the secretary goes on camera and feigns a childish “innocence” in her description of this “diplomat” (part of the occupying force) as a wonderful parent and husband.

U.S. dead

I wonder what the secretary thinks hundreds of thousands of women and men are to their children right across the Middle East, South Central Asia looking north and eastward, across East Africa looking north and westward: parents and their children terrorized with occupation and invasion (“diplomacy,” “humanitarian” aid?) and assassination; hunted, made homeless, displaced internally and externally by the United States of America. Countless numbers of them traumatized under the Hillary Rodham Clinton-Barack Obama reign.

The U.S. President reacts, sending in marines to join the occupiers in protecting U.S. “missions,” he calls them, a seemingly benign word except when one considers its roots in the righteous terrorizing religionists: the West’s (European, British, North American) Catholics, Protestants, etcetera’s ethnic cleansing, reeducation, slaveholding, massacring “missions” extending back centuries.

U.S. invaded
Iraq in flames

Criminal leadership, mendacious governance

The world outside the Washington beltway knows that corporate-cashed men who rule the world and rule it at the behest of their corporate paymasters are wrong ─ dead wrong. They know too that among the dangerously wrongheaded male heads of state, high government officials and their partners in crime over at least the past two decades (but longer) are “female-males”: the Hillary Clintons and Madeline Albrights, the Condoleezza and Susan Rices.

Theirs and their male conspirators’ willful, deliberate, insensible, criminal ignorance is beyond dangerous and should never be allowed decision-making roles or leadership positions in states or nations.

U.S. wars by remote

Inevitable aftereffect

Nonviolent protest
Drone killings in
Somalia
Pakistan
 Afghanistan
Yemen
Other countries in
Africa
Middle East,
South Central Asia

In the aftermath of (and ongoing) foreign aggression, what on earth did the Americans expect? That the peoples of Yemen and Bahrain, Somalia, Libya and Egypt, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq would genuflect and kiss cheeks?

Do you really think that slaughtering people is “meaning well,” as U.S. State Department staffer (now under fire from his bosses) Peter Van Buren puts it too generously in We meant well: How I helped lose the battle for the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people?  

Does any sane person believe that oppressed peoples will forever hold their heads down and bow to bombs and guns and “greatness” of abusively powerful States and their cohorts?

Do you believe that respect and rights, life itself is the due only of the “mightierest” armed with remote-controlled might?

I abhor violence of all kinds in all situations, except in clearly confirmed cases of self defense (My easy, unintimidating walk in life has never occasioned the carrying or use of arms). For all the religiosity of the righteous religionists of the West, they selectively forget ─ and fail to reveal in their propaganda ─ that their wars beget retaliatory wars. Violence cycles violence.

Moreover, the notion that freedom licenses the taking of life; or that, in the name of freedom, killing is justified is at worst the mark of the criminally insane and at best the delusion of the sociopath.

A way forward

I truly believe that, in the name of an evolutionary course of history ─ no matter what is needed or desired by nations or individuals  ─ deliberation, talking, verbal negotiation, staying at that roundtable for the long term, constitute constructive power, a power far greater than sanctions, belligerence, armaments, occupation, aggression, war and the threat of these.

 

I truly believe that negotiation and cooperation, respect for peoples, cultures and sovereignty, understanding and actively seeking to understand others and their ways ─ care that transcends selfish individualism, nepotism and caprice ─ are the way forward, a way forward in the best sense of “progress”: an evolutionary revolutionary, true progressiveness.

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Bennett's books are available in New York State independent bookstores: Lift Bridge Bookshop: www.liftbridgebooks.com [Brockport, NY]; Sundance Books: http://www.sundancebooks.com/main.html [Geneseo, NY]; Mood Makers Books: www.moodmakersbooks.com [City of Rochester, NY]; Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center: www.enlightenthedog.org/ [Buffalo, NY]; Burlingham Books – ‘Your Local Chapter’: http://burlinghambooks.com/ [Perry, NY 14530]; The Bookworm: http://www.eabookworm.com/ [East Aurora, NY] • See also: World Pulse: Global Issues through the eyes of Women: http://www.worldpulse.com/ http://www.worldpulse.com/pulsewire http://www.facebook.com/#!/bennetts2ndstudy

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