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Popular activism
The opportunity for change
By Jeff Flashinski
Popular activism is not just important to try to compel Obama to do what represents the will of people, but also because it leads to a change in the moral and popular culture.
Barack Obama is now our president elect, and while I could not be happier that McCain did not win, I am not under any illusion that the Obama presidency will make any real change in this country. The United States is a one-party state with two factions. The one party is the business party, and the two factions represent two different sectors of the elite. It is important for those who voted for Obama to realize that it was necessary to prevent the extremism of McCain from taking power, but that Obama is nothing but a centrist Democrat and that without popular activism his administration will accomplish little in terms of reform.
Obama has surrounded himself with many of the same people who ran the Clinton administration. While Democrats can rightly see the crimes of the Republican Party, it is sometimes hard for them to acknowledge their own party’s past crimes. Clinton committed many crimes when he was president, including funding the Turkish ethnic cleansing of the Kurds, providing military aid to the Colombian government which was carrying out attacks against its own people, costing the lives of approximately 3,000 Colombians each year and continuing the sanctions regime on Iraq for the entire administration, which led to the deaths of over a half-million children under the age of 5. Clinton also bombed Iraq in December 1998. The Clinton administration described the Indonesian dictator Suharto, who was one of the worst mass murderers of the 20th century, as “our kind of guy.” Clinton then bombed Yugoslavia in 1999, setting off an ethnic cleansing of Albanians by the Serbs.
With Obama’s administration looking quite similar to Clinton’s, we can expect those same types of crimes to be committed. The only reason one should expect anything different from Obama is assuming that popular activism will compel Obama’s administration to pass through social welfare programs and stop U.S. military interventions. Without activism, Obama will be constrained by the elite sector which is his main constituency. But, as the New York Times stated in 2003, in response to the massive protests around the world, there are two superpowers in the world now: one is the United States and the other is popular activism.
Popular activism is not just important to try to compel Obama to do what represents the will of people, but also because it leads to a change in the moral and popular culture. The media in this country is owned and paid for by the same multinational corporations that run and control our society and government. The result is that the information most of the country receives has a very strong state bias and often represents America’s interests and not reality. Popular activism can lead to broadening the range of information that is available to the population. It can also lead to the awakening of a moral culture which has been suppressed by fear-mongering or nonexistent due to apathy.
Activism is necessary now because we must never allow another George W. Bush to come to power. We must never forget his crimes and how close this country came to fascism. The rejection of international law and the trampling of the Constitution which occurred must never happen again. If it does, there is little chance for the survival of our species.
The murder of more than 1 million Iraqis is a crime which will be recorded as one of the worst genocides of the 21st century. This is a crime that every American must always remember and that should never be erased from the conscience of our nation. If there is any justice in this world, Bush will one day come before an international court to be prosecuted for war crimes.
Let us now act. We have a president that will actually listen to the people if they choose to organize and articulate their concerns. We, as citizens, must recognize what it means to be a democracy. It does not mean checking a ballot once every four years; it means active participation in the political process. The election of Obama was not change, but an opportunity for change. The opportunity for change is now dependent on the actions of the world’s second superpower.
> Comments
Johanan Raatz on Nov 10, 2008 at 11:07 AM:
"The murder of more than 1 million Iraqis is a crime which will be recorded as one of the worst genocides of the 21st century. This is a crime that every American must always remember and that should never be erased from the conscience of our nation. If there is any justice in this world, Bush will one day come before an international court to be prosecuted for war crimes."
LOL give me a break. And please look into Lancet and ORB's methodology before you continue to spout there ridiculous statistics.
The million and 655,000 figures are highly dubious and were generated using the epidemiological methods combined with the highest casualty densities they could find. The found the highest samples and generalized over the whole. You can't sample war violence the same way you sample an epidemic.
And another thing. To call this "genocide" on the part of Bush when in fact it is largely insurgents who we are killing and largely insurgents who are killing most of the Iraqi's is -well it's absurd.
"Bush will one day come before an international court to be prosecuted for war crimes."
Doesn't work that way. We haven't signed onto the ICC you see. Besides that everyone knows the ICC is a joke. If they ever tried to try Bush and his administration there would be no shortage of organizations and military contracting companies that would "destabilize" them for good.