"Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original virtue"

[T.Ruth2power]

http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2008/04/09/honouring-the-unbreakable-promise-by-john-pilger/

Honouring the 'unbreakable promise'
By John Pilger

Every day, we breathe the hot air of these pseudo ideas with their pseudo truths and pseudo experts. They set the limits of public debate within the most advanced societies. They determine who are the good guys and who are the bad guys. They manipulate our compassion and our anger and make many of us feel there is nothing we can do.

Take the “war on terror”. This is an entirely bogus idea that actually means a war of terror.

Its aim is to convince people in the rich world that we all must live in an enduring state of fear: that Muslim fanatics are threatening our civilisation.



In fact, the opposite is true.

The threat to our societies comes not from Al Qaeda but from the terrorism of powerful states.

Ask the people of Iraq, who in five years ago have seen the physical and social destruction of their country. President Bush calls this "nation-building". Ask the people of Afghanistan, who have been bombed back into the arms of the Taliban - this is known in the West as a "good war". Or the people of Gaza, who are denied water, food, medicines and hope by the forces of so-called civilisation. The list is long and the arithmetic simple. The greatest number of victims of this war of terror are not Westerners, but Muslims: from Iraq to Palestine, to the refugee camps of Lebanon and Syria and beyond.



We are constantly told that September 11th 2001 was a day that changed the world and - according to John McCain - justifies a 100-year war against America's perceived enemies. And yet, while the world mourned the deaths of 3,000 innocent Americans, the UN routinely reported that the mortality rate of children dead from the effects of extreme poverty had not changed. The figure for September 11th 2001 was more than 36,000 children. That is the figure every day. It has not changed. It is not news.



Oscar Wilde wrote:

"Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original virtue".

I read the other day that the South African police calculated that the number of protests across the country had doubled in just two years to more than 10,000 every year. That may be the highest rate of dissent in the world. That's something to be proud of - just as the Freedom Charter remains something to be proud of. Let me remind you how it begins: "We, the people of South Africa, declare that our country belongs to everyone...". And that, as Nelson Mandela once said, was the "unbreakable promise". Isn't it time the promise was kept?

[Altean Wanderer]

1. Kick n/t

[Orwellian_Ghost]

2. Great quote

K&R

[flashl]

3. Kick. nt