We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Friday, April 12, 2013

Britain and the 'war on terror' throughout the ages

Click here to access article from The Rebel Griot blog (Britain).

I was a bit relieved reading this article after learning that our US torture agents learned their heinous craft from their Anglo counterparts in the current Anglo-American Empire. (Maybe Americans are good guys after all--they just shouldn't hang out with evildoers like the Brits.) In this blogger's review of the recently held literary festival in Oxford, he reports on a number of participants who disclosed many previously secret torture operations and other war crimes of the British Empire.
There is an unfortunate tendency in this country – including, perhaps especially, on the ‘left’ – to think of the ‘war on terror’ and its attendant horrors as a US crime. Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, drone strikes…all have become bywords for US atrocities; virtually household names. But how many are aware that the modern system of secret prisons, the interrogation techniques used in the prison abuse scandals, and the use of aerial bombing to suppress resistance, were all pioneered by the British....