DAY 46: Political Prisoners, Elections and the Continuing Resistance

Sooner or later they are going to start seeing this hideous situation as it really is. Sooner or later the coup managers are going to run out of drugs which they're using to keep the soldiers doped up. When that happens, Katie bar the door.

The first one they go after should be the death squad leader, Billy Joya. He has cheated Karma far too long.

They've been running amuck in their own homeland, harming unarmed people. Sooner or later it's going to dawn upon them all that this is the wrong way to behave, no matter how many scummy little white rich men like Goriletti tell them it's their duty as soldiers to terrorize helpless, unarmed Hondurans, no matter how many right-wingers in the States swoon in some kind of "rapture" over the idea of Honduran scum buckets owning and controlling an entire country, and subjugating, controlling decent men, women, and children through violence delivered by the young Honduran military men.

Too bad the blowback won't reach the deformed American losers who've been breathing heavily over this coup.

The USA is clearly on a steep decline, everywhere we look--whether it's the corporate takeover of our vote counting system, or the hijacking of the US military for corporate resource wars, or the disgrace that the Bushwhacks have plunged us into by torturing thousands of prisoners and slaughtering hundreds of thousands of people to steal their oil, or the Financial 9/11 that the Bushwhacks pulled off in the final days of their junta, or the daily morass of joblessness and debt that so many people here are suffering. We are an empire in deep, deep trouble.

Meanwhile, democracy almost everywhere in South America, and in about half of Central America, has seen a dramatic, indeed, an amazing renaissance, and with democracy--with true representation of the interests of the people--comes intelligent and visionary leadership which has seen the way out of subjugation by the US for Latin America, in cooperative regional planning with the goals of social justice, use of resources to benefit local people, and regional and national sovereignty, as well as regional organization, such as the new South American "common market," UNASUR.

And when this potential powerhouse economic region gets fully organized, they are going to leave us in the dust. They now have the motivated people--motivated by hope and by political empowerment--that we used to have; they have the resources--oil, gas, minerals, fresh water, forests and more--that our corpo/fascist rulers now have to kill to obtain; and they have the leaders that they need, at long last, to pull all this--all their advantages--together, and the grass roots organization to elect good leaders and keep them in power. These leaders are rich in practical understanding--for instance, that machines parts for Venezuela's oil industry should be manufactured in Venezuela, not imported--thus, good jobs stay in Venezuela...things like that, so many of them...common sense from leaders who don't take their orders from global corporate predators but think things through for local benefit. These leaders are also rich in historical understanding. They know very well what they are doing--they are overturning centuries of oppression, first by Spain and Portugal, and then more than a hundred years of oppression by the U.S. They have rejected that oppression in all of its forms, including, recently, the failed, corrupt, murderous US "war on drugs" and "free trade for the rich"--and they are building something new, on a cooperative model that resembles the EU "common market" but is much more culturally and politically cohesive. The wind is in South America's sails--and it is beginning to blow in Central America. The Hispanic half of the western hemisphere has a future.

And we could have been part of it. They wanted us as partners. They were willing to forgive everything--the most heinous of crimes and repression and thievery. Latin Americans have no inherent hatred, or even dislike, of the people of the US, and have many cultural affinities with us, including an affinity for democracy. They merely, right now, want respect and cooperation and fairness. As Evo Morales has said, "We want partners, not bosses." Evo Morales--whom the Bushwhacks tried to overturn last September with a white separatist insurrection. They welcomed Obama, with his talk of respect, peace and cooperation--only to find the US establishing seven more US military bases in Colombia--the fascist outlier of the continent, run by narco-thugs and death squads, on whom the US lavishes $6 BILLION in military aid.

So, as this disreputable corpo/fascist bullyism of the US loses us potential friends throughout the southern hemisphere, they will go their own way. They may have to fight for it--and I am increasingly worried that that is just what they're going to have to do--but our corpo/fascists can no more win against a highly motivated people with a passionate commitment to democracy, than Hitler could against us, when we were that way--inspired by fairness and political empowerment. US Latin American policy is headed toward a permanent and unbridgeable breach between north and south--whether by outright war (which seems increasingly likely) or a continued "war of attrition" in which the US spends billions and billions of dollars militarizing and nazifying and looting the few countries that will have us, and trying to topple and destroy democracy everywhere else. Latin America will end up hating us, and rightfully so--and they will go on to make this their century, not ours.

We could have been partners--but our corpo/fascist rulers do not want a fair playing field, and they, and not "we the people" are running the US government. They will loot us some more, send more of our young people as "cannon fodder" to their resource wars, and destroy us. They've got their foreign bank accounts and their global corporate empires. What do they care? And they really, really, really don't give a fuck for the "little people" whom they brainwash and use as little trumpets for their corpo/fascist "talking points" or as 'brownshirt' thugs. The "deformed American losers," as you call them, those breathing heavily over this coup. They, too, are losing their democracy and their prosperity, as the creative momentum of the Americas vanishes from our shores, and thrives south of the border. I pity them their brainwashed stupidity (unless they are paid agents of our Corporate Rulers). I pity them their unhappiness. I pity the consequences of Corporate Rule that are falling on them, as on all of us. And I pity their inability to feel joy at the rise of true democracy in the southern hemisphere--a region that has been so stomped on, and so "divided and conquered," for so long.

I have fallen prey to a dark scenario of our inability to reverse the decline that our country is so visibly suffering. However, I don't consider the 'brownshirts' among us to be anything but a tiny minority, and I have boundless optimism, actually, that our democracy can still recover--can actually throw off the Corporate Rulers, and renew ourselves as the greatest democratic experiment that was ever undertaken. I have great faith in the (north) American people as a whole. And I have not given up hope. If the South Americans can do it--after so much suffering and oppression--so can we.

the coup in Honduras can be reversed, can you envision the 3 million displaced marching on Uribe?

It would appear that the Pentagon has envisioned a similar movement here, otherwise how do you explain holding back regular troops and sending Guard and reserves to the middle east?

in Colombia. Uribe--bad as he is--is at least talking to the other leaders of the continent, even if just to con them (or try to). Santos wouldn't bother. He'd invade Venezuela tomorrow, if he gets the go-ahead from whoever is running US foreign policy in Latin America, kill all the leftists and gain control of Venezuela's oil for Exxon Mobil & cabal. He's chafing at the bit to do it. The people of Colombia and the people of Venezuela and Ecuador are just target practice to him--or recruitable "cannon fodder" or death squad killers, to be shoved out of the way or eviscerated if they get uppity, or indoctrinated and turned into torturers and murderers, as he sees fit. He is South America's Donald Rumsfeld.

If you are talking about the 3 million displaced Colombians who have fled mostly into Venezuela and Ecuador, they are much better off in Venezuela and Ecuador, than they would be in Colombia, even if they are poor, dispossessed and living by their wits. They will at least have health care, education and compassionate treatment by good governments. They are fleeing mostly from the Colombian military and its death squads; also from US/Colombia toxic pesticide spraying. But actually I'm not sure what you meant.

If you meant a non-violent civil resistance movement in Colombia, such as the Honduran people are mounting, then I agree. Although I think I understand the reasons for FARC's armed resistance, I don't condone it. But I really don't think I have a right to judge it, considering what the people of Colombia have suffered. I don't know what I would do if members of my family or community had been chopped up with chainsaws while alive and their body parts thrown into mass graves. I really don't. Maybe I would take up arms; maybe not. But looking at armed resistance from afar, and with historical perspective, what I see is that it rarely produces a fair and just society. Cuba is one of the few exceptions, but they are an historical anomaly. Bloodshed leads to more bloodshed and suffering, almost always. That is why Gandhi was such a brilliant, brilliant man. He saw the OTHER way. Also, Martin Luther King after him. Their insight into the human soul, and into the soul of rightful resistance, changed everything. Trying to gain justice by use of a gun, or a bomb--by killing people, or threatening to--never seems to work out. What have you won? You have merely won power, not justice. You have physically dominated the other; you haven't changed him. Is that justice? No. It is understandable in some circumstances? Certainly. Can it create fairness, tolerance, goodness, mutual benefit, compassion, a better society? It's a difficult question, when you look at, say, the US Revolutionary War, or the Civil War, or WW II. There were substantial, nameable progressive advances in human culture that seemed to derive from killing great numbers of people.

What Gandhi and MLK did was to put the matter on an entirely different plane--a spiritual plane. What right do you have to harm or kill someone, even if they are trying to harm or kill you? It is commonly believed that we have the right of self-defense, but should we exercise it? Or should we exercise it on behalf of someone else--even if we are valorous and would sacrifice ourselves? They raised these questions, and created a new way to look at it: the right of your enemy to be at peace with you. How do you help him achieve that right? If you respond to violence in kind, you have said that peace is not possible--and no peace treaty can erase the wounds. They will return, in a cycle of vengeance, or erupt in society in some other way.

Anyway, I think that many people alive now have been sobered by these two--Gandhi and MLK, also Mandela in South Africa. The call to arms--even in a "just cause"--falls on more deaf ears than it ever has before in human history. We have just been through the rudest awakening imaginable that the US war machine in particular doesn't care if people oppose or resist its calls to war. But that is another problem. Despite the world being armed to the teeth--with the US the worst of the lot--the war machine has to go through a vast amount of lying and deception--and looting and destruction of the economy--to even get enough "cannon fodder" for their dreadful purposes. Few of their recruits believe the crap they are told. As for the rest of us, they have to rig the voting machines! Nearly 60% of the American people opposed the Iraq War (Feb '03, all polls). They wanted the OTHER way--diplomacy, cooperation, PEACE. And where did they get that idea?

So the FARC are like dinosaurs--they are people displaced in time. They are pre-Gandhian. They are also trapped in a 40+ year civil war. They are in a cycle of violence and revenge with the Colombian military and its death squads. And God knows how that can be solved. It will take a saint--or saints--to accomplish it.

But I think you are right--if this is what you mean--that, if the non-violent civil resistance movement in Honduras succeeds, then it is also possible in Colombia--likely much more difficult, but possible. Honduras has its own bloody history of fascist outrages, and if they can recover from that, and from the outrages of today, by peaceful means, it will be a great example to Colombians. Many Latin American countries have recovered from fascist brutality, through peaceful, democratic means, often accompanied by non-violent protest action. In fact, that is the backstory to many of the leftist governments of today. But Honduras would be an especially good example, because, like Colombia, it is a client state of the US. They all once were, but Honduras is now. Some of them have suffered US interference recently--notably Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador--but their strong leftist governments have resisted it, and they have also been able to act cooperatively to resist it. That is much more difficult in countries run by our corpo/fascists and the Pentagon, and local toadies. Honduras. Colombia. And if Hondurans succeed, Colombians can, too.

I am attaching a link to THE BULLDOZER REVOLUTION in serbia which is a pattern for Honduras.
http://guerillas-without-guns.blogspot.com/2007/06/bulldozer-revolution.html