Dave Pollard recently challenged me, in an email, as to what we all could DO about the current situations. I replied that building awareness, and then facilitating understanding on a wide-spread scale, were imo actions, and that blogging is and remains important in that role. But obviously not enough, not the whole story.
And I regularly muse on what various forms of civil disobedience might look like in North America. I suppose we know that marching in the streets does lead to freedom enclosures, and might end up with some form of Kent State situation … just a matter of time and place.
And Tom once suggested to me that we would never see a France-like general strike in North America, that it’s de facto illegal (?)
But I suppose if enough people formed a silent, organized, systematic and sustained silent, credit-card based civil action directed at the corporate world, we’d see some interesting question marks float up.
Then this morning, Euan Semple sent me by email one of the most articulate and beautifully-thought-out pieces connecting the dots between the “war on terror”, corporate profits, the schism between justice and human rights and the ongoing traumatization of the less fortunate in society. It was written, and delivered as a speech, by Arundhati Roy, an Indian writer and activist who has my everlasting respect.
Here are two moving, haunting pieces from her speech, which she titled Peace and the Corporate Liberation Theology.
This first excerpt is one of the clearest and hardest-hitting denuciations that shines a bright light through the three years of bullshit crammed down peoples’ throats by the Bush administration in cahoots with the corporate media. The Bush people are too far gone to be chastised, really, but the coproate media in the States deserves villification, and they deserve to be put out of business.
The invasion of Iraq will surely go down in history as one of
the most cowardly wars ever fought. It was a war in which a band of
rich nations, armed with enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world
several times over, rounded on a poor nation, falsely accused it of
having nuclear weapons, used the United Nations to force it to disarm,
then invaded it, occupied it and are now in the process of selling it.
This second excerpt is the one that makes me wonder – hard, and in a flash of insight, made me realize that even if 50% or more of Americans don’t support this war, and couldn’t unseat George Bush … if they all decdied to take economic action, non-violent economic action (which is clearly in their power to do, on a daily basis) major change could be made to occur. Major change could be made to occur much more quickly than planning, scheming and organizing for elections in 2006 and 2008.
If you really want to climb out, there’s good news and bad news.
The good news is that the advance party began the climb some time ago.
They’re already half way up. Thousands of activists across the world
have been hard at work preparing footholds and securing the ropes to
make it easier for the rest of us. There isn’t only one path up. There
are hundreds of ways of doing it. There are hundreds of battles being
fought around the world that need your skills, your minds, your
resources. No battle is irrelevant. No victory is too small.
The bad news is that colorful demonstrations, weekend marches and
annual trips to the World Social Forum are not enough. There have to
be targeted acts of real civil disobedience with real consequences.
Maybe we can’t flip a switch and conjure up a revolution.
But there are several things we could do. For example, you could make a list of
those corporations who have profited from the invasion of Iraq and
have offices here in Australia. You could name them, boycott them,
occupy their offices and force them out of business. If it can happen
in Bolivia, it can happen in India. It can happen in Australia.
Why not?
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