[Peace-discuss] Bellicose rhetoric???

[E. Wayne Johnson]

Well, regarding South Africa, what ever that country might do or not do 
is no business of the US Congress, although
any US citizen feeling the mission call to that battlefield has the 
right to depart from here
and go to South Africa and do what ever he likes, acting on his own behalf.

Our foreign policy ought to be that of communication, trade and peaceful 
commerce, not meddling inside the borders of some other
sovereign country.  We ought to also resist with utmost vigour any 
meddling that foreign states seek within our borders
with the same fervor that Yankee Imperialism is resisted around the world.

How unfortunate it is that Robinson's efforts how ever eloquent they 
might have been were so misguided
as to drive for an unconstitutional act against another sovereign 
state.  I am not impressed with Robinson's sincerity
in translocating to St.Kitts, an island resort as I picture it.  If he 
were the real deal I would have expected him to
move to Haiti or some African field where his work could have been 
effective, and he might have had the
opportunity to mingle his writing with his blood rather than basking on 
the beach.




John W. wrote:
>
> On Sun, Nov 9, 2008 at 11:09 PM, E. Wayne Johnson <ewj at pigs.ag 
> <mailto:ewj at pigs.ag>> wrote:
>
>     John W. wrote:
>>
>>
>>         Chomsky says that he differs with his Quaker friends who
>>         recommend telling truth
>>         to power.  Power already knows the truth, he says, and tries
>>         to cover it up. 
>>
>>
>>     This is true.  Personally, I think it's often more useful to
>>     speak lies to (those in) power.  But of course you have to figure
>>     out what you want to accomplish with your lies.
>
>     One reason that it _Can_ be useful to speak the truth to those in
>     power is that
>     they are at times subject to blind spots from which they can
>     recover if pointed out by
>     the word fitly spoken.
>
>
> I suppose that's possible, though it's contrary to my experience.  
> Perhaps my words and those of every other disenfranchised person with 
> whom I'm familiar have not been "fitly spoken" enough.  Even the great 
> Randall Robinson, whom I doubt anyone would accuse of 
> unintelligibility or inarticulateness, had this to say after almost 40 
> years of activism:
>
> Excerpts from /Defending the Spirit: A Black Life in America/ by 
> Randall Robinson, 1998
>
>             …Which brings us to the sine qua non for effective 
> outside-the-Policy-House advocacy: a gift for self-promotion, a gift 
> used or, more appropriately, misused to its fullest by those 
> self-seeking souls unburdened by any restraint of shame.  This is not 
> to disparage self-promotion, especially when it is an inadvertent 
> by-product of a public effort to alter wrongheaded public policy.  We 
> have seat belts in our cars, and consumer safety standards generally, 
> because of the public advocacy of Ralph Nader, whose formidable public 
> stature has carried in its trail a salutary and major public policy 
> influence.
>
>             My academic friends and the foundations that fund their 
> painstaking research appear to understand none of this.  For forty 
> years of apartheid, the tenured opponents of that system won grants, 
> did research, wrote monographs and books, gave testimony ad nauseam 
> before Congress.  All to no effect.  American policy toward South 
> Africa had been and remained one of de facto public and private 
> embrace.  Few if any members of Congress felt compelled to read or 
> listen to anything the academic community had to say.  Only when a 
> campaign of massive civil disobedience was packaged for public 
> participation in late 1984 did American policy begin to turn around.
>
>             This is not the preferred way to make or influence foreign 
> policy.  But in America, if you are outside the Policy House, a 
> position to which virtually all blacks have been relegated, it is the 
> only way to have impact.  We have won most of the battles in which I 
> have fought.  But the price has been dear and I am tired and 
> diminished by the process.  In all the years of meeting with 
> presidents, secretaries of state, national security advisors, U.S. 
> trade representatives, and members of Congress, I cannot recall a 
> single change of policy course that resulted from any of the hundreds 
> of discussions, the thousands of letters, the scores of presentations 
> to perfunctory nods and courteous closings.  Like water off a duck's 
> back.  It never ever meant a damn thing…
>
> Pages 244-45
>
>  
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.chambana.net/mailman/archive/peace-discuss/attachments/20081110/f9b36371/attachment.htm