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October 25, 2001
The World's Only Superpower
By William Blum
Being the World's Only Superpower
Means Never Having to Say You're Sorry
Cuba, said US District Judge James Lawrence King on December 17, 1997, "in outrageous contempt for international law and basic human rights, murdered four human beings in international airspace." He then proceeded to award $187.6 million to the families of the Florida-based Cuban pilots who had been shot down in February 1996 by Cuban jets while on an air mission, destination Cuba.{2} (In actuality, the Cuban government had done no more than any government in the world would have done under the same circumstances. Havana regarded the planes as within Cuban airspace, of serious hostile intent, and gave the pilots explicit warning: "You are taking a risk." Planes from the same organization had gone even further into Cuban territory on earlier occasions and had been warned by Cuba not to return.) Full Article
Sept. 11 Through Latin American Eyes
By Andres Tapia Pacific News Service
Argentinean Jews like Horacio Kejsefman feel vulnerable not only because of recent threats by fundamentalist Muslims worldwide. The trial of 20 people accused of involvement in the Buenos Aires bombing has just begun, and more violence is feared. Kejsefman's children go to a Jewish school barricaded behind a line of short concrete columns intended to thwart car bombs.
Headlines and dinner conversations in Peru and Argentina fluctuate between the recently declared war on terrorism and economic uncertainty -- just as they did during terror-induced times in both countries. In the early '90s, the Shining Path was car-bombing in Lima, and from 1976 to 1983 the Argentinean military dictatorship "disappeared" hundreds of political opponents.
These experiences with politically induced terror make South Americans astute observers of America's current peril. On one hand, they have great admiration for the United States and seek to emulate its economic and political institutions. The balance of power in several Latin nations between the executive, judiciary, and legislative branches is directly borrowed from the United States. Argentina has pegged the value of its peso to the value of the U.S. dollar. And for decades some of the best and the brightest in South America have studied and worked in the United States, including Peru's Toledo and several of his top advisors. Full Article
Might The Mouse That Roars Wag the Dog?
By Lloyd Williams
Despite the Declaration of Independence's dictum that 'All men are created equal,' a flag-waving O'Sullivan argued that the white man was superior in terms of race, culture and religion. He deemed it not only a God-ordained "right" but an "obligation" to eradicate the "savage" Native Americans and to enslave the "inferior" African race.
Tragically, a questionable morality of expediency provided the basis for the ensuing philosophy of expansionism, which closed out the 19th Century In the 20th Century; a similarly shortsighted America has demonized Germans, the Japanese, the Vietnamese, The Russians and numerous other ethnic adversaries. But, if you notice, our enemies more often end up as prosperous allies than as irreparably vanquished foes. Full Article
Perched on the new age of colonialism?
By Reginald Dumas
IN EARLY 1970 I paid my only visit so far to Afghanistan. The weather was cool, even cold, in the capital Kabul. But my welcome was warm, even if, as you can imagine, I was at the same time the object of much curiosity.
One day I drove down to Jalalabad, near the Pakistan border. There, over a meal of delicately-spiced stewed lamb and rice, my hosts invited me to stay in Afghanistan. Of course, I would have to learn the Pashto language, they told me, and convert to Islam, but think of the number of attractive wives I could have. I declined politely (and not, I suppose, without a certain regret): I was already married, I said. In reply I received a puzzled look: existing marriage was clearly not an insuperable obstacle. Full Article
