[Naakow Grant-Hayford]

https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu

Great source for dissertations. And Yes:

Read more dissertations :-)!

[Naakow Grant-Hayford]

ORIGINAL: http://inthesetimes.com/article/18581/henry-kissinger-greg-grandin-us-military-air-power

Kissinger invokes today’s endless, open-ended wars to justify his diplomacy by air power in Cambodia and elsewhere nearly half a century ago. But what he did then created the conditions for today’s endless wars, both those started by Bush’s neocons and those waged by Obama’s war-fighting liberals like Samantha Power.

Web Only / Features » November 9, 2015
How Henry Kissinger Helped Make Endless War an All-American Tradition

Kissinger’s steadfast support for bombing as an instrument of “diplomacy” has coursed through the decades.
BY Greg Grandin

In April 2014, ESPN published a photograph of an unlikely duo: Samantha Power, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and former national security adviser and secretary of state Henry Kissinger at the Yankees-Red Sox season opener. In fleece jackets on a crisp spring day, they were visibly enjoying each other’s company, looking for all the world like a twenty-first-century geopolitical version of Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. The subtext of their banter, however, wasn’t about sex, but death.

As a journalist, Power had made her name as a defender of human rights, winning a Pulitzer Prize for her book A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. Having served on the National Security Council before moving on to the U.N., she was considered an influential “liberal hawk” of the Obama era. She was also a leading light among a set of policymakers and intellectuals who believe that American diplomacy should be driven not just by national security and economic concerns but by humanitarian ideals, especially the advancement of democracy and the defense of human rights.

The United States, Power long held, has a responsibility to protect the world’s most vulnerable people. In 2011 she played a crucial role in convincing President Obama to send in American air power to prevent troops loyal to Libyan autocrat Muammar Gaddafi from massacring civilians. That campaign led to his death, the violent overthrow of his regime, and in the end, a failed state and growing stronghold for ISIS and other terror groups. In contrast, Kissinger is identified with a school of “political realism,” which holds that American power should service American interests, even if that means sacrificing the human rights of others.

According to ESPN, Power teasingly asked Kissinger if his allegiance to the Yankees was “in keeping with a realist’s perspective on the world.” Power, an avid Red Sox fan, had only recently failed to convince the United Nations to endorse a U.S. bombing campaign in Syria, so Kissinger couldn’t resist responding with a gibe of his own. “You might,” he said, “end up doing more realistic things.” It was his way of suggesting that she drop the Red Sox for the Yankees. “The human rights advocate,” Power retorted, referring to herself in the third person, “falls in love with the Red Sox, the downtrodden, the people who can’t win the World Series.”

“Now,” replied Kissinger, “we are the downtrodden”—a reference to the Yankees‘ poor performance the previous season. During his time in office, Kissinger had been involved in three of the genocides Power mentions in her book: Pol Pot’s “killing fields” in Cambodia, which would never have occurred had he not infamously ordered an illegal four-and-a-half-year bombing campaign in that country; Indonesia’s massacre in East Timor; and Pakistan’s in Bangladesh, both of which he expedited.

You might think that mutual knowledge of his policies under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford and the horrors that arose from them would have cast a pall over their conversation, but their banter was lively. “If a Yankee fan and a Red Sox fan can head into the heart of darkness for the first game of the season,” Power commented, “all things are possible.”

All things except, it seems, extricating the country from its endless wars.

Only recently, Barack Obama announced that U.S. troops wouldn’t be leaving Afghanistan any time soon and also made a deeper commitment to fighting the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, including deploying the first U.S. ground personnel into that country. Indeed, a new book by New York Timesreporter Charlie Savage, Power Wars, suggests that there has been little substantive difference between George W. Bush’s administration and Obama’s when it comes to national security policies or the legal justifications used to pursue regime change in the Greater Middle East.

Henry Kissinger is, of course, not singularly responsible for the evolution of the U.S. national security state into a monstrosity. That state has had many administrators. But his example—especially his steadfast support for bombing as an instrument of “diplomacy” and his militarization of the Persian Gulf—has coursed through the decades, shedding a spectral light on the road that has brought us to a state of eternal war.

From Cambodia…

Within days of Richard Nixon’s inauguration in January 1969, national security adviser Kissinger asked the Pentagon to lay out his bombing options in Indochina. The previous president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, had suspended his own bombing campaign against North Vietnam in hopes of negotiating a broader ceasefire. Kissinger and Nixon were eager to re-launch it, a tough task given domestic political support for the bombing halt.

The next best option: begin bombing across the border in Cambodia to destroy enemy supply lines, depots, and bases supposedly located there. Nixon and Kissinger also believed that such an onslaught might force Hanoi to make concessions at the negotiating table. On February 24th, Kissinger and his military aide, Colonel Alexander Haig, met with Air Force Colonel Ray Sitton, an expert on B-52 bombers, to begin the planning of Menu, the grim culinary codename for the bombing campaign to come.

Given that Nixon had been elected on a promise to end the war in Vietnam, Kissinger believed that it wasn’t enough to place Menu in the category of “top secret.” Absolute and total secrecy, especially from Congress, was a necessity. He had no doubt that Congress, crucial to the appropriation of funds needed to conduct specific military missions, would never approve a bombing campaign against a neutral country with which the United States wasn’t at war.

Instead, Kissinger, Haig, and Sitton came up with an ingenious deception. Based on recommendations from General Creighton Abrams, commander of military operations in Vietnam, Sitton would lay out the Cambodian targets to be struck, then run them by Kissinger and Haig for approval. Next, he would backchannel their coordinates to Saigon and a courier would deliver them to radar stations where the officer in charge would, at the last minute, switch B-52 bombing runs over South Vietnam to the agreed-upon Cambodian targets.

Later, that officer would burn any relevant maps, computer printouts, radar reports, or messages that might reveal the actual target. “A whole special furnace” was set up to dispose of the records, Abrams would later testify before Congress. “We burned probably 12 hours a day.” False “post-strike” paperwork would then be written up indicating that the sorties had been flown over South Vietnam as planned.

Kissinger was very hands-on. “Strike here in this area,” Sitton recalled Kissinger telling him, “or strike here in that area.” The bombing galvanized the national security adviser. The first raid occurred on March 18, 1969. “K really excited,” Bob Haldeman, Nixon’s chief of staff, wrote in his diary. “He came beaming in [to the Oval Office] with the report.”

In fact, he would supervise every aspect of the bombing. As journalist Seymour Hersh later wrote, “When the military men presented a proposed bombing list, Kissinger would redesign the missions, shifting a dozen planes, perhaps, from one area to another, and altering the timing of the bombing runs… [He] seemed to enjoy playing the bombardier.” (That joy wouldn’t be limited to Cambodia. According to Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, when the bombing of North Vietnam finally started up again, Kissinger “expressed enthusiasm at the size of the bomb craters.”) A Pentagon report released in 1973 stated that “Henry A. Kissinger approved each of the 3,875 Cambodia bombing raids in 1969 and 1970”—the most secretive phase of the bombing—“as well as the methods for keeping them out of the newspapers.”

All told, between 1969 and 1973, the U.S. dropped half-a-million tons of bombs on Cambodia alone, killing at least 100,000 civilians. And don’t forgetLaos and both North and South Vietnam. “It’s wave after wave of planes. You see, they can’t see the B-52 and they dropped a million pounds of bombs,” Kissinger told Nixon after the April 1972 bombing of North Vietnam’s port city of Haiphong, as he tried to reassure the president that the strategy was working: “I bet you we will have had more planes over there in one day than Johnson had in a month… Each plane can carry about 10 times the load [a] World War II plane could carry.”

As the months passed, however, the bombing did nothing to force Hanoi to the bargaining table. It did, on the other hand, help Kissinger in his interoffice rivalries. His sole source of power was Nixon, who was a bombing advocate. So Kissinger embraced his role as First Bombardier to show the tough-guy militarists the president had surrounded himself with that he was the “hawk of hawks.” And yet, in the end, even Nixon came to see that the bombing campaigns were a dead end. “K. We have had 10 years of total control of the air in Laos and V.Nam,” Nixon wrote him over a top-secret report on the efficacy of bombing, “The result = Zilch.” (This was in January 1972, three months before Kissinger assured Nixon that “wave after wave” of bombers would do the trick).

During those four-and a half years when the U.S. military dropped more than 6,000,000 tons of bombs on Southeast Asia, Kissinger revealed himself to be not a supreme political realist, but the planet’s supreme idealist. He refused to quit when it came to a policy meant to bring about a world he believed heought to live in, one where he could, by the force of the material power of the U.S. military, bend poor peasant countries like Cambodia, Laos, and North Vietnam to his will—as opposed to the one he did live in, where bomb as he might he couldn’t force Hanoi to submit. As he put it at the time, “I refuse to believe that a little fourth-rate power like North Vietnam does not have a breaking point.”

In fact, that bombing campaign did have one striking effect: it destabilized Cambodia, provoking a 1970 coup that, in turn, provoked a 1970 American invasion, which only broadened the social base of the insurgency growing in the countryside, leading to escalating U.S. bombing runs that spread to nearly the whole country, devastating it and creating the conditions for the rise to power of the genocidal Khmer Rouge.

…to the First Gulf War

Having either condoned, authorized, or planned so many invasions—Indonesia’s in East Timor, Pakistan’s in Bangladesh, the U.S.’s in Cambodia, South Vietnam’s in Laos, and South Africa’s in Angola—Henry Kissinger took the only logical stance in early August 1990, when Saddam Hussein sent the Iraqi military into Kuwait: he condemned the act. In office, he had worked to pump up Baghdad’s regional ambitions. As a private consultant and pundit, he had promoted the idea that Saddam’s Iraq could serve as a disposable counterweight to revolutionary Iran. Now, he knew just what needed to be done: the annexation of Kuwait had to be reversed.

President George H.W. Bush soon launched Operation Desert Shield, sending an enormous contingent of troops to Saudi Arabia. But once there, what exactly were they to do? Contain Iraq? Attack and liberate Kuwait? Drive on to Baghdad and depose Saddam? There was no clear consensus among foreign policy advisers or analysts. Prominent conservatives, who had made their names fighting the Cold War, offered conflicting advice. Former ambassador to the U.N. Jeane Kirkpatrick, for instance, opposed any action against Iraq. She didn’t think that Washington had a “distinctive interest in the Gulf” now that the Soviet Union was gone. Other conservatives pointed out that, with the Cold War over, it mattered little whether Iraqi Baathists or local sheiks pumped Kuwait’s oil as long as it made it out of the ground.

Kissinger took the point position in countering those he called America’s “new isolationists.” What Bush did next in Kuwait, he announced in the first sentence of a widely published syndicated column, would make or break his administration. Anything short of the liberation of Kuwait would turn Bush’s “show of force” in Saudi Arabia into a “debacle.”

Baiting fellow conservatives reluctant to launch a crusade in the Gulf, he insisted, in Cold War-ish terms that couldn’t fail to bite, that their advice was nothing short of “abdication.” There were, he insisted, “consequences” to one’s “failure to resist.” He may, in fact, have been the first person to compare Saddam Hussein to Hitler. In opinion pieces, TV appearances, and testimony before Congress, Kissinger forcefully argued for intervention,including the “surgical and progressive destruction of Iraq’s military assets” and the removal of the Iraqi leader from power. “America,” he insisted, “has crossed its Rubicon” and there was no turning back.

He was once again a man of the moment. But how expectations had shifted since 1970! When President Bush launched his bombers on January 17, 1991, it was in the full glare of the public eye, recorded for all to see. There was no veil of secrecy and no secret furnaces, burned documents, or counterfeited flight reports. After a four-month-long on-air debate among politicians and pundits, “smart bombs” lit up the sky over Baghdad and Kuwait City as the TV cameras rolled. Featured were new night-vision equipment, real-time satellite communications, and former U.S. commanders ready to narrate the war in the style of football announcers right down to instant replays. “In sports-page language,” said CBS News anchor Dan Rather on the first night of the attack, “this… it’s not a sport. It’s war. But so far, it’s a blowout.”

And Kissinger himself was everywhere—ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, on the radio, in the papers—offering his opinion. “I think it’s gone well,” he said to Dan Rather that very night.

It would be a techno-display of such apparent omnipotence that President Bush got the kind of mass approval Kissinger and Nixon never dreamed possible. With instant replay came instant gratification, confirmation that the president had the public’s backing. On January 18th, only a day into the assault, CBS announced that a new poll “indicates extremely strong support for Mr. Bush’s Gulf offensive.”

“By God,” Bush said in triumph, “we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.”

Saddam Hussein’s troops were easily driven out of Kuwait and, momentarily, it looked like the outcome would vindicate the logic behind Kissinger’s and Nixon’s covert Cambodian air campaign: that the US should be free to use whatever military force it needed to compel the political outcome it sought. It seemed as if the world Kissinger had long believed he ought to live in was finally coming into being.

…toward 9/11

Saddam Hussein, however, remained in power in Baghdad, creating a problem of enormous proportions for Bush’s successor, Bill Clinton. Increasingly onerous sanctions, punctuated by occasional cruise missile attacks on Baghdad, only added to the crisis. Children were starving; civilians were being killed by U.S. missiles; and the Baathist regime refused to budge.

Kissinger watched all of this with a kind of detached amusement. In a way, Clinton was following his lead: he was bombing a country with which we weren’t at war and without congressional approval in part to placate the militarist right. In 1998, at a conference commemorating the 25th anniversary of the accords that ended the Vietnam War, Kissinger expressed his opinion on Iraq. The real “problem,” he said, is will. You need to be willing to “break the back” of somebody you refuse to negotiate with, just as he and Nixon had done in Southeast Asia. “Whether we got it right or not,” Kissinger added, “is really secondary.”

That should count as a remarkable statement in the annals of “political realism.”

Not surprisingly then, in the wake of 9/11, Kissinger was an early supporter of a bold military response. On August 9, 2002, for instance, he endorsed a policy of regime change in Iraq in his syndicated column, acknowledging it as “revolutionary.” “The notion of justified pre-emption,” he wrote, “runs counter to modern international law,” but was nonetheless necessary because of the novelty of the “terrorist threat,” which “transcends the nation-state.”

There was, however, “another, generally unstated, reason for bringing matters to a head with Iraq”: to “demonstrate that a terrorist challenge or a systemic attack on the international order also produces catastrophic consequences for the perpetrators, as well as their supporters.” To be—in true Kissingerian fashion—in the good graces of the most militaristic members of an American administration, the ultimate political “realist” was, in other words, perfectly willing to ignore that the secular Baathists of Baghdad were the enemies of Islamic jihadists, and that Iraq had neither perpetrated 9/11 nor supported the perpetrators of 9/11. After all, being “right or not is really secondary” to the main issue: being willing to do something decisive, especially use air power to “break the back” of… well, whomever.

Less than three weeks later, Vice President Dick Cheney, laying out his case for an invasion of Iraq before the national convention of Veterans of Foreign Wars, quoted directly from Kissinger’s column. “As former Secretary of State Kissinger recently stated,” said Cheney, there is “an imperative for pre-emptive action.”

In 2005, after the revelations about the cooking of intelligence and the manipulation of the press to neutralize opposition to the invasion of Iraq, after Fallujah and Abu Ghraib, after it became clear that the real beneficiary of the occupation would be revolutionary Iran, Michael Gerson, George W. Bush’s speechwriter, paid a visit to Kissinger in New York. Public support for the war was by then plummeting and Bush’s justifications for waging it expanding. America’s “responsibility,” he had announced earlier that year in his second inaugural address, was to “rid the world of evil.”

Gerson, who had helped write that speech, asked Kissinger what he thought of it. “At first I was appalled,” Kissinger said, but then he came to appreciate it for instrumental reasons. “On reflection,” as Bob Woodward recounted in his book State of Denial, he “now believed the speech served a purpose and was a very smart move, setting the war on terror and overall U.S. foreign policy in the context of American values. That would help sustain a long campaign.”

At that meeting, Kissinger gave Gerson a copy of an infamous memo he had written Nixon in 1969 and asked him to pass it along to Bush. “Withdrawal of U.S. troops will become like salted peanuts to the American public,” he had warned, “the more U.S. troops come home, the more will be demanded.” Don’t get caught in that trap, Kissinger told Gerson, for once withdrawals start, it will become “harder and harder to maintain the morale of those who remain, not to speak of their mothers.”

Kissinger then reminisced about Vietnam, reminding Gerson that incentives offered through negotiations must be backed up by credible threats of an unrestrained nature. As an example, he brought up one of the many “major” ultimatums he had given the North Vietnamese, warning of “dire consequences” if they didn’t offer the concessions needed for the U.S. to withdraw from Vietnam “with honor.” They didn’t.

“I didn’t have enough power,” was how Kissinger summarized his experience more than three decades later.

Will the Circle Be Unbroken?

When it comes to American militarism, conventional wisdom puts the idealist Samantha Power and the realist Kissinger at opposite ends of a spectrum. Conventional wisdom is wrong, as Kissinger himself has pointed out. Last year, while promoting his book World Order, he responded to questions about his controversial policies by pointing to Obama. There was, he said, no difference between what he did with B-52s in Cambodia and what the president was doing with drones in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. Whenasked about his role in overthrowing Salvador Allende, the democratically elected president of Chile in 1973, he insisted that his actions had been retrospectively justified by what Obama and Power did in Libya and wanted to do in Syria.

Kissinger’s defense was, of course, partly fatuous, especially his absurd assertion that fewer civilians had died from the half-million tons of bombs he had dropped on Cambodia than from the Hellfire missiles of Obama’s drones. (Credible estimates put civilian fatalities in Cambodia at more than 100,000; drones are blamed for about 1,000 civilian deaths.) He was right, however, in his assertion that many of the political arguments he made in the late 1960s to justify his illegal and covert wars in Cambodia and Laos, considered at the time way beyond mainstream thinking, are now an unquestioned, very public part of American policymaking. This was especially true of the idea that the U.S. has the right to violate the sovereignty of a neutral country to destroy enemy “sanctuaries.” “If you threaten America, you will find no safe haven,” Barack Obama has said, offering Kissinger his retroactive absolution.

Here, then, is a perfect expression of American militarism’s unbroken circle. Kissinger invokes today’s endless, open-ended wars to justify his diplomacy by air power in Cambodia and elsewhere nearly half a century ago. But what he did then created the conditions for today’s endless wars, both those started by Bush’s neocons and those waged by Obama’s war-fighting liberals like Samantha Power. So it goes in Washington.
Greg Grandin

Greg Grandin, a TomDispatch regular, teaches history at New York University and is the author of a number of books, including Fordlandia, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and The Empire of Necessity, which won the Bancroft Prize in American History. His new book, Kissinger’s Shadow: The Long Reach of America’s Most Controversial Statesman, will be published in August.

[Naakow Grant-Hayford]

Positiver und Negativer Frieden: Ein Schaubild aus: „50 Years 25 Intellectual Landscapes Explored“ p.130 [ https://www.galtung-institut.de/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/TUP-FLYER.pdf ]

[Naakow Grant-Hayford]

Das Thema der Gewaltformen hat Johan Galtung hier auf Englisch http://them.polylog.org/5/fgj-en.htm und hier auf Deutsch http://them.polylog.org/5/fgj-de.htm sehr genau erörtert.

Diese 6 BLICKWINKEL auf das Fait Social „Gewalt“ sind unterschiedliche Linsen, die jeweils andere Spezifika von gewaltförmigen sozialen Beziehungen in den Fokus rücken.Der Natur-Kultur-Struktur Ansatz wirft für jeden dieser Untersuchungsbereiche weitreichende und ergiebige theoretische und empirische Forschungsfragen auf.

[Naakow Grant-Hayford]

https://www.transcend.org/tms/2014/03/three-years-after-gaddafi-libya-is-imploding-into-chaos-and-violence/

Three Years after Gaddafi, Libya Is Imploding Into Chaos and Violence

MIDDLE EAST & NORTH AFRICA, 17 March 2014

by Patrick Cockburn – The Independent

World View: Its government has no real power; militias are ever more entrenched, and now the state itself is under threat.

16 Mar 2014 – The Libyan former Prime Minister Ali Zeidan fled last week after parliament voted him out of office. A North Korean-flagged oil tanker, the Morning Glory, illegally picked up a cargo of crude from rebels in the east of the country and sailed safely away, despite a government minister’s threat that the vessel would be “turned into a pile of metal” if it left port: the Libyan navy blamed rough weather for its failure to stop the ship. Militias based in Misrata, western Libya, notorious for their violence and independence, have launched an offensive against the eastern rebels in what could be the opening shots in a civil war between western and eastern Libya.

Without a central government with any real power, Libya is falling apart. And this is happening almost three years after 19 March 2011 when the French air force stopped Mu’ammer Gaddafi’s counter-offensive to crush the uprising in Benghazi. Months later, his burnt-out tanks still lay by the road to the city. With the United States keeping its involvement as low-profile as possible, Nato launched a war in which rebel militiamen played a secondary, supportive role and ended with the overthrow and killing of Gaddafi.

A striking feature of events in Libya in the past week is how little interest is being shown by leaders and countries which enthusiastically went to war in 2011 in the supposed interests of the Libyan people. President Obama has since spoken proudly of his role in preventing a “massacre” in Benghazi at that time. But when the militiamen, whose victory Nato had assured, opened fire on a demonstration against their presence in Tripoli in November last year, killing at least 42 protesters and firing at children with anti-aircraft machine guns, there was scarcely a squeak of protest from Washington, London or Paris.

Coincidentally, it was last week that Al-Jazeera broadcast the final episode in a three-year investigation of the Lockerbie bombing that killed 270 people in 1988. For years this was deemed to be Gaddafi’s greatest and certainly best-publicised crime, but the documentary proved beyond reasonable doubt that the Libyan intelligence officer, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, convicted of carrying out the bombing, was innocent. Iran, working through the Palestinian Front for The Liberation of Palestine – General Command, ordered the blowing up of Pan Am 103 in revenge for the shooting down of an Iranian passenger plane by the US navy earlier in 1988.

Much of this had been strongly suspected for years. The new evidence comes primarily from Abolghasem Mesbahi, an Iranian intelligence officer who later defected and confirmed the Iranian link. The US Defense Intelligence Agency had long ago reached the same conclusion. The documentary emphasises the sheer number of important politicians and senior officials over the years who must have looked at intelligence reports revealing the truth about Lockerbie, but still happily lied about it.

It is an old journalistic saying that if you want to find out government policy, imagine the worst thing they can do and then assume they are doing it. Such cynicism is not deserved in all cases, but it does seem to be a sure guide to western policy towards Libya. This is not to defend Gaddafi, a maverick dictator who inflicted his puerile personality cult on his people, though he was never as bloodthirsty as Saddam Hussein or Hafez al-Assad.

But the Nato powers that overthrew him – and by some accounts gave the orders to kill him – did not do so because he was a tyrannical ruler. It was rather because he pursued a quirkily nationalist policy backed by a great deal of money which was at odds with western policies in the Middle East. It is absurd to imagine that if the real objective of the war was to replace Gaddafi with a secular democracy that the West’s regional allies in the conflict should be theocratic absolute monarchies in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. This is equally true of Western and Saudi intervention in Syria which has the supposed intention of replacing President Bashar al-Assad with a freely elected government that will establish the rule of law.

Libya is imploding. Its oil exports have fallen from 1.4 million barrels a day in 2011 to 235,000 barrels a day. Militias hold 8,000 people in prisons, many of whom say they have been tortured. Some 40,000 people from the town of Tawergha south of Misrata were driven from their homes which have been destroyed. “The longer Libyan authorities tolerate the militias acting with impunity, the more entrenched they become, and the less willing to step down” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “Putting off repeated deadlines to disarm and disband militias only prolongs the havoc they are creating throughout the country.”

Unfortunately, the militias are getting stronger not weaker. Libya is a land of regional, tribal, ethnic warlords who are often simply well-armed racketeers exploiting their power and the absence of an adequate police force. Nobody is safe: the head of Libya’s military police was assassinated in Benghazi in October while Libya’s first post-Gaddafi prosecutor general was shot dead in Derna on 8 February. Sometimes the motive for the killing is obscure, such as the murder last week of an Indian doctor, also in Derna, which may lead to an exodus of 1,600 Indian doctors who have come to Libya since 2011 and on whom its health system depends.

Western and regional governments share responsibility for much that has happened in Libya, but so too should the media. The Libyan uprising was reported as a simple-minded clash between good and evil. Gaddafi and his regime were demonised and his opponents treated with a naïve lack of scepticism and enquiry. The foreign media have dealt with the subsequent collapse of the Libyan state since 2011 mostly by ignoring it, though politicians have stopped referring to Libya as an exemplar of successful foreign intervention.

Can anything positive be learnt from the Libyan experience which might be useful in establishing states that are an improvement on those ruled by Gaddafi, Assad and the like? An important point is that demands for civil, political and economic rights – which were at the centre of the Arab Spring uprisings – mean nothing without a nation state to guarantee them; otherwise national loyalties are submerged by sectarian, regional and ethnic hatreds.

This should be obvious, but few of those supporting the Arab uprisings, for reasons other than self-interest, seem to have taken it on board. “Freedom under the rule of law is almost unknown outside nation-states,” writes the journalist and MEP Daniel Hannan in a succinct analysis of why the Arab Spring failed. “Constitutional liberty requires a measure of patriotism, meaning a readiness to accept your countrymen’s disagreeable decisions, to abide by election results when you lose.”

Even this level of commitment may not be enough, but without it only force can hold the state together. The escape of Morning Glory, the ousting of Ali Zeidan and the triumph of the militias all go to show that the Libyan state has so far neither the popular support nor military power to preserve itself.

________________________________

Patrick Cockburn has been a Middle East correspondent since 1979, first for the Financial Times, then for the Independent. Foreign Commentator of the Year (Editorial Intelligence Comment Awards 2013).

Go to Original – independent.co.uk

[Naakow Grant-Hayford]

Dear friends, I understand that you may have some trouble understanding the use-ability and purpose of the concept of faultlines.

 

Please do not hesitate to ask me about it. Particularly as it pertains to the study of Africa. A landmass with over a billion humans on it.

Dear Katrin, dear Ines, do you mind translating the following into english for your fellow participants? I wrote this in response to a question about faultlines by an intern of the G-I some time ago. It helped him   understand the concept a little better. I believe it might come in handy.

Faultlines Begreifen

 

Dialektik hat nach unserem dafürhalten über dieses von Dir erwähnte hegelianische linear-chronologisch-teleologishe Verständnis von Dialektik hinaus, eine innere Triebfeder, eine innere Dynamik, die eher synchronischen bzw. simultanen und eher zirkulären Prozessen unterliegt. Also nicht immer kommt erst eine These. Dann eine Antithese. Dann eine Synthese. Sodass man das alles sauber beobachten kann. Wie bei einer Kausalität. Erst Ursache. Dann Wirkung. etc. Oft sind gesellschaftliche  Ereignisse Wechselwirkungen unterlegen und interdependent und man verliert die Spur, auf Grund der kompbinatorischen vielfalt der Relationen. So ist es jedenfalls wenn wir von gesellschaftlichen Systemen sprechen.

Deshalb auch unser Kernbegriff der ”Contradictions” als Triebfeder von gesellschaftlicher Dialektik. Widersprüche. Damit sind nicht etwa antithetische Widersprüche gemeint, die sich simpel aufheben oder ausschalten, sondern wechselwirkende Bewegungen von Actio-Reactio. Force and Counterforce. Die auch von Parsons erörterte Zielverfolgung von Akteuren führt zur Ziel Anpassung anderer Akteure im sozialen System. Diese Anpassung kann, und das ist unser Interesse aus Friedens- und Konfliktforschungssicht, gewaltsam oder eben konzilliant-konstruktiv verlaufen.

Johan Galtung’s point has always been this: Kann man diesen dynamischen Actio-Reactio Motor sozialer Systeme beobachten und einer wissenschaftlichen Betrachtung und Kommentierung zugänglich machen UM GEWALTAUSBRÜCHE VORHERZUSEHEN UND ZU VERHINDERN bzw. UM KONSEQUENT KONZILLIANT-KONSTRUKTIVE ENTWICKLUNGEN ZU ERKENNEN UM DIESE ZU FÖRDERN ?

Im Zuge der Beantwortung dieser Frage nimmt Johan Galtung 8 ”Faultlines”  in Betracht, die die Homosphäre durchziehen, also einer jeden Gesellschaft inne wohnen. Er hat in dem mit Kees Van der Veer veröffentlichten Methodenbüchlein 13 solcher gesellschaftlichen Spannungsfelder aufgelistet

[ http://www.rozenbergps.com/images/omslagen/01400.gif  ]aber diese 8 reichen völlig. Ich nenne sie in Anlehnung an das allgemein für Belustigung sorgende Wort ”Sollbruchstelle” die ”kann-aber-muss-nicht-Bruchstellen” von Gesellschaften.

Die dort genannten Dimensionen sind die ”Kann-Aber-Muss-Nicht-Bruchstellen” von sozialen Systemen. DORT,wenn auch nicht ausschließlich, wie bei den tektonischen Faultlines der Geologie, sind die Actio-Reactio Dynamiken sozialer Systeme verortet, die, je nachdem wie widersprüchlich sie sich artikulieren, zu den destruktiven Erschütterungen führen, die wir in unseren Fernsehern und Zeitungen als Formen kollektiv organisierter Gewalt zu sehen bekommen.

Did I make sense to you? I’d be happy if I did. This is more or less the heart of our work.

Vielen Dank nochmal für eine möglichst schnelle Übersetzung für eure Kollegen,

thank you, Naakow

 

[Naakow Grant-Hayford]

Dear ACT-participants,

 

allow me to share these reflections on „Pondering Africa’s futureS“ before our common session tomorrow.

 

I am open for a dialogue on the substances elaborated herein during the entire week.

I hope you enjoy the writeup below.

 

Africa – Searching for Futures

 

There is no such thing as “the” future of Africa. One could indeed posit, as has been done before, that politically and sociologically Africa exists but in name only. But what is in a word and why harp on this detail? As in the case of “the Americas”, derived from the name of Amerigo Vespucci, an Italian navigator, the word Africa itself, is said to be derived from the Latin negation of the word for “cold”: a-frigus. This does sound plausible and wouldn’t be too much of a misnomer. But of course, there are other etymological explanations – tracing the origin of the word back to pharaonic times. Here is not the place to settle this open dispute. It is simply important to point out this potentially European origin of the denomination from the start, because if indeed true, it simply evidences once again how omnipresent the influence of European memes remain for matters as fundamental as „identity“ and the „perception of self“ when it comes to the “discovered” peoples of this planet.

 

There is an explanatory motive behind the negations with which this essay opens. Surely, there is a continental landmass we designate by the word “Africa”. However this term continues to convey the idea of an empirical uniformity or homogeneity which simply does not do justice to the idiomatic and sociological diversity observable on that very landmass. Depending on how precisely one decides to look at social reality on the continent, between 800 or 2000 distinct ascriptive identity groups with particular definitions and sentiments on that which is sacred, moral, ethical, aesthetic or valid populate and interact in 54 states, often across the arbitrary borders of this second largest of the continents. With a population that crossed the billion mark in 2009[1], the stupefying distinctiveness of these various nations and the cultural expressions and idioms by which they live, should in principle forbid any attempt to homogenize, unitize or generalize. When we speak of “futures” in plural, this is simply paying attention to the manifold contemporary trans-border social patterns of interaction between these ethno-linguistic groups. This very diversity has strong bearings on the dynamics of the contradictions along the existential faultlines that criss-cross the socio-sphere in Africa – as elsewhere. This very diversity may mean that there is a huge reservoir of contradiction-transformation-literacy to be mapped. There is a lot to be learned from African populations.

 

Politically, at best, one could attest to a nominal “Africa” as seen in the administrative institutions and bodies of the utterly symbolic African Union[2]. But if one considers the mainstream thrust of western political analysis – which posits the state and its preponderance over societal and economic viability – clearly, indicators of dysfunction and informality dominate academic literature on Africa regarding its future prospects. From this vantage point, all too often, the conclusion is that politics on the continent are a greedy and disorderly mess with the states on the continent involved in massive category killing of their own population or a political cacophony at best. Wole Soyinka once expressed, in what he called a “pure theoretical gambit”, that notwithstanding the consensus upheld by decision makers at the macro level – namely, that they would never question the borders inherited from colonialism – we may very well witness major transformations of the macro political landscape in the near future with state-borders in Africa shifting and changing to adjust more and better to the social realities on the ground.[3] At this point the exo-genesis of African statehood – Berlin 1885 – holds some explanatory value for such an outlook. Statehood was arbitrarily imposed over some 200 regions of varying size which have remained intact to this day and continue to bridge the frontiers of the present states.[4] This is one major narrative on what we may come to witness in one of Africa’s many potential futures.

 

Furthermore, this diversity should not be neglected particularly because it has extensive implications for the work of conflict transformation specialists. Where ever we find such an abundance of goal seeking systems and worldviews, societal contradictions will invariably abound and where contradictions abound, we are quite sure to find meaningful reflexive peace cultures to learn from, in order to expand our existing conflict-resolution repertoire. This again entails a dedicated examination of the idioms and immanent cultures of the continent. From the perspective of a peace scholar the prospect of studying the epistemic tenements of the various patterns of intelligibility employed by Africans, is quite exciting. If Africa is often perceived as the continent of violent outbreaks and misery, overcoming the underlying contradictions these emerge from, will require serious knowledge and understanding of the various articulations of Deep Culture extant in Africa.

 

Culturally, Europe has been investing much energy in continuously re-inventing itself on the basis of an existential reverence to an ancient Hellenistic common denominator and remains beholden to the Christian roots of Scholasticism notwithstanding its expansionist secularism. In short, there is a common cultural denominator in Europe… however complex. If we listen to mainstream academia, in Africa there is none such common denominator linking the nations of the continent. However, a serious assessment of the works of scholars working along the lines of the late Cheikh Anta Diop and John Henrik Clarke might very well illustrate that evidence for a cultural continuum spanning continental swaths of space and macro-historical periods of time, has been put into the public sphere for academic, political and philosophical perusal a long time ago. It just hasn’t been picked up yet. Any serious concern with a constructive future for the people on the continent will have to reactivate and explore this tradition of conscientization[5] initiated by the likes of Dubois and Nkrumah further. Knowing your future requires you to connect to your past.

 

But how far back does one travel into the past to find the necessary and sufficient causes for the status quo? Ambrose Bierce’s cynical aphorism on “the past” hits the nail on the head when he defines the past as

 

“that part of Eternity with some small fraction of which we have a slight and regrettable acquaintance. A moving line called the Present parts it from an imaginary period known as the Future. These two grand divisions of Eternity, of which the one is continually effacing the other, are entirely unlike. The one is dark with sorrow and disappointment, the other bright with prosperity and joy. The Past is the region of sobs, the Future is the realm of song. In the one crouches Memory, clad in sackcloth and ashes, mumbling penitential prayer; in the sunshine of the other Hope flies with a free wing, beckoning to temples of success and bowers of ease. Yet the Past is the Future of yesterday, the Future is the Past of to-morrow. They are one—the knowledge and the dream.“

 

Historically, the people of the continent have – their own faultlines and violent interactions put aside – been subjected to various forms of sociocidal foreign invasions and have had their fair share of exogenous darkness, sorrow and sobbing. Initially mainly by islamic raids which sapped Africa’s population and social strength for generations through the trans-saharan trade, creating an east-west structure of intercontinental proportions long before Christians began their transatlantic version of the international trade in the human commodity which in turn imposed a north-south pattern of vertical interaction on the continent which perdures until this very day.[6]

 

This line of thought quickly leads us from the analytical question of causation of the status quo to the moralist approach, more inclined to asking: who is to foot the bill? Who is at fault? Who is responsible and who is to blame? TRANSCEND’s conflict transformation approach on the other hand, would ask the question how this status quo can be explained and how the harm and the insults to basic human needs necessarily implied by it, may be reduced, halted and reversed into positive peace and a sustainable satisfaction of the somatic and psychological basic needs of the afflicted. A look into the past then becomes an investigative and explanatory effort aimed at empowering the researcher to formulate constructive solutions ad “basic needs”. So much to that part of the past “with which we have had a slight and regrettable acquaintance.”

 

Our point is to overcome Bierce’s “regrettable acquaintance” by modelling the future consciously with constructive proposals, appropriate to the creation and guarantee of physical reproduction, political freedom, cultural identity and economic wellbeing for the people of Africa. A frequent explanation given for “maturity” is found in the formula “when one is able to take responsibility for one’s own future”. The question then becomes an endogenous one: should the bill then rather be put to the political, military, cultural and economic elites of Africa who inherited the political responsibility for their constituents after the dehumanizing exploitation at the hands of Christian monarchies & western democracies came to its nominal end in the 60ies of the past century?

 

Or should the bill be put to the populations themselves, which continue not to make use of their unalienable right to depose and transform their governance systems in their pursuit of happiness, fulfilment and basic needs? Is it the sycophantic and self-serving elites, or is it an irresponsible population, not quite aware of its own existential interests? Isn’t the question of the futures of Africa the question of whether or not the populations will at some point become self-reliant and articulate enough to effectively demand from their representatives to be more responsive towards their explicit needs? These are the core questions which will drive Africans towards futures they desire. In closing, we ask: what are the futures the many Africans see for themselves? What does the Africa they imagine for themselves look like? What are the ways in which the peoples of Africa are currently taking responsibility for their own futures? What are the ways in which such responsibility can be taken to start with?  A key principle for solution oriented conflict transformation, as taught by TRANSCEND International, is the point that it is the strength of a constructive project situated in a positive future, that pulls the actor out of the miserabilism of frustration and manifest conflict.

 

Find below a heuristic scheme for a sociological inquiry on the subjects discussed above.

Conceptualizing Africa’s Futures

Social Spheres	Influencing Variables	Past	Present	FutureS
Economic[1]	Endogenous	– –	– –	– –
	Exogenous	– –	– –	– –
Political	endogenous	– –	– –	– –
	exogenous	– –	– –	– –
Military	endogenous	– –	– –	– –
	exogenous	– –	– –	– –
Culture	endogenous	– –	– –	– –
	exogenous	– –	– –	– –

 

 

 

Appendix: How to write about Africa by Binyavanga Wainaina

Always use the word ‘Africa’ or ‘Darkness’ or ‘Safari’ in your title. Subtitles may include the words ‘Zanzibar’, ‘Masai’, ‘Zulu’, ‘Zambezi’, ‘Congo’, ‘Nile’, ‘Big’, ‘Sky’, ‘Shadow’, ‘Drum’, ‘Sun’ or ‘Bygone’. Also useful are words such as ‘Guerrillas’, ‘Timeless’, ‘Primordial’ and ‘Tribal’. Note that ‘People’ means Africans who are not black, while ‘The People’ means black Africans.

 

Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or in it, unless that African has won the Nobel Prize. An AK-47, prominent ribs, naked breasts: use these. If you must include an African, make sure you get one in Masai or Zulu or Dogon dress.

In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates. Don’t get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: fifty-four countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book. The continent is full of deserts, jungles, highlands, savannahs and many other things, but your reader doesn’t care about all that, so keep your descriptions romantic and evocative and unparticular.

Make sure you show how Africans have music and rhythm deep in their souls, and eat things no other humans eat. Do not mention rice and beef and wheat; monkey-brain is an African’s cuisine of choice, along with goat, snake, worms and grubs and all manner of game meat. Make sure you show that you are able to eat such food without flinching, and describe how you learn to enjoy it—because you care.

Taboo subjects: ordinary domestic scenes, love between Africans (unless a death is involved), references to African writers or intellectuals, mention of school-going children who are not suffering from yaws or Ebola fever or female genital mutilation.

Throughout the book, adopt a sotto voice, in conspiracy with the reader, and a sad I-expected-so-much tone. Establish early on that your liberalism is impeccable, and mention near the beginning how much you love Africa, how you fell in love with the place and can’t live without her. Africa is the only continent you can love—take advantage of this. If you are a man, thrust yourself into her warm virgin forests. If you are a woman, treat Africa as a man who wears a bush jacket and disappears off into the sunset. Africa is to be pitied, worshipped or dominated. Whichever angle you take, be sure to leave the strong impression that without your intervention and your important book, Africa is doomed.

Your African characters may include naked warriors, loyal servants, diviners and seers, ancient wise men living in hermitic splendour. Or corrupt politicians, inept polygamous travel-guides, and prostitutes you have slept with. The Loyal Servant always behaves like a seven-year-old and needs a firm hand; he is scared of snakes, good with children, and always involving you in his complex domestic dramas. The Ancient Wise Man always comes from a noble tribe (not the money-grubbing tribes like the Gikuyu, the Igbo or the Shona). He has rheumy eyes and is close to the Earth. The Modern African is a fat man who steals and works in the visa office, refusing to give work permits to qualified Westerners who really care about Africa. He is an enemy of development, always using his government job to make it difficult for pragmatic and good-hearted expats to set up NGOs or Legal Conservation Areas. Or he is an Oxford-educated intellectual turned serial-killing politician in a Savile Row suit. He is a cannibal who likes Cristal champagne, and his mother is a rich witch-doctor who really runs the country.

Among your characters you must always include The Starving African, who wanders the refugee camp nearly naked, and waits for the benevolence of the West. Her children have flies on their eyelids and pot bellies, and her breasts are flat and empty. She must look utterly helpless. She can have no past, no history; such diversions ruin the dramatic moment. Moans are good. She must never say anything about herself in the dialogue except to speak of her (unspeakable) suffering. Also be sure to include a warm and motherly woman who has a rolling laugh and who is concerned for your well-being. Just call her Mama. Her children are all delinquent. These characters should buzz around your main hero, making him look good. Your hero can teach them, bathe them, feed them; he carries lots of babies and has seen Death. Your hero is you (if reportage), or a beautiful, tragic international celebrity/aristocrat who now cares for animals (if fiction).

Bad Western characters may include children of Tory cabinet ministers, Afrikaners, employees of the World Bank. When talking about exploitation by foreigners mention the Chinese and Indian traders. Blame the West for Africa’s situation. But do not be too specific.

Broad brushstrokes throughout are good. Avoid having the African characters laugh, or struggle to educate their kids, or just make do in mundane circumstances. Have them illuminate something about Europe or America in Africa. African characters should be colourful, exotic, larger than life—but empty inside, with no dialogue, no conflicts or resolutions in their stories, no depth or quirks to confuse the cause.

Describe, in detail, naked breasts (young, old, conservative, recently raped, big, small) or mutilated genitals, or enhanced genitals. Or any kind of genitals. And dead bodies. Or, better, naked dead bodies. And especially rotting naked dead bodies. Remember, any work you submit in which people look filthy and miserable will be referred to as the ‘real Africa’, and you want that on your dust jacket. Do not feel queasy about this: you are trying to help them to get aid from the West. The biggest taboo in writing about Africa is to describe or show dead or suffering white people.

Animals, on the other hand, must be treated as well rounded, complex characters. They speak (or grunt while tossing their manes proudly) and have names, ambitions and desires. They also have family values: see how lions teach their children? Elephants are caring, and are good feminists or dignified patriarchs. So are gorillas. Never, ever say anything negative about an elephant or a gorilla. Elephants may attack people’s property, destroy their crops, and even kill them. Always take the side of the elephant. Big cats have public-school accents. Hyenas are fair game and have vaguely Middle Eastern accents. Any short Africans who live in the jungle or desert may be portrayed with good humour (unless they are in conflict with an elephant or chimpanzee or gorilla, in which case they are pure evil).

After celebrity activists and aid workers, conservationists are Africa’s most important people. Do not offend them. You need them to invite you to their 30,000-acre game ranch or ‘conservation area’, and this is the only way you will get to interview the celebrity activist. Often a book cover with a heroic-looking conservationist on it works magic for sales. Anybody white, tanned and wearing khaki who once had a pet antelope or a farm is a conservationist, one who is preserving Africa’s rich heritage. When interviewing him or her, do not ask how much funding they have; do not ask how much money they make off their game. Never ask how much they pay their employees.

Readers will be put off if you don’t mention the light in Africa. And sunsets, the African sunset is a must. It is always big and red. There is always a big sky. Wide empty spaces and game are critical—Africa is the Land of Wide Empty Spaces. When writing about the plight of flora and fauna, make sure you mention that Africa is overpopulated. When your main character is in a desert or jungle living with indigenous peoples (anybody short) it is okay to mention that Africa has been severely depopulated by Aids and War (use caps).

You’ll also need a nightclub called Tropicana, where mercenaries, evil nouveau riche Africans and prostitutes and guerrillas and expats hang out.

Always end your book with Nelson Mandela saying something about rainbows or renaissances. Because you care. ■

 

 

---

[1] Chang, Ha-Joon: http://camara.ie/web/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/Kicking-away-the-ladder.pdfbbbbbbbb

---

[1]Africa: Continent’s populatin reaches 1 billion:  http://allafrica.com/stories/200908200660.html

[2]Former President Mbeki declares the AU a failiure:  http://www.bdlive.co.za/opinion/2012/09/27/is-mbeki-correct-to-declare-the-au-a-failure

[3] A conversation with Wole Soyinka:  http://www.unischaft.gmxhome.de/archiv/0105/19.pdf

[4] Amin, Samir: Underdevelopment and Dependence in Black Africa: Historical Origin http://www.chabotcollege.edu/faculty/kwaldo/Common%20Resources/Readings%20on%20Colonialism/Amin_African%20colonization.pdf

[5] Anyanwu, Christian: The African and Conscientization: A Critical Approach to African Social and Political Thought with Particular Reference to Nigeria, AuthorHouse 2012.

[6] Elizabeth Savage: The Human Commodity: Perspectives on the Trans-Saharan Slave Trade, London: Frank Cass 1992

[Naakow Grant-Hayford]

Dear Aura,

 

thank you very much for your inquiry.  I will answer in brief delay. But I must say that these two maps for me simply represent two separate attempts to depict the spatial reality of the african continent. „Africans“ populate a continent so large, that China, the USA, The EU and India fit in without any problems. With this visual illustration of SPACE and SURFACE of Africa at the back of our minds, the very common and ridiculous notion of Africa as a country becomes even more ludicrous.

 

I will add more maps, thank you dear Aura for this inquiry.

[Naakow Grant-Hayford]

Thank you for uploading this list 🙂

[Naakow Grant-Hayford]

Dear Aura,

 

thank you so much for uploading this for us.

I didn’t get around to thanking you before today!

 

Muchas Gracias!!!!

[Naakow Grant-Hayford]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnOoNM0U6oc

 

„Ohio“

Tin soldiers and Nixon coming,
We’re finally on our own.
This summer I hear the drumming,
Four dead in Ohio.

Gotta get down to it
Soldiers are cutting us down
Should have been done long ago.
What if you knew her
And found her dead on the ground
How can you run when you know?

Gotta get down to it
Soldiers are cutting us down
Should have been done long ago.
What if you knew her
And found her dead on the ground
How can you run when you know?

Tin soldiers and Nixon coming,
We’re finally on our own.
This summer I hear the drumming,
Four dead in Ohio.

[Naakow Grant-Hayford]

1. My Personal Favourite: CONVERSATIONS WITH HISTORY
2. US-American ergo Global Politics: http://www.c-spanvideo.org/videoLibrary/

1. (example: http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/292918-1 )

[Naakow Grant-Hayford]

Now let’s get to the habitual ways of looking at africa with Murdock at the back of our minds and see what hypotheses this may help generate on why the societal forms of interaction occuring on the continent are occuring just the way they are.

 

ENVIRONMENT and Survival Basic Need):

 

 

ENVIRONMENT II: ENVIRONMENT AND CONFLICT EVENTS (http://bit.ly/OVyvT1)

 

 

ECONOMIC: (http://bit.ly/QGdHlM)

 

 

[Naakow Grant-Hayford]

http://www.myvideo.de/watch/6847192/Jamiroquai_Too_Young_To_Die

 

Too young to die Jamiroquoai

 

Everybody
Don’t want no war,
‚Cos we’re too young to die,
So many people,
All around the world,
Seen their brothers fry.
What’s the motive?
In your madness.
You’ve made my people cry.
So politicians this time
Keep your distance.
‚Cos we’re too young to die.
You know we’re too young to die,
You know we’re too young to die,
You know we’re too young to die,
You know we’re too young to die,

What’s the answer?
To our problems.
I think we’ve gone too high,
Little children,
Never said a word now,
But still they have to die.
It won’t be long.
Dancing like we do now,
To put this sad world right.
So don’t you worry,
Suffer no more,
‚Cos we’re too young to die.
You know we’re too young to die,
You know we’re too young to die,
You know we’re too young to die,
You know we’re too young to die,

All gone when they drop the bomb.
Can the politicians reassure?
‚Cos here I am presuming that
Nobody wants a war
There’s so many people praying
Just to find out if they’re staying.
But lately stately governments
And disillusioned leaders,
So full of empty promises
But rarely do they feed us.
Put our backs against the wall,
Or don’t we count at all?

Can you decide,
Are you mesmerised.
Do you know which side you’re standing?
Cos when it falls gonna take us all.
Gotta know what we’re demanding,
I never lie,
Can’t your hear the cry,
Coming from on high,
WE’RE TOO YOUNG TO DIE.

 

[Naakow Grant-Hayford]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvBC7tmgFFM

 

 

Sankara – the upright man aka don’t you ever mess with the WEST

[Autor]

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