These are poor coffee farmers, mostly. Once the coffee trees are destroyed and the land is fumigated & poisoned, it's poisoned forever. Not only are lives destroyed and crops, but biodiversity is also destroyed, and rather crucially, the tradition of peasant agriculture is destroyed.
The fumigation is officially justified as a "war on drugs." This is hard to take seriously except as a cover for a counterinsurgency program, and another stage in the long history of driving peasants off the land for the benefit of wealthy elites and resource extraction by foreign investors.
The consequence is that if this area ever goes back to agriculture, it will be monoculture for agro-export with laboratory-produced seeds, bought from Monsanto. There's no real other alternative.
The effect of the Cuban embargo, the standard line here, which was repeated by former President Carter a couple of weeks ago, is that the embargo helps Castro and, of course, doesn't harm the Cubans. The only people who are harmed by it are the North Americans like farmers and agro-business who want to export there, but it has no effect on Cuba except to help Castro.
A detailed study in March 1997 concluded that the embargo had dramatically harmed health and nutrition in Cuba, and caused a significant rise in suffering and death. It would have been a humanitarian catastrophe, they said, which is quite astonishing, though it did direct resources in the health system away from other needs, with the obvious consequences.
That effort was stopped by the embargo. It blocked half a billion dollars' worth of aid that was coming from the IADB and other sources, and it terminated the projects and, of course, exacerbated the already horrendous conditions. The only help they're getting is from Cuba.
Haiti, incidentally, is paying interest on the loans that are blocked and that it isn't receiving, just to add to the catastrophe. So that's the 2nd embargo. This is also being imposed because of our love of democracy, as Powell and others have explained
The second reason is, of course, that we're here. We happen to have an unusual degree of freedom in the US, and, for most of us, privilege. That confers enormous responsibility for our own actions, and for our influence on policy. Even if it were not the case that this is by far the most powerful country in the world, that responsibility would or should be of primary concern to us.
A: A horrible atrocity. But I reacted pretty much the way people did around the world. A terrible atrocity, but unless you're in Europe or the US or Japan, I guess, you know it's nothing new. That's the way the imperial powers have treated the rest of the world for hundreds of years. This is a historic event, but unfortunately not because of the scale or the nature of the atrocity but because of who the victims were. If you look through hundreds of years of history, the imperial countries have been basically immune. There are plenty of atrocities, but they're somewhere else. And that's gone on for hundreds of years.
A: It is.
Q: For Japanese who have experienced the atomic bomb in Nagasaki and Hiroshima, hearing the words "Ground Zero" leads to very complicated feelings. I wondered if you have any thoughts about that.
A: The interesting thing is that here, almost nobody thinks of it. Check around. I mean, I've never seen a comment in the press or the massive commentary on this that points that out. It's just not in people's consciousness.
Q: But that word.
A: That's where it comes from. Absolutely. No questions about it. It struck me right away.
Q: That's why it resonates with people.
A: I understand. But it doesn't mean that here, because here, it's the same story as before. The atrocities you commit somewhere else don't exist.
A: Things began to heat up again in the early 1960s. By the time the beginnings of the Vietnam War were coming along, it was just impossible not to become involved.
Q: And during those early years, what was the response to the work that you were doing?
A: Mostly it was total incomprehension. Through the early 1960s, you couldn't get anybody to sign a petition. By 1965 or 1966, Vietnam was becoming a big issue. But protests were met with extreme hostility. Take Boston, right here. This is a pretty liberal city, but we couldn't have public protests against the war. They would be violently broken up. The speakers would be saved from being murdered only by hundreds of state police. And the attack on the protesters would be praised in the liberal media. It was considered right. It wasn't until late 1966 that there was enough of a change for you to see substantial public opposition.
Then for the next 26 years it was good. The Shah compiled one of the worst human rights records in the world. President Carter particularly admired the Shah. Just a couple of months before he was overthrown, he said how impressed he was by the Shah's "progressive administration," and so on.
In 1979, Iran became evil again. They pulled out of the imperial system. And since then they have been evil. They haven't been following orders.
There is a reason for that. If there is any element of democracy in the new regime, the population will have some voice in what is happening. That is what the democracy is. But the problem is that the majority of the population is Shiite, which means that to the extent that the majority of the population has any voice, it is going to move toward relations with Iran, which is the last thing the US government wants. Furthermore, the Kurds in the northern part of Iraq, who are another big part of the population, are on a quest for some kind of autonomy, and Turkey will go berserk if that happens, as will the US.
|
The above quotations are from Power and Terror Post-9/11 Talks and Interviews by Noam Chomsky. Click here for other excerpts from Power and Terror Post-9/11 Talks and Interviews by Noam Chomsky. Click here for other excerpts by Noam Chomsky. Click here for a profile of Noam Chomsky.
Please consider a donation to OnTheIssues.org!
| Click for details -- or send donations to: 1770 Mass Ave. #630, Cambridge MA 02140 E-mail: submit@OnTheIssues.org (We rely on your support!) |