On Friday June 24, 2011 at 7pm, I attended an event at a Church in Washington, DC. The focus of the event was regarding Cynthia McKinney, former congress member and presidential candidate for the Green Party in 2004 and 2008, and her support team of experts, who recently went to Tripoli, Libya to gather first-hand evidence on the current crisis that has only escalated with US and NATO’s involvement.
Her team recorded and witnessed that what the mainstream media and US Government has been depicting to the public is just not true. Once again the US Government is lying to the American people and the world.
The meeting at a small church in DC had an audience consisting primarily of black middle to low-income Americans. However, diversity of the group was present with other ethnic groups present in small numbers. The first portion of the event was highly motivating and informative with several speakers before McKinney. These voices were passionate and open to criticizing the tactics that President Obama has been reflecting. Rather than being the President of Hope and Change, he had disappointed the entire room by following the footsteps of Colin Powel and Condalisa Rice, and by being more loyal to corporate elite oil interest than to preserving human dignity.
Obama has followed the George Bush path of lying to the American people about a war in yet another Muslim country that is a strategic oil producing nation, and his strategic bombing of Tripoli has in deed destroyed a university and has killed innocent civilians. Even more frustrating to the audience was that Obama has been an African-American President bombing an African Nation.
The Eyewitness Team has noted that the Rebel groups in Libya have also not been well truly captured in mainstream media. The half-truths have hidden that in fact the rebels are quite racist and have, without hiding it, targeted innocent black Libyan’s with murder, rape, and intimidation to the point of mass departures and fear.
Why Libya? Why not Sudan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia or the Ivory Coast? I am all for justice and supporting human rights against dictators; but US military interest in Libya as in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Kuwait, has always proven to be about natural resources that corporations such as Exxon, Mobil, Haliburton, and many friends of George H. W. Bush. Libya has been an interest in capitalist gain for a considerable time because, as with Cuba, it has been independent and uninfluenced by the imperial interests of the US, UK, or France even during the Colonial era.
The most impressive speaker of the Eyewitness presentation gave the audience a better understanding of Libya’s history alongside the history of its fellow neighbors in Uganda, Kenya, and Egypt. While the British had strategically chose the leaders to follow independence in Kenya and Uganda for business interests that would be obedient to the Common Wealth, they stifled democracy seeking patriots of the Mau Mau revolution in Kenya, who had consisted of many former Africans forced to fight for the British in World War II; leaving a trail of blood and open scars. In Uganda, the British did not want the socialist leaning freedom fighters to succeed, so they aligned power with a man notoriously known as Idi Amin. In Egypt, the resistance to British imperialism was Nasser who empowered his people with independence; but when he did fall from power, the US had well worked the leadership of Egypt with Sadat and then Mubarak. Gadaffi was inspired by Nasser, and ever since Nasser’s fall, he has been a pariah since, because Libya had been so independent and unable to break. Throughout the 1970’s and 1980’s, first as the head of the CIA and then as vice-president, George H W Bush had oil interest in finding ways to chisel at the regime in hopes of change for corporate benefit.
When Cynthia McKinney spoke she was straight-forward about her interest in going to the ground level and making sure what the US Government and mainstream media was saying to the American public was truthful. But it was not. Now if one goes back the Bush-Cheney-terms in office, as a Congress-woman, McKinney was one of the very few elected officials to pursue impeachment measures and, as well, during Donald Rumsfeld’s hearing, she was the only one asking questions that he evaded to answer on Weapons of Mass Destruction.
As the night carried on, after my energies and overall feeling of solidarity with the audience felt good, the event took a nosedive. Rather than an informative meeting, the event turned the stage over to a local preacher who began to push the audience to donate money. The audience began to fracture from unity. The continuous drive to seek donations from a mostly economically struggling demographic seemed disheartening.
When I spoke up about the movement being more than just about fund-raising, I was silenced. What I had wanted to say was that I believe the way out of our current frustration with the military corporate governance needs to lean towards social togetherness and resistance, and not seeking to break capital with capital. But don’t take my word for it, Grace Lee Boggs in her recent interview with Tavis Smiley and Cornel West, iterates that before we can have a political and social revolution, we have to have a personal revolution, where the way we think about change is beyond economic interests.
Martin Luther King Jr., Cesar Chavez, and Gandhi made their bold changes to society by not pushing the profit margin. They gathered the hearts and minds of the people and with their leadership made enough voice to change the acceptable standards. If we choose to fight the economic robber-barons through economic means, they will always win because money is all they know how to use as a tool to suppress the masses, and they know it well.
By the end of the night, I was so turned-off by the final show of the Eyewitness Event, that I walked away disappointed and yet empowered to write more. We cannot make significant change in society if we play by the market system's imbalances. Information sessions should not be tools for political agendas when the higher value of social needs is beyond politics. That is why, while walking away from the event, I realized why I truly loved Ralph Nader, and always chose him rather than the Green Party.
Ralph Nader has always remained a strong idealist, true to his cause and never wavering. His speech at my college in 2001 is still significant in my mind, because he urges us to “Raise our Expectations”, don’t settle for a political party system that only supplies you with the illusion of democracy, but push for and reach for a true democracy that holds corporations, individuals, and elected representatives accountable for their actions.
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