In 1957, Martin Luther King Jr. was invited to Accra, Ghana for the independence ceremony of the first British colony in Sub-Saharan Africa granted freedom from its oppressor. Kwame Nkrumah was the first president of the new nation. He sought a policy of Positive Action, where he attempted to free his nation from neocolonialism of corporate interests. Nkrumah’s goal was to overcome post-World War II rhetoric of the Cold War, where in factual reality colonialism was merely altering its face to re-absorb the interest of new nations who were on alternative paths for self-development.
When MLK was at the celebration in Accra, he went up to, at the time, Vice-President Richard Nixon there on democratic promotion of the independent state. King mentioned to Nixon that he should “come to Alabama” if he is in Accra, so that he could promote the same freedoms he came to cheer on in Africa: dignity of human life. When MLK spoke to Nkrumah, he was inspired and told him that Ghana’s freedom “gives impetus to oppressed people all over the world.”
In 1966, President Nkrumah was ousted in a military coup backed by the CIA. As similar to Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973 in Chile, because Nkrumah chose to lead a different policy of development for his people, and which was not conducive to the neocolonial and capitalist interests, who eventually found ways to strip him of power.
One of Kwame Nkrumah’s American friends for several decades happened to be Grace Lee Boggs. They had first met in 1948, when he was on visit to the US.
Grace Lee Boggs in her newest book, The Next American Revolution, critiques the value of healthy education, not the education of machines that the No Child Left Behind has dehumanized the education process with, but the educational emphasis in Paulo Friere’s oeuvre. She reflects, “I find myself recalling his insights, for example, people ‘cannot enter the struggle as objects in order to later become human beings’ or ‘the future isn’t something hidden in a corner. The future is something we build in the present’” (Boggs).
By being dehumanized objects in a classroom preparing for a standardized test, we have turned our children into undistinguished masses, we cannot ask our children to change the world if we are following education policies that do not allow our children to think, but to merely stare blindly yet ready for a test.
Michael Parenti discusses in his book with the same title the idea of Contrary Notions the media’s limited parameters to not venture beyond permissible opinions. Judith Butler comes to the same conclusion in her criticism of how acceptable public discourse have been regulated, even Noam Chomsky has focused on the importance of differing between consent and manufactured consent.
For the past ten years the government, media and mass public acceptance of discourse consciously or unconsciously embracing in communication raises important questions for public intellectuals like Boggs, Parenti, and Butler. Thinking critically about 9/11 is a significant example of how questioning reactions and making responsible queries is vital to being an individual.
Back to history lessons, how can we direct our building of the future without addressing our past? While we can criticize presidents, the masses cannot mobilize past directing the arguments to facial images. We are rarely allowed to criticize the system, which we live in without being shunned for conspiracy, madness, or unpatriotic, merely because we ask hard questions and want high standards, rather than actions of which Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld claim are the only roads to take.
When yesterday commenced the 10 year memorial ceremony of 9/11, it was hard for me to not debate the issues. I heard others online, in media, and in person state that “now was not the time to discuss politics, but a time to remember those who died.” However, I cannot separate the event from the actions my government followed after the event and leading up to the event. I still have to ask hard questions.
One of my friend’s mentioned, “Rest in Peace the 2,976 American people that lost their lives on 9/11 and R.I.P. the 48,644 Afghan, 60,000 Pakistani and 1,690,903 Iraqi people that paid the ultimate price for a crime they did not commit.”
In an interview, September 11, 2011, CNN's Fareed Zakaria talked with Donald Rumsfeld. As in interviews with Dick Cheney the previous week, Rumsfeld put his foot in his mouth, as he double-folds that the act of fighting for freedom comes at the expense of freedom foreign and domestic. He failed to give any remorse of guilt for sacrificing millions to maintain an illusion of acceptability.
Yet for anyone who asks hard questions, one can notice that though Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld, cared little to protect freedom when they had also conducted terrorist activities after 9/11, like other CIA activities in previous decades when these men or their father pushed behind Nixon, Ford, and Reagan: in 2002 the CIA pushed a failed coup against the democratically elected Venezuela President Hugo Chavez, and the CIA supported another coup in 2004 of the democratically elected Haitian president Aristide. Not to mention that, the very government outsourced torture to Mubarak's Egypt and according to a new Wikileak document, to Gaddafi's Libya.
Such activities prove that the administration at the time cared little to change the tactics they followed before 9/11. 9/11 merely gave them a blank check and super-patriotic support to do everything they had hoped to accomplish during the first decade of the 21st Century.
During a time when we cannot rely on our government to uphold the ideals we claim to thrive on, we have to ask hard questions and hold injustice accountable, not just acts against us, but acts against innocent people globally. Education has to be more than a mere absorption of facts, but a way to overcome manufactured consent to activate our struggle, not as passive objects but as human beings willing to stand true to our ideals (Boggs). As Grace Lee’s husband, James Boggs, always promoted: “coming out of your mothers womb does not make you a human being” alone, one must gain a sense of humanity by engaging in protecting all life from injustice.
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