Tariq Ali: Rights and Needs

the same religion that's capable of hideous acts of destruction can also be capable of moments of healing and restoration and of hope but educate a girl and you educate her entire family there is a Sun within every person when that anger sets in write it write the letters but don't send them you never want to leave concrete proof of insanity it's my pleasure to welcome you here to our keynote speech for the human rights and neoliberalism universal standards local practices in the role of culture conference we'd like to thank Arts & Lectures for helping make today's talk possible we'd like to remind everyone that this is part of a conference that has another day we have a schedule in the back that will tell you about Saturday's sessions and I've been given two messages to convey one is that tariq Ali will be signing books for those of you who've brought them by the side of the stage at the end of the talk and that anybody who brought a cell phone should turn it off now so that does not disrupt the talk it's my great pleasure to introduce Tarek Ali a prolific author and activist and editor someone who has come to us with important things to say some 40 years ago almost exactly 40 years ago Martin Luther King jr. broke his silence on the Vietnam War knowing that many people in his own organization didn't want him to speak out knowing that the politicians the corporate media the funders didn't want him to speak out but he felt he was motivated by what dr. King called the fierce urgency of now the fierce urgency of now involved conduct unfit for humans the fierce urgency of now spoke to that part of us that must be connected to the fate the well-being of other humans on this earth Tara Kelly has written novels that span continents and countries that span centuries he's been a critical observer of world affairs polemicists a researcher but most of all someone who always as he will do today speaks to the fierce urgency of now so please welcome tarik Ali dear friends thank you very much for inviting me to give this lecture and I'm was extremely pleased when Carl wrote to me because of the subject of the conference which is taking place at this University at the same time and it was that that attracted me when he wrote several months ago to come and do the talk and not yet not the beautiful location as some people think why is this subject important were you not told to switch them off please do it now why is the subject important because this whole phrase human rights and the struggle for human rights and humanitarian interventions and military humanism have become part of the dominant talk just before the West goes to war and it's worth asking why now I don't think there's anyone in this audience certainly not me who is opposed to human rights as such how could we be as human beings but I think it is worth asking what use is made of this concept and why use is made of words in this fashion can sometimes debase the whole concept that's the important thing that has to be understood first a word a few words on language Human Rights is a slightly odd construct if you think about it it's got an anthropological change that every human has rights but the fact that you are human doesn't those rights on you rights historically of every sort have been traditionally in human history fought and won and they only become rights when they are given judicial standing in other words whatever the right that is being fought for whether it is the right to vote whether it is the right for gender equality whether it has the right for racial equality only becomes a right not because the person arguing for these rights is human because that's taken for granted but when these rights are given the strength of law and can be defended and that applies to virtually all the rights that have been historically won now it could be that the United Nations Charter of 1948 on human rights wanted to stress the universality of these rights and the importance that these rights were the privilege of everyone and that is fair enough but I think the point I've made as to distinguishing the emotive use of this phrase from what it can become if it is put into power after struggles have taken place which is always the case because without them no one ever guarantees rights no body on earth no institution guaranteed rights and the United Nations was responding to something that had happened during the Second World War when millions of people had died apart from the Judeo side which took the life of a particular ethnic minority the Jewish people of Western Europe and Eastern Europe between five and six million of whom died in addition to that thirty million Russians died millions of Western Europeans died and so the world was quite in quite a traumatic State in many Americans died who went to fight in that war so the world was in a slightly traumatic State and the founders of the United Nations or elements within them felt that the world deserved a charter but if you read that charter of the human of the United Nations a number of interesting things come up that Charter was called the first declaration of Havana by the way which is why when Fidel Castro famous speech after the Cuban Revolution took place it was called the second declaration of Havana and many assumed that since Fidel is a habit of talking a great deal he must have made another declaration at some time which wasn't so good and that was the first declaration but this isn't the case the first declaration of Havana was the charter of human rights Baum thereafter bit ferocious and heated debates and so that charter of human rights if you look at it doesn't simply defend the right of private property it defends that right but it also defends the right to maintain an own collective property because that's the world in which that charter was drafted and if you read all the clauses in it that charter defends the right to free education to a health system to shelter for all etc etc etc and it's that particular Charter should be taught because it's now seems totally alien in a world dominated by neoliberal ideology but from that point of view alone it's interesting to discuss how the world has moved on or regressed depending on what your point of view happens to be that many of the demands in the human rights charter are the demand are for social rights and these social rights are today impermissible impermissible because a whole set of institutions set up after the Cold War make sure that these social rights which were taken for granted by large numbers of people in the world are no longer the rights that you need that the basic right today is the right to remove all possible laws or barriers to deregulation to privatization to the making of profits including removing barriers which were taken for granted in the United States at the end of the 19th and for most of the 20th century I don't even talk now about the Europeans and the social democratic movements there so the turn we have taken in relation to rights is related to the world in which we live and it was assumed after the collapse of communism in the 1990s that now it was possible to do anything and I have always argued even in the 60s and 70s that one reason these social rights and pull it and with these social rights you also had political diversity within the media which is also a right by the way because unless you have political diversity in the mass media you cannot function democratically because you do not have the information to make up your mind so democracy itself becomes a hollowed out process and that is something which we have seen developing since the nineties onwards a hollowing out of the democratic process mainly in the Western world complete shortage now of space in the mainstream media for views which may not be even be hostile but which are different and so we have a whole new architecture of the neoliberal world in which human rights plays some part of human rights as they conceive it plays some part ideologically but this basic foundations of this world are economic and it is the untrammeled rule of capital proceeding to all parts of the globe which is the central priority and everything else including rights including needs are subordinated to that and that is why you have seen the dismantling all over the world by the way of the social safety nets that were in place after the Second World War the end of social democracy as we knew it in Western Europe the end of most of the New Deal legislation that was passed in the United States and this was dismantled not necessarily by the right but by the center left and the center right together at different times Clinton began the process here and the new democratic council did some of the Social Democrats are doing so in Europe even as we speak conservatism did its bit so you have as a result of this new neoliberal architecture an extremely narrow world and this narrow world where the elite of the business elite and the political elite and the media elite increasingly live in a bubble a bubble that they have created themselves and a bubble you're not allowed to pierce because they feel it can't be pierced and sometimes when things happen we all sit up and say go how did that happen you know how how how is it possible that a lone woman whose son died in Iraq sitting outside a presidential ranch in Texas suddenly got all this massive publicity globally and in the United States and became a heroine for many people and one reason that still happens is that and it happens also in Europe by the way is that they Bank on people having very short memories because unless this business is sustained it goes away and that's the confidence the rulers of this world have in their own ability to all just virtually see of all threats human rights in this context and military humanism as it was called but I don't think any longer all humanitarian interventions was part and parcel of this exercise whereas in the past in the preceding century in the fight against communism the whole Cold War period it was a fight for freedom and democracy those were the two words that were used and this was by and large accepted by the West we are fighting everywhere we fight for freedom and democracy but we can't fight for freedom and democracy in Latin America because we've put into place a whole set of military dictatorships to torture and kill and set up camps so we can't say we're fighting for freedom and democracy there but even there we are fighting for freedom and democracy in the long term because we have to put these measures into place so they defeat our main enemy and then we can see that's what how the argument was but in Europe and on a global scale it was the fight for freedom and democracy and this fight necessitated having a media which was more diverse than what existed in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union not a very difficult exercise and so particularly in the case of divided Germany you had a West German media which did publish all sorts of views at that time and television networks which are all sorts of documentaries including many that Walter critical of West Germany in the West and this had its impact can't be denied but with that particular challenge gone it is no longer necessary to maintain that level as far as the media is concerned and so we've had two processes the drying up of room for divergent views as I've said and at the same time and increasing corporatization of the media so that five large companies own the bulk of the world's media networks and sometimes when I say this people say yeah but you know they might own it but this does this on its own mean diversity and I say well look at it this way out of Rupert Murdoch's 230 editors globally is it purely coincidental that out of these editors only one oppose the war in Iraq and he had it's a small newspaper in Tasmania all the other murdoch newspapers backed the war in Iraq like their owner and proprietor did so the proprietors of these corporate media chains have also become extremely forceful when it comes to key and critical questions now the changes that took the freedom and democracy argument erupted imploded at the time of the Vietnam War because so many people all over the world especially in the United States of America felt that what was being done to Vietnam was completely at variance with the ideology involved and so you had an implosion you had giant anti-war movements you had a big big implosion inside the US Army with large numbers of GIS coming out and marching against a war which they could no longer fight and they could no longer defend and that was a total contradiction and collapse of the dominant ideology that was promoting that war and an ideology which those who were sent to fight for no longer could believe in and that had a major impact and it was the kid totally cut through the lock Cold War lines completely and it's very interesting just reflecting on that last century for a minute where many of today's events grew out of that that when there was an uprising in Czechoslovakia in the August of 1968 and the Czech socialists and communists said we want our social system we like it but we also want democracy the phrase popularized by the leader of that period Alexander Dubcek as socialism with a human face which became very popular and you had things happening in that country at the time which were unthinkable then and leave alone now that the media was taken over by the people who worked for it and I remember one television show that was so striking and which did so much to raise the political consciousness of that country in neighboring countries that the Russians got scared this was a show where all those who had been political prisoners since the Second World War confronted their jailers their waters and the people who had ordered the arrests and the entire country would watch this show now that degree of freedom if you like one had not noticed anywhere and the combination of increasing control of the media by the population because that's what it was you had big debates in the press far beyond anything in the Western press frightened the Russians because they said if this example spreads we are sunk and so they sent in the tanks to destroy an occupied Czechoslovakia some of you will remember but the interesting point I was going to make was that this particular occupation and crushing of a popular movement did not excite too much anger in the West if you compare it to other things of course criticisms were made but they were so mild that one wondered whether secretly they were quite pleased because the experiment threatened them as well and the NATO magazine which had a long article on Czechoslovakia only remarked on the speed with which Soviet troops had taken Prague they were very admiring militarily but behind that military admiration must have been a very deep and big.you 'ti and that ambiguity has always been very strong and remains strong to this day and so the ideology which was developed after the Cold War was no longer the ideology of freedom and democracy but it was the ideology of universal human rights as interpreted by the West and as interpreted by those whom it funded in large parts of the world who were called in the early days and still are NGOs or non-government organizations people were nervous in different parts of the world when the NGO started some of them did good work some were more propagandistic some was simply away a new way for the West to buy off the intelligentsia of large parts of the world this had been done during the Cold War the CIA had set up the Congress for cultural freedom lots of intellectuals globally had been bought up magazines like encounter magazine had been started the new project the lineage was the Congress of cultural freedom but this was a different world this was given a civil society coloration and one was told that NGOs plus neoliberalism equaled modern democracy and that's all you were going to get which completely restricted the functioning of democracy and accountability of course the NGOs are now referred in many parts of the world as WG o--'s Western governmental organizations after the countries that fund them and are increasingly beginning to be seen as such as people who basically some of them might do good work but by and large become a barrier to achieving any real social change in those countries and this combination of so-called civil society groups ie NGOs and neoliberalism was soon to be pushed militarily and the first country where they decided to do this was the former Yugoslavia now that particular war was accepted by people largely in the West it was accepted as a war which was stopping horrible things being done because the images were very fresh in people's minds the images that were conjured up in order to push through this agenda images of the Holocaust which quite honestly was a disgrace that that was done because it was nothing like it and not even remotely like it this was a pretty dirty unpleasant civil war which broke up the former Yugoslavia for what reason that they structural adjustment program demanded by the World Bank and the IMF wrecked that country for one whole year they couldn't pay the Yugoslav army they didn't receive their salaries and a very good researcher at the Brookings Institute Susan Woodward wrote a very powerful book actually mapping out how Yugoslavia was made uncomfortable by the economic policies it was forced to pursue and when you do this and people become more and more conscious of their own identity to defend themselves or to gain whatever is on offer and that created the circumstances of an unpleasant civil war but to blame one side for that civil war the Serbs when the Croats behave just as abominably the Bosnians were least to blame it has to be said but the Serbs and Croats it was very little to differentiate between these two sides but because those croquettes were backing the West so the Serbs were totally demonized and the result if you go to Yugoslavia today is horrific absolutely no one talks about it now because that's the world we live in a world of short-term memories you can use the media you can use ideological constructs to whip up popular frenzy go to war and then no one cares because you think it's over but it isn't over the war is over but the conditions created by the war in the breakup of that country are still there the decline in the social rights of all the former constituents of Yugoslavia the are completely shocking if you were to read them what they've lost and what cannot be regained under the present structure then the tragedy of that is that it was perfectly possible here the European Union is more to blame initially than anything the United States did the European Union seeing what was going on could have made a massive offer to the Yugoslav states saying here's a billion or two billion euros as untied unconditional aid and we are prepared to give this to you provided you maintain a confederal structure of your country and don't allow it to collapse and we will make sure the money is well spent on social infrastructure projects what's undone and then the war costs billions and billions and billions so everyone is prepared to spend on war but no one is prepared to spend anything on peace and there's a lot of talk about the Marshall Plan that followed the Second World War as a model plan well you know one has to understand what the Marshall Plan was it was a plan to recover Western Europe because of the communist ennemy very important to understand that the reason the United States which it emerged as the strongest power after the Second World War its industries were booming they'd done well out of the war from that point of view as far as the US industry and economy was concerned the choice they faced was a horrific choice for them what do you do with the broken up your former enemies and your allies Western Europe was in ruins Japan had been nuked Germany was totally desolate and desperate what do you do if you don't do anything you could have a social revolution in all these countries and the commies would get them so you pour in money and they did it it's the only time in history that a power has bought resuscitated its economic rivals in order to strengthen them against a common enemy it's never happened before and I predict it's unlikely to happen again because the big power that has come up and one of the most decisive developments of the 21st century it's also not unrelated to the use of human rights as an ideological weapon is the massive rise of China as an economic power I mean China today and this rise has structurally altered the world market China today is the workshop of the world just like Victorian England was in the 19th century and you know that very well in this country because you've only got to go shopping to find that out and when after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 there was a massive increase in demand for the Stars and Stripes American industry couldn't meet that demand and they had to make an urgent telephone call to Beijing which got the flags ready in record time and FedEx them over so it's just a symbolic example of the strength of that economy now China has done this you know one of the ideological constructs behind the use of human rights ideology as it is used at the moment by the West is that this ideology is tied in every possible way to the existing form of capitalism that we have and the two go together well if that were the case one could say the Chinese capitalism which actually is thriving and doing very well without any human rights or any democracy at all that if you constantly link these two together people will say well what what need do we have of democracy and I am told that many Texan billionaire drools when he hears about how the Chinese profits have been rising without having the problems of trade unions and any such things there so it's not the case that capitalism and democracy stroke human rights are things which go together they don't they never have I mean capitalism was born you know what historians still argue about it but let's accept it was born in the 18th century and then using Western Europe as it launching pad in the next century more or less took the world and new empires came into being that's absolutely true but none of those states were democratic states democracy in the proper sense of the word only came into existence after the first world war when women were granted the vote and in the United States it took many more struggles before afro-americans won the right to register or could register especially in the southern states which is what I'm talking about it was the 60s when the fights for registration began in were won over the next decade so it's a relatively recent phenomenon democracy it doesn't have deep roots structured within the capitalist social order and what has such shallow roots can only be protected by the people by the citizens and if they lose faith in it and nothing can protect the system a system of accountability and that is the danger that I see that despite all the talk of human rights which is endless but though as I will come to in a minute is becoming less so you actually have a process where in all the advanced Western countries I mean the United States has been like that for some time but your appeals to be different but what we are now witnessing is if you like a certain Americanization of european politics as a result of the new water where neither center-left nor center-right disagree on the basic fundamentals of what is to be done and because they don't young people are becoming more and more alienated from democracy in the last two British general elections a majority of young people between the ages of 18 and 26 did not vote Tony Blair was elected Prime Minister with 25 percent of the electoral vote the lowest vote to elect any european government and you never would guess that when he delivers a pious speech that this is what his support is based on and you add to that a second process which we are now seeing as I said earlier if freedom and democracy was removed they imploded those ideas by the Vietnam War the whole idea of human rights interventions military humanism that is what we're going to do democracy building has been exploded by the events in Iraq completely and totally as some of us warned those who were in favor of the war even before it took place that they were making a terrible mistake the president I think is one of the few people left who doesn't totally understand this as yet he doesn't his one of the things he said is that the gratitude level is pretty low in Iraq he actually said that they should be grateful for being invaded bombed tortured their country wrecked and destroyed 70% of the population when questioned by US polling organizations in Iraq said that life was much better for them under saddam hussein so a guy who was a fairly ruthless dictator we have to thank this in this administration for having revived him in iraqi minds and his lynching public lynching did not go down well either in iraq or in the rest of the world people did not like that he was handed over to be lynched and taunted while he was being killed it sets a bad precedent so iraq the torch out that took place and again the way the torture was revealed those awful images which became iconic and then after a months heated discussion a few trials it disappeared and when it disappeared you assumed or many people assume well the reason we are not hearing about it is because it's no longer happening not true it is happening and it carries on to this day and most of the occupying armies centrally involved are involved in it because that is what you do when you occupy a country and you want information the UN Charter of Human Rights prohibits torture in any shape or form by anyone but that is not the human rights on display here because what we have seen is in encontró distinction to the rights which most of us would support is the birth of a human rights industry with human rights Department springing up all over campuses with big names becoming and I'm not saying that they're sort of all of they're doing the same thing but by and large if you look at some of the big names who are professors for Human Rights one such name occurs at the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard Michael Ignatieff when news was brought to this noble professor that there was torture in Iraq and what did he think about it he said I would have to think about that finally he came down on the right side I'm glad to say and said it shouldn't happen but then soon after he wrote a book on ethics in which he actually said well you know one can't be totally squeamish about these things and Saddam Hussein tortured - well yeah he did and the Saudi Kings do it too and the president of Egypt does it too but one doesn't like it when they do it and other dictators have done it in the past but if you have a system which is pledged to stop this and you can't do it yourselves in this particular way I mean I could then use other arguments if I wanted to and say yeah but the torture in Iraq was horrible but it wasn't as bad as the torture they used in Vietnam there was an American soldier recently last summer at a festival in Chicago where they were discussing the iconography of Abu Ghraib as if that's the main thing to discuss their pictures and this angry former GI stood up he was sitting in the audience and after they when it was time for questions he couldn't bear it and he said look what are you guys going on about I was in Nam and I saw the following thing happened in front of my eyes we captured two Vietnamese prisoners guerrillas who were fighting against us we wanted information from them they refused to speak he said in front of my my eyes the officer ordered a soldier with his knife to cut the stomach of one of these prisoners and take out his entrails and then we said to the other this is going to happen to you if you don't talk and he didn't talk and so we did it to him as well so he said when you occupy countries that's what you become you become animals and so let's not talk about iconography let's talk about torture and this should never become acceptable again and I don't know how many of you have been following the trial of Padilla who was kept in a Break of Carolina the trial is now come up and the forms of sensory deprivation used on him have driven him completely crazy so he can barely defend himself according to the reports being published in the New York Times it's a very important trial likewise Guantanamo most of the people it now peers had nothing to do with anything but were picked up because they happen to be in the wrong country at the wrong time some of them have been released others have been tortured the Brits have done exactly the same thing in Britain driven people locked up people deprived them of everything so that their bulk of them have literally lost their minds and are now in mental institutions now what is this in aid of to fight terrorism but you know you can't fight terrorism like that I remember very well after the terrorist attacks when both the president and the British prime minister said these terrorists want to destroy our way of life and we're not going to let them but you have let them and in fact they didn't ask you for this because awful though these events were it's not that they were completely crazy they said you're occupying our countries get out this is not the way to do it as one told them many a time by going killing innocents in the United States but that's what they wanted it's not the system here that they were particularly opposed to apart from the way in which it refracted on their lives and in their countries but the attacks which have been made the Patriot Act here in Britain we have an act in place now which makes it possible for anyone to be picked up and kept without a law in prison without seeing a lawyer for four to six weeks and they're still saying that's not enough and they had to introduce a state of emergency to pick up some people they didn't like and in order to get the state of emergency they said we are facing a more difficult situation in Britain than we did during the Second World War a blatant lie but they said it in order to get these wretched laws through so the I very ideas of all this going on at the same time as human rights being used as an ideology is of course deeply disturbing and one cannot accept these constructs abstracted from the world in which we live now it is not the case and the Economist which is not a particularly progressive or radical magazine actually had a four-page supplement comparing the Islamic terrorists to the anarchists of the 19th and early 20th centuries it was a very revealing piece because I'd argue this once and got my head snapped off by various human rights warriors people who like to sort of map out which countries can be bombed on their laptops and they got very angry that I had compared this to annex --an but there is a similarity and the economists pointed out who the anarchists had attacked how many heads of state they had destroyed how many cafes they had blown up because they thought this was the way they could win their demands they were wrong and they stopped doing it and these guys who were involved basically you know if once totally frank about this they attacked the United States once in 2001 not being able to repeat it and one reason they haven't been able to repeat it is because they're very weak they're not that strong I mean maximum force they have is to 3,000 people the kids who carried out the attacks in London on July the 7th were British kids and they did it they said it had nothing to do with religion but because but blared supported the war in Iraq they were wrong of course to create that senseless carnage it's made many of us told them or people who supported them but the reasons for what they did was quite clear in that case and it's a sort of desperation that drives people to this and one reason these kids got desperate and this is by the way now accepted by official think tanks which were set up to do reports including the British Foreign Office think tank that if you have a situation where 66 to 70 percent of the country is opposed to you going into war in Iraq and you defy the public opinion and go into it then lots of people feel well what's left they don't listen to anyone this figure I'm giving you which goes up and up was not reflected in Parliament just not reflected in Parliament so you had this division it's the the phrase I used earlier that people carried on living in the bubble endlessly they didn't move and the last point I want to make is that of course Human Rights duck the way in which human rights is used by Western governments today is an example of the most grotesque double standards ever a leader they don't like can be brought down because he doesn't you know he's not Democratic enough but someone who's even more undemocratic is kept going I mean we have this situation in Islamic world it's very common condi rice goes to Pakistan where there's a military regime and says that General Musharraf this government your government is a model example for the entire Muslim world i uniformed secular military man well if this was true why did you invade Iraq I mean so do you see that there is no real logic to this the only logic is the interests of the imperial power we will determine whether you are democratic or not and the most sensational example of this which I've provided in my new book on that in America Pirates of the Caribbean and axis of hope is that you have the only continent in the world today where there is the rebirth if you like of hope in the following sense that a one latin-american country after the other has given birth to social movements which have challenged the neoliberal order they did it in Argentina they did it in Venezuela they did it in Bolivia big social movement saying we cannot carry on living like this people say how come Evo Morales won the Bolivian presidential election a radical guy and indigenous leader native Bolivian first time that a native has been elected in a country where 80% of the people are like that how come that this happened because a gigantic social movement in Cochabamba had fought against water privatization the government had sold water in the city to guess which corporation back tell that's right and this corporation in league with the government agreed that it was illegal to collect water from the sky rain water in receptacles on your roofs well I mean the Bolivians refused to accept this and there was an insurrection people were wounded a kid died and the government had to retreat and the peasants in cusco in deepest Peru fought against electricity privatization they said we are not political people we don't think politically I but one thing we know if this is privatized many of our houses will be without electricity and they resisted and they won and similar movements had developed in Venezuela in 89 90 and that is what brought to power a whole group of new leaders like Chavez like Morales like Rafael Correa in Ecuador very recently who basically said we are going to use the wealth of our country whatever it is to help the people one reason Chavez is so hated in the Western media is not that he's undemocratic he's been elected on nine different occasions with ever-increasing majorities but these elections don't count you see because these elections are won by politicians who are deeply hostile to the neoliberal project of the global order and they challenge it and because they challenge it they're denounced and the United States one year before it went to Iraq backed and green-lighted a military coup to try and topple a democratically elected government in Venezuela it backfired badly they failed and you know my favorite example from that event is the young when they did the coup succeeded for 48 hours they had to find a new president and they found one of the more discredited and corrupt businessman in the country who was so excited at being president that he to Madrid where they fitted him up with the presidential sash in a shop there and flew back and he came back and was president for 24 hours and there was an insurrection the poor marched down from the slums and the soldiers refused to accept the coup and one story which was very symbolic of what can happen when you have a popularly elected democratic government pushing through social reforms in the face of attacks from the whole world's media the Western media is that the general who had led the coup came out and said to these two the band which plays the national anthem on ceremonial occasion which is always outside the miraflores palace in caracas he said i'm going to bring the new president out you see the whole world's media is here CNN CBS all the American networks to see our new president and the minute I bring him out you play the national anthem and these soldiers didn't even know what was going this it excuse us general what new president we elected Chavez what's happened and the general said you just obey me so the soldiers asked him twice and then he knew the band wasn't going to play so he went to a 17 year old peasant kid who played the bugle and he said I'm going to bring the new president out in the minute I come you play the bugle like to do when Chavez comes on ceremonial occasions this 17-year old peasant kid turns to the general and says excuse me general what president we voted for Chavez so he says three times to this kid play the bugle finally the kid says general you seem to be very keen that someone should play the bugle here you play it now what is it that transforms the political consciousness of a young soldier from a poor family and gives him the courage to be able to talk like that to a general what gives him the courage is that he feels empowered by his government and by the changes that have taken place in that society while he has been serving in the army and he knows that in this country where the oligarchy has ruled forever and have now lost power and he also knows that this is an oligarchy which is also light skinned and that the majority of Venezuelans who are dark skinned and of mixed race are looked down upon by their oligarchy and one reason for the hatred of Chavez by the oligarchy is they say his example which is that he's off mixed afro-american and native Indian blood that's the word they used for that assemble can't be trusted we never trust a sample many of them will say openly whether entire 80% of the private television channels have been attacking him endlessly and in the first days along openly racist lines where the American Embassy threw a party for the oligarchic opposition and a comedian dressed as a monkey with a blackface performed and pretending to be Chavez so much so that even : Powell who was then Secretary of State said that this was impermissible and insisted that they give an apology which was at least he could do that's the situation which is being changed by movements from below actually putting more blood into democracy giving democracy a new flow and you see that happening in country after country in Latin America whereas virtually the opposite process is happening in the West so here you now have two types of democracies and two types of human rights one which embraces social rights and says these are equally if not more important than anything else and the other which totally denies that they have the right to even take place that is the world we live in and sometimes it's possible because the United States is a large and powerful country for many of you not to think about anywhere else because it's difficult enough thinking about this country but your leaders are constantly thinking about the rest of the world and in order to even understand what they're doing you've got to know what's going on then it's got very little to do with the lack of human rights in most of these cases but it's got everything to do with the politics of power the politics of empire the politics of occupation and I always say whenever I visit this country that its future depends on its citizens and this is a rich country a powerful country and it could be transformed and people sometimes who don't know the United States cannot imagine a different United States but I can imagine it because if I see what's happening in South America and I also see now the increasing links between South America and North America in these much reviled and much despised and much attacked Latino migrants without whom the economy in large parts of this country wouldn't survive but these migrants are now the bridge between the two parts of the American continent so that when workers and teachers are shot dead in the Mexican city of Oaxaca you have a permanent ticket by Mexican Americans outside the consulate in LA protesting against what's going on in Oaxaca and who knows maybe a new idea of Rights and a new idea of reviving democracy will also travel from south to north thank you

Channel: University of California Television (UCTV)

Views: 32,242

Rating: 4.858407 out of 5

Keywords: Tariq, Ali, Islam, activism

Id: 21CL-QqRgs0

Length: 59min 10sec (3550 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 31 2008