Βρήκα λοιπόν το χρόνο να τελειώσω εκείνο το βιβλίο του Cornel West που είχα αρχίσει να διαβάζω πριν αρκετό καιρό.
Πολύ μου άρεσε, με αποκορύφωμα το τελευταίο κεφάλαιο όπου τα χώνει κανονικότατα στον Lawrence Summers, πρόεδρο του Harvard. Να αναφέρω μόνο το εξής: "The larger message of my sad encounter with president Summers is that it reflects a fundamental clash betweem the technocratic and the democratic conceptions of intellectual life in America."
Αλλά ας μην επεκταθώ άλλο επ'αυτού.
Ενδιαφέρουσα βρήκα και την ανάλυση του σχετικά με το Μεσανατολικό. Μελετώντας λίγο τη σχέση Ηνωμένων Πολιτειών - Ισραήλ: "There is no doubt that the relationship of the American empire and the Israeli state is a special one. It was not always so. Nor will it likely forever be so. Most American political elites supported the Arab states in the late 1940s and early 1950s owing to oil. In 1956 President Eisenhower ordered Israel to withdraw from the Gaza strip and Sinai Penisnula, which it had invaded and occupied, along with oil-hungry Britain and Nasser-hating France. Israel complied. The present U.S.-Israeli alliance did not emerge until the mid 1960s. Soviet ties to Egypt and Syria pushed president Johnson closer to Israel. Meanwhile, Israel's fear of Arab threats to eliminate the Jewish state made it eager for U.S. support. The first U.S. offensive weapons systems sale to Israel-the A4 Skyhawk jet deal-was approved in 1965.
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This massive shift to support for Israel took place not because U.S. officials were drawn to the just cause of the Israeli state but for cold war political and geostrategic reasons. Israel, a small and fragile state under siege, began to look like an important ally to the American empire because of U.S. dependency on foreign oil and fear of Soviet influence in Arab states.
Today Israel-a country of 6.5 million people-receives 33% of the entire foreign aid-budget of the American empire ($3 billion a year). Another 20% of the budget goes to Egypt, in part as a payment for not attacking Israel, and Jordan is the third largest recipient. In short, more than half the budget concerns the security of Israel.
The average African receives 10 cents a year from U.S. foreign aid. The average Israeli receives $500 a year. Only 0.2% of the U.S. GNP goes to foreign aid-by this measure America ranks last out of the 22 wealthies countries in the world!
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Israel has become a military giant (with nuclear weapons) in the Middle East, and yet the military might and the protectorship of the United States that has accompanied all the munitions has not come for free. Israel has paid a price:it has no peace or real security. Historically empires have looked to their allies to assist their dirty work, and Israel played a key role in some of the most morally indefensible policies of the United States as it waged the cold war: providing arms, training, and intelligence support for the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua, the Afrikaner government of apartheid South Africa, Unita thugs in Angola, and repressice juntas in Guatemala. Like Turkey, Greece and South Korea, Israel became a frontline U.S. ally, and no other ally in the Middle East yielded such positive results."
και επισημαίνοντας πόσο ελλιπής είναι η δήθεν ενασχόληση των ΗΠΑ με την εδραίωση της δημοκρατίας στο μουσουλμανικό κόσμο:"A central conceptual problem is that modern democracy evolved over centuries within the distinctive context of post-Reformation, market-oriented Christian Europe. Does it make sense to look for points of contact in a remarkably different context? My answer begins from the premise that democracy and Islam are defined in the first instance by their underlying moral values and the attitudinal commitments of their adherents-not by the ways that those values and commitments have been applied. If we focus on those fundamental moral values, I believe, we will see that the tradition of Islamic political thought contains both interpretive and practical possibilities that can be developed into a democratic system." (Khaled Abou El-Fadl)
καταλήγει στα προφανή συμπεράσματα περί των κινήτρων που τις υποκινούν στις σημερινές τους επιλογές στη Μέση Ανατολή. Θίγει και άλλα ζητήματα, όπως τη δημοκρατική παράδοση της Αμερικής, συνοψίζοντας τις θέσεις των Emerson και Melville, παραδείγματος χάρη ότι: "Emerson offered the empowering insight that to be a democratic individual is to be
flexible and fluid, revisionary and reformational in one's dealings with fellow citizens and the world, not adhering to comfortable dogmas or rigid party lines. He posits that the core of being a democrat is to
think for one's self, judge for one's self, trust one's self, rely on one's self, and be serene in one's own skin-without being self-indulgent, narcissistic or self-pitying."
ή ακόμα και την εξέλιξη της hip-hop και τη σχέση της με τη δημοκρατία... Καλό ήταν λοιπόν το βιβλίο, κάτι έχει να πει ο West, και τέλος πάντων μπράβο του που και ερευνά και γράφει και έρχεται σε επαφή με τον κόσμο λίγο παραέξω από το Princeton μήπως και αγγίξει περισσότερους ανθρώπους να σκεφτούν και να συζητήσουν και δυο πράγματα.
