If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.– James Madison
Last week’s unscheduled landing of the official aircraft and “forced detention” of Bolivia’s President Evo Morales has revealed, for those who have not yet seen, that global imperialism in this era of its last stand has now entered the stage of lunacy.
No one should be surprised by the abyss at which we all stand, and how quickly we have gotten there.
Prior to and since the Obama presidency, the global moral compass has been shifted out of place and the collective consciousness numbed by the public viewing of the hanging of a former world leader, Saddam Hussein; the extrajudicial murder of Libya’s President Muammar Gaddafi; the murder of an aged and sickly head of al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, with the United States president and his entourage enjoying a cinema-type viewing of the act; the use of unmanned drones in territories dubiously identified as harbouring enemy combatants resulting in untold numbers of civilian casualties including women and children; the extrajudicial killings of American citizens; and the list goes on.
The disrespectful and callous humiliation of a fellow world leader, albeit a head from the historically despised Latin American Third World country, has now pushed all of us to the point where our cherished freedoms have been threatened and diminished.
And what are the forces that have transformed the United States from defender of freedom to architect of tyranny?
One remembers teary-eyed the beautiful speech delivered by President Barack Obama on the winter cold but emotionally warm morning of his inauguration on January 20, 2009. The gist of Obama’s speech was that the onset of global terrorism should never be an excuse for America to abandon its democratic traditions.
Indeed, as he put it, “as for our common defence, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our founding fathers faced with perils that we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man . . . . Those ideals still light the world and we will not give them up for expedience’s sake”. That was then.
Today, faced with an economic, ideological and moral crisis, global imperialism is now hunting down a young defender of freedom, Edward Snowden, whose only crime was to publicly report that the United States has been a principal violator of individual privacy. Worse, in its desperate search to silence its own citizen, the private space and right to free movement of a duly elected world leader was violated, on a whimsical suspicion, aided by a shamelessly unthinking Europe.
Despite this, though, all oppressed peoples should take comfort that the current lunatic phase of imperialism is the sign of its approaching end.
• Tennyson Joseph is a political scientist at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus, specializing in regional affairs. Email [email protected]
