by Gouda » Fri Jul 14, 2006 6:33 am
<!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>Apropos</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END-->....Just out, from somewhere in northeast Indiana, latest <!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>The Calumet Review:</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END--><br><br>On the UN: <br><br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>Some of our local Porter County loons have, in addition to their Patriot Radio station (93.3 FM, audible from Hobart to Westville on a “good” day—that’s about twenty miles, for you lucky non-Calumetians) and the homemade signs of Farmer Fruitbat (Indiana 149 from the corner of US 6 to an undefined point some several hundred yards north), placed where folks might see ‘em some placards out on the interstate (94) urging “US out of UN.” Like so much with the “Patriot” types, they have it right—sort of—but for all the wrong reasons. The Calumet Review agrees—the United Nations should, in its present form and incarnation, cease to be. Not because it isn’t the pliant (and suppliant) instrument of US policy, but because it is precisely that instrument and ever has been. Similarly, all the crap run by Soros’ money should cease to be, not because Soros is Jewish and out to destroy honest Christian nations, if not the blood of Our Precious Savior altogether, it’s not even because he’s Hungarian, but because Soros is a capitalist pig and his “open society” is a vision (and reality) of corporate (and currency speculator) tyranny.<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br><br>On NGO: <br><br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>Whatever NGOs and their supporters intentions are, the reality is that they—to be clear, the NGOs--suck. They are precisely what Christian missionaries were in centuries past (and, are still)—something like a fifth column. Anybody remember a countrypolitan song from 1980 or so called “Pickin’ Up Strangers?” Sung by Johnny somebody, friend, as I recall of Mickey Gilley’s. Anyway, the chorus rang like such:<br><!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em><br>Pickin’ up strangers, lemme tell ya ‘bout the dangers (Repeat)<br>Some’re just come in peace, they say<br>Next thing y’know, one’ll steal yer heart away.</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END--><br><br>(As a young afficianado of hillbilly music, I always wondered what summergists were—some kind of cult? Like the Hare Krishnas? Wisdom, if such it can be named, straightened me out on the drawled mumble of this ditty.) <br><br>NGOs are the Strangers of this (not Merle Haggard’s) song—‘cept they won’t steal yer heart away, but rather yer sovereignty. For one thing, a whole lot of NGOs are QGOs—quasi-governmental organizations. I’m not even counting the frickin’ NED, which is altogether governmental and altogether wicked. <hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br><br>More: <!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>Here’s how the venerable James Petras put it in 1997 (Monthly Review, Vol. 49, No. 7):<br><br><!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>By the early 1980s the more perceptive sectors of the neoliberal ruling classes realized that their policies were polarizing the society and provoking large-scale social discontent. Neoliberal politicians began to finance and promote a parallel strategy "from below," the promotion of "grassroots" organization with an "anti-statist" ideology to intervene among potentially conflictory classes, to create a "social cushion." These organizations were financially dependent on neoliberal sources and were directly involved in competing with socio-political movements for the allegiance of local leaders and activist communities. By the 1990s these organizations, described as "nongovernmental," numbered in the thousands and were receiving close to four billion dollars world-wide.</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END--><br><hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--> <br><br>In closing:<br><br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>This is the world of the PR scumbags: what is called when battling on the behalf of polluters and toxics “astroturf,” or fake-grassroots lobbying. What slick masters we have, eh? There’s of course another term for such practices when applied to people named Gotti, Capone, Noriega—money-laundering. (See also that outstanding book, the copies of which, sadly, we’ve all given away and must acquire more, Toxic Sludge is Good for You, whose authors escape us for the moment.) This, too, is part of a wave of privatization (on which, see more below, in I.B. Dog’s essay on bottled water—ed.), in this instance of foreign policy. Here again we see the thread which binds the missionary tradition to the modern NGO. For, despite the alleged separation of church and state, religious organizations, both Jewish (in the case of Israel, an altogether special case) and Christian, have figured by various means, in the advancing of American foreign policy aims for decades. Evangelical Protestantism, with increasing gusto during the Reagan years, as one might imagine, has figured especially heavily, for which see Sara Diamond’s Spiritual Warfare, The Politics of the Christian Right. These churches and their adjutant ”ministries” and parachurch organizations (of, for instance, Bible societies and “Bible translators”) have advanced the neoliberal, neocolonial, and downright genocidal agendas of agribusiness and right-wing governments in Paraguay and Brasil and have served as conduits for American tax money (through AID and other agencies) to death squads in the Philippines. <hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--> <br><!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>The Calumet Review,</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END--><br>Volume Three, Number Four, Sometime in 2006 <p></p><i></i>