A MWC Special Features

UNCIVILISED STATE OF AMERICA
 
'It would be a good idea.' Mahatma Gandhi, when asked about his views on western culture. George W .Bush, "You are with us or against us "after 911= End of pluralism, liberty and democracy "I did not know how much was ended. When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as I saw them with eyes still young. In addition, I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people's dream died there. It was a beautiful dream..." Black Elk on the aftermath of the Massacre at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, December 1890.
 
The United States Army Seventh Cavalry used battling guns to slaughter 300 helpless Lakota children, men and women. Less than 3 decades later, the alleged Armenian Genocide during First World War, remains on US lawmakers agenda.

On 4 November 1971, Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi met with US President Richard Nixon in Washington to build support against Pakistan military is genocide against the people of Bangladesh. Next day, when Nixon and his aide Henry Kissinger met at the Oval Office, the later said: "The Indians are bastards anyway. They are starting a war there." The President agreed, saying: "We really slobbered over the old witch." "You slobbered over her in things that did not matter, but in things that did matter, you did not give her an inch," Kissinger said.

Earlier in a White House conversation with Nixon on June 4, Kissinger said [about Indians]: "Those sons-of-bitches, who never have lifted a finger for us, why should we get involved in the morass of East Pakistan—"And on July 16, Nixon said the Indians were "a slippery, treacherous people". He felt the Pakistanis "are straightforward and sometimes extremely stupid. The Indians are more devious." These are the words of those who claim superior culture and claim to defend democracy against dictatorships.

Indira Gandhi's chief aide then, Dr. P.C. Alexander, expressed satisfaction that few in India reacted to that uncivilized discourse .Unfortunately polite and courteous discourse is considered by even many educated Americans as a sign of weakness and cowardice.  

However, what else to expect from a people whose history is a narrative of landmarks like the Massacre at Wounded Knee, who have morphed from savagery to high-tech savagery and gave to the last generation, Mai Lai massacre, and now, Guantanamo, Abu Gharib, Falluja. Nevertheless, instead of looking at themselves, they pontificate to the rest of the humanity, with their uncivilized discourse.
 
As part of annual ritual, Congressman Christopher Smith, New Jersey Republican, Chair of the House International Relations Subcommittee on Global Human Rights and International Operations, convened the hearing titled 'India's Unfinished Agenda —Equality and Justice for Victims of Caste System', said, "The Dalits and tribal peoples are treated as virtual non-humans, and suffer pervasive discrimination and violation of their human rights." 

Welcoming the 'global partnership between USA and India, he argued that "there is still a long road to travel," while "most observers have focused on the nuclear proliferation implications of our announced agreements as potential stumbling blocks to a true strategic partnership between the US and India," he believed that "we must not lose sight of India's serious human rights problems." "To keep nearly a quarter of one's population in subhuman status is not only a grotesque violation of human rights, but it is a formula for economic and political stagnation as well," he added.

Apart from its annual lecture to the world, where US policies are hated and its people increasingly detested, it has an element of arm-twisting to influence the Indian vote against Iran in November at International Atomic Energy Agency, Vienna. US succeeded by insulting and bullying India by another US lawmaker Tom Lantos' ugly utterances .India's vote went against its own stated policy and could harm its long term strategic and energy interests.

Smith acknowledged that "once in America, we deprived African Americans of the most basic rights and opportunities. This was especially true in our southern states, which were once a byword for poverty and backwardness among people of all races." "For a long time we refused to act at a national level to stop lynching, often arguing that it was a local problem," he said. "Yet we all suffered the consequences of shutting off a huge segment of our population from equality and justice."

Lynching have been barred only now .But would Christopher Smith stop being an ostrich and go to New Orleans and the region, white America's putrid underbelly and see the real truth, to see how American Africans were treated and are still being treated .Those who visited the region even last year say that there has been no change in the pitiable conditions of the Blacks and poor in USA for the last two centuries. Following the Katrina hurricane, when the truth could not be hidden, US corporate news networks soon started a cover up, with boring repeat visits of the President and statements. However, it has fooled no one except the usual suspects, info-challenged US population. Even they are learning the truth.

Inequalities of class and race

Le Monde noted,"Bush initially said that "the storm didn't discriminate", a claim he was later forced to retract: every aspect of the catastrophe was shaped by inequalities of class and race. Besides unmasking the fraudulent claims of the Department of Homeland Security to make Americans safer, the shock and awe of Katrina also exposed the devastating consequences of federal neglect of majority black and Latino big cities and their vital infrastructures.

"The incompetence of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) demonstrated the folly of entrusting life-and-death public mandates to clueless political appointees and ideological foes of "big government". The speed with which Washington suspended the prevailing wage standards of the Davis-Bacon Act and swung open the doors of New Orleans to corporate looters such as Halliburton, the Shaw Group and Black water Security, already fat from the spoils of the Tigris, contrasted obscenely with Fema's deadly procrastination over sending water, food and buses to the multitudes trapped in the stinking hell of the Louisiana Superdome.

"But if New Orleans, as many bitter exiles now believe, was allowed to die as a result of governmental incompetence and neglect, blame also squarely falls on the Governor's Mansion in Baton Rouge and especially on City Hall on Perdido Street. Mayor C Ray Nagin is a wealthy African-American cable television executive and a Democrat, who was elected in 2002 with 87% of the white vote. [Uncle Tom]
"He was ultimately responsible for the safety of the estimated quarter of the population that was too poor or infirm to own a car. His stunning failure to mobilize resources to evacuate car-less residents and hospital patients, despite warning signals from the city's botched response to the threat of Hurricane Ivan in September 2004, reflected more than personal ineptitude: it was also a symbol of the callous attitude among the city's elites, both white and black, toward their poor neighbors in back swamp districts and rundown housing projects. Indeed, the ultimate revelation of Katrina was how comprehensively the promise of equal rights for poor African-Americans has been dishonored and betrayed by every level of government."

London's Observer on Katrina;

London's Observer noted "Perhaps nothing else so encapsulates the endless paradoxes of being black in America. Never have blacks had so much legal freedom, yet there are record numbers in jail.

Traditional black neighborhoods have collapsed into drug-ridden crime strongholds, even as the black middle class is the biggest in history.

"It is now 40 years since the Voting Rights Act that secured the black vote. [In Florida 2000!] It is 10 years since hundreds of thousands of blacks came to Washington in the Million Man March to demand a way out of poverty. It is a single month since Hurricane Katrina exposed the racial fault lines that fracture the big cities.

"Almost four decades after King was killed, there are still two Americas. One is largely white and wealthy, one largely black and poor. They live cheek by jowl in the same country yet in separate worlds. The shocking thing about the TV pictures from New Orleans was not black poverty; it was the reaction of whites. 'Most whites were shocked about the amount of poverty in New Orleans, but black media have talked about poverty for the past 20 years,' said David Canton, professor of history at Connecticut College.

"Bare statistics tell the story. Black life expectancy is six years shorter than that of whites. Black unemployment is twice as high. Blacks are twice as likely as whites to die from disease, accident or murder at every stage of their lives. About 24 per cent of black families live below the poverty line, compared with 8 per cent of the white population."