Constructing rational and linguistic lifeworlds with the intent of mirroring our most pressing material realities is not only a human trait, it is a practice that has been successfully transposed to articulate the legimitations of political societies throughout global history. But the irony is that the more complex a group becomes, the more elaborate its justifications for homogeneity need to be. So our ideas of social harmony and cohesion lie within a balance of alternatives - between what exists and what can be achieved – collectively.
In this regard we could position the claim that certain nations’ ways of life, ethics and morality has been perennially utilized to justify the meddling by our representatives – governments and their extensions - in other countries and regions around the world.
For an example look no further than the once isolationist United States of America. The USA imperiously turned outwards once it realized that its goals of growth, progress and freedom could not be met with the available domestic resources. In this sense, empire (at the onset) was not a planned outcome of foreign policy, but became one as the natural result of social needs that needed to be continuously fed in order to perennially legitimize the American way of life and its cultural representation.
This context serves to posit the USA’s military ventures abroad –epitomized in the attached video- that seem to suggest and reinforce the idea that their values of liberal democracy and free markets are being squandered because of the real intentions of power that lay beneath its eagerness for a multifaceted interference around the world but which real workings are now being uncovered by the Internet.
There is nothing new to contravene claims of a political world comprised of states which main goal is to use globalization for the perpetuation of their own specific ethnic and national identities. Hence, realizing how international politics operate is more a matter of acceptance. Once we have accepted how reality functions and is shaped by states we can propose alternatives. In this particular case the video attacks the hypocrisy of a national identity –represented by the US flag- that is basically being waved as a justification for a common imperial mentality that has aggressively overdosed on violence both locally and internationally. A mercenary army everywhere is gobbling resources up, and it safe to say that it is only superficially aware of its participation in a much greater game that transcends mere army briefings. The US flag here could be seen as the epitome of the bastardization of a discourse of liberty and human civilization. What are they fighting for besides the obvious?
‘Justice is peace’ elicits the narrator in the video. In a globalised human community what happens with one nation does not pertain to itself in isolation. What could be simpler to understand but simultaneously so difficult to implement by the architects of a declining power like the United States of America?
-juan carlos guerra, dec 6th 2011
No comments:
Post a Comment