In memory of Martin Luther King, Junior and Patrice Lumumba

It seemed more than fitting to learn on this twenty-fifth Martin Luther King, Jr. Day weekend that Sunday, January 16, 2011, was the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, Congo’s first democratically-elected Prime Minister.  

Reverend King and President Lumumba represented the hopes and dreams of their people.  Both men were dynamic speakers who excelled at “speaking truth to power.” And despite the unexpected election of Barack Obama to the American presidency in 2008, the social aspirations of far too many African Americans and the Congolese people as a whole have been retarded as a result of their untimely deaths.  Patrice Lumumba was thirty-five when his life was cut short, King thirty-nine.

Patrice Lumumba and Martin Luther King, Jr. share one other historical tie: Both King and Lumumba were targeted for assassination by the federal government of The United States of America.

The spoils of victory

Drifting in and out of codeine dreams he sees George H. W. Bush going mad.

The President stands at a podium on a stage in front of thousands.  The shouts of hecklers rise from the crowd, their words waver in a fierce wind.  “Iran-Contra haunts you!  Iran-Contra haunts you!” the noisy protesters chant.

Iran, Iran-Contra, The Iran-Contra Affair:  one thread of a democracy unraveling.

Bush’s grin widens maniacally, his arms flail wildly, he shoots out his left hand in defiance.  “You know, I wish, I wish those draft dodgers out there would go back to, to CANADA where they came from," The Commander in Chief stutters in that Yankee Texan twang of his.

The faithful roar in Pavlovian response. 

What is this, he thinks haltingly, Campaign ’68 or just another grotesguery of the mind?

In the middle of the night he senses what must surely be:  In his desperation to retain the Presidency, Bush has fallen into frenzy, and he’s taking the country down with him.  He lies awake and wonders if others sense this to be true.  Although it is a cool night, his bed sheets are damp with sweat.

He turns on the television, to CNN.  Lost in a drugged fog, he sees blurred talking heads mouthing disjointed, Felliniesque sound bites:  Watch out for that ozone man . . . My dog Millie knows more than those bozos . . .  Pundits opine the President has found his stride as he heads into the homestretch.   


A plane flies through gray skies trailing a tattered white banner reading GEORGE BUSH, IRAN-CONTRA HAUNTS YOU.

Iran-Contra haunts you once again.

He is awakened by the sound of the early morning newspaper bouncing off of the hollow front door.  Unable to escape back into sleep, he eases carefully out of bed. 

He hobbles to the hall and looks down the darkened stairway, uncertain whether to descend.  Deciding to do so, he stops after each step, trying to control his response to the pain.

He twists open the two deadbolts and the front door’s brass knob.  The courtyard is brightly lit.  An emergency vehicle’s siren pulses somewhere in the distance.  A spent moon shines through an oak.

He folds down onto his hands and knees to pick up the banded paper and crawls halfway outside.  He sniffs the barely cool air.  He feels a kinship with the animals that prowl through the night when he’s forced to assume their position.  He reaches for the paper and withdraws back into his own human shell.

Seeing the date on the masthead of the paper, he realizes he’s lost many days.  He looks at the lead headline—BUSH, CLINTON IN VIRTUAL TIE—and shudders involuntarily in response.

It’s not that he’s a fan of the Arkansas Governor’s:  Bill Clinton seems too much a part of the Corrupted Wing of the Democratic Party, Federal Government Division.  But, unlike the sitting President, Clinton hasn’t had a chance yet to wreak havoc at home and abroad.  Cream rises to the top only in dairy products, he thinks.  What rises to the top in American politics is something else altogether.

“But who cares what you think?” he asks himself savagely.  He feels the words reverberate in the room.  He crawls to the couch as another damning consideration dies into a mutter.  He climbs onto the couch.  


He looks at the plaster swirl marks on the ceiling, searches for patterns, feels the weight of the newspaper on his chest.  Must you immerse yourself again in the sordid details of this all-too-animal human planet in the midst of your own going under?

He hears no response.  He closes his eyes and sighs—what he wants to do most is stop thinking.  He dams welling tears with his knuckles and whispers, “Be still, be still, be still.”

In that moment before sleep, when the body often jolts, a final question shakes him:  what has happened to my country, and to me, as a result of “winning” the Cold War?

Democracy and democracy II

We, the people of the United States of America, have created a nation whose society has been both the envy and great evil for many throughout the world.  The amount of human progress due to American creativity and technological advancement is almost beyond measure.  The goodwill that the United States accumulated with the rest of the world in joining the Allied cause during World War II, and in helping to rebuild Europe with The Marshall Plan in the aftermath of the war, appeared to validate America as the legitimate “Leader of the Free World.”  But the antidemocratic contradictions which existed from the outset of our republic—slavery, allowing propertied males only to vote in political elections—have evolved in ways which have continued to cripple the American people’s understanding of the liberating promise of democratic philosophy. 

Although a civil rights movement toppled legalized segregation a century after The Civil War ended human slavery in The United States, many of the movement’s beneficiaries remained mired in poverty--and targets of Americans who resented the change.  


The tragic imperial mindset that begat the American colonization of the Philippine Islands at the end of the Nineteenth Century led to a Pandora’s Box of Twentieth Century American nightmares:  the overthrow of democratically elected governments in Iran, Guatemala and Chile; the destabilization of other democratic movements worldwide; our Southeast Asia war; Ronald Reagan’s Central America Wars and “The Iran Contra Affair.”  The spirit of “Iran Contra” begat the lies of the George W. Bush administration that led us in 2003 into war in Iraq.  


Imperial America’s rejection of the liberating promise of democracy that its Founding Fathers made to the world over two centuries ago has resulted in many throughout the world who are fearful or resentful of democracy, American style.  The American news media sugarcoats the bitter fruit of our betrayal of democratic social philosophy with “fair and balanced” reporting that rarely makes mention of inconvenient historical context or foreign opinion. 

Instead of educating themselves as to why their country has lost its position of moral authority in the world, Americans spend as much of their free time as possible in catastrophic mass consumption, immersing themselves in a shallow celebrity culture and watching any number of popular “reality shows” intent on bringing out the worst in people.  Not surprisingly, violent video games have been a booming American market for generations.

All of the generalizations and justifications that we practice in defending “The American Way” of excessive earthly consumption and human exploitation is the best measure of the distance we remain from being a people devoted to the common human good.  Rather than release humanity from our species-long battle between our animal instincts and the enlightened soul within, “we, the people” have instead become the biggest and baddest of all of the animals to be found within the human jungle for as long as we have been able.  So long as we continue to embrace our social status quo, the American people, will have no real appreciation for the promise of democratically elevated human conduct. 

We, the people, must accept responsibility for our country’s tragic and violent rejection of the democratic spirit at home and abroad in order to end our inhumane social behavior. 

Democracy and democracy

Most Americans know that a democratic form of government is one based on individual and national self-rule.  But democracy as a code of human conduct?  Most Americans know as much about democracy the philosophical ideal as they know about speaking ancient Greek.

Go ahead:  Ask any American.  Ask yourself:  What defines democratic philosophy?

There will be many guesses and half-guesses, of course, but it is safe to predict that most will be incorrect.  It is also safe to predict that, once the democratic philosophy is defined, most Americans will not believe that their society’s conduct can be based on such a belief.  Indeed, democracy will sound to most Americans like communism, socialism or that other, still lingering, likeminded “evil”--liberalism.

The American Heritage College Dictionary defines philosophical democracy as principles of social equality and individual rights.  My Illustrated Oxford Dictionary (Revised First Edition, 2003) defines a democratic society as being classless and tolerant.

Well, now:  Just how democratic is the “average” American?

Too many Americans’ knowledge of laudable individual and social conduct becomes stunted at a championing of individual rights only.  Because of such an arrested development, those who most vociferously advocate individual rights as what it means “to be an American” are also those within society most likely to advocate an “America—Love It or Leave It” brand of patriotism.  The democratic principle of social equality becomes code for Marxist Leninism, classlessness is defined as “class warfare” and a notion that Americans aren’t tolerant can be countered with the popular intolerant charge that such a commentator “Hates America.”  Tolerance for anything other than defending a pre-Civil Rights Era, early 1950s version of the American status quo—when most Americans knew their place--is condemned. 

It’s amazing, really, how little most American people know about democracy, and how even less regard most Americans have for democratic philosophy.  “Are you crazy?  What are you--nuts?” is not an uncommon comeback to hear when Americans are told that there’s more to democracy than just a nationalistic “right” to do whatever we damned well please.

So now that you know you’re not a democrat, what are you?  And how is that better than the social philosophy our country’s Founding Fathers held up to the rest of the world in the 1770s as the best hope for Humanity?

The United States of America Crimes Against Humanity 1898-2010

So that we, the people of The United States of America, might begin to correct the antidemocratic errors of our national ways, let us prove first that we are mature enough to do so by acknowledging them: 

1.  The destabilization, destruction and suppression of democracy through the overthrow of democratically elected governments, interference in democratic elections and alignment with antidemocratic military regimes, civil war factions and other social and political forces in the following countries:

Angola
Australia                       
Belau                                                              
Bolivia           

Brazil                                                              
Bulgaria                       
Cambodia                                                      
Chad    

Chile                                                               
Congo                           
Costa Rica                                                     
Dominican Republic

East Timor                                                     
Ecuador                       
El Salvador                                                    
Fiji           

Ghana                                                             
Grenada                       
Greece                                                            
Guatemala

Guyana                                                           
Indonesia                      
Iran                                                                  
Iraq                       

Italy                                                                  
Jamaica                       
Korea                                                              
Laos

Lebanon                                                         
Morocco                       
Nicaragua                                                      
Panama
Peru                                                                
Philippines                   

Portugal                                                          
South Africa

Syria                                                                
Uruguay                       
Vanuatu                                                          
Venezuela

Vietnam                                                          
Zaire

2.  The late- and post-World War II recruitment of Nazi Germans and European Fascists for United States military intelligence operations and weapons development; commercial and federal aerospace research and development, and for illegal use of foreign aliens in domestic lobbying organizations.

Number of people killed as a result of above U.S. conduct:  Approximately 5,000,000.

Number of people injured, maimed, orphaned and tortured as a result of above U.S. conduct: An as yet undetermined multitude.

The Age of American Antidemocracy

I can still feel the shock that jolted me to my all-too-human core when I learned for the first time that my country, The United States of America, has acted in grievously antidemocratic ways.  It was mid-November 1979.  I was a student at the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB).  I sat reading in a library.

Days earlier, Iranian revolutionaries had overrun the United States embassy in Teheran.  Fifty-three Americans were being held hostage inside.  National and international news media focused upon masses of angry Iranians assembled in their nation’s capitol expressing an all-consuming rage against my country.  Americans had responded in kind.  Middle Eastern Americans and Middle Eastern students attending colleges in the United States, including my own, were attacked physically and verbally in the days and weeks following the audacious Iranian action.

A few months before, I had taken to heart the libertarian philosophy: Every person has the right to lead the life they choose so long as they do not infringe upon the same right of others.  Libertarianism reminded me of the Do unto others as you would have them do unto you and Love thy neighbor as you would love thyself rules of conduct that I had come to accept during my childhood.  (I would soon realize libertarianism’s primary deficiency—a lack of any social consciousness other than an ideological devotion to unfettered capitalism.)  So I started a chapter of Students for a Libertarian Society at UCSB shortly after the 1979 academic year had begun.  From a folding table set up in front of the school’s student union center, I engaged my fellow academics in conversations about our country and the world.

By mid-November student groups—my own included--began to organize public debates and demonstrations on campus in response to the Iranian seizure.  I thought it prudent to learn more about my country’s history of relations with Iran before I dared to speak publicly on the subject. So I began to study.

I came across a brief history of U.S.-Iran relations--in Time Magazine, I believe.  I read that in 1954, my country had participated in a military coup in Iran that had successfully overthrown Mohammed Mossadeq, the country’s democratically elected president.   

My country? I remember asking myself after the shock of this revelation jerked me into an upright position.  The United States of America, the leader of the Free World, played a role in the overthrow of another democratically elected government?  Wasn’t that, I sputtered internally, . . . impossible?

Sadly, I learned that it was not.  That same Time article may also have

mentioned The United States’ role in the overthrow of democratically-elected

Guatemala President Jacobo Arbenz in 1955, one year after the coup in Teheran. 

I sat immobilized, pondering the implications of this discovery.  After three decades of life under a U.S.-backed “benevolent” dictatorship, the Iranian people had finally commanded the attention of the American public.  Iranians were now demanding that The United States of America answer for the crime against democracy that it had committed in their country a quarter of a century earlier. 

If I or any other American had lived in the U.S. in the 1950s, and Iran had helped to overthrow our government, how would we hope to respond—as fighters for our own democracy or as enablers of the corruption?  I knew then that if I began to make excuses for my country’s tragic misconduct, I would no longer be able to espouse in good faith the human principle of democracy to myself or to a single other human being. 

So what was I, an idealistic and patriotic American citizen, to do?  I dropped out of school, moved to Washington, D.C., and became a professional political activist.  I tried to change my country’s misbegotten ways with every nonviolent resource I could muster.

As the Twentieth Christian Century has transitioned into the Twenty First, I have watched the people of my country continue to contribute to humanity’s suffering to an apocalyptic degree.  Such a democracy is a disgrace to its good name.  The Age of Antidemocracy in The United States of America must come to a long overdue and yet well-considered end.

How best to liberate the American people from the fear and loathing of other human beings that have been instilled in us by our own imperfect society?  How best to awaken the spirit of humanity in a people seemingly democratic by virtue of their national form of government only?  Such questions have troubled me throughout my adult life.

Although I left the world of political activism long ago, I have continued to research the past and present conduct of my country.  The result of such labor has been, at times, altogether too bitter.  But my resolve to accept responsibility for all of my country’s actions, and my desire to change those with which I disagree, has never wavered.

democracy vs. The United States of America

I have made a decision.

I will no longer remain silent while voices of educated evil and inhumane ignorance are allowed to pass for civilized discourse in my country.

I will no longer remain passive as antidemocratic social forces are free to wreak havoc not just in these Disunited States of Babel but also throughout a world of humanity in which the liberating promise of democracy has been betrayed by its American torchbearer.