“Well, the Somalia story is complex. It’s a long, ugly history. I’ll just keep to the present. In what must have been 2005 or 2006, as a part of the so-called “War on Terror”, the treasury department’s branch the Office of Foreign Assets Control, which deals with alleged transfers of money that are supposedly or may have something to do with terrorist activities, went after an Islamic charity called Al-Barakat and claimed that it was involved in financing Al Qaeda. They closed it down. There was a lot of publicity about that as a great achievement of the “War on Terror”. A couple years later, they conceded quietly that it was a mistake and that they weren’t involved at all. It turns out that this charity was a large part of the sustenance for Somalia, a very poor country, and that the charity was funding business activities, banks, and private enterprise. It was making a substantial contribution to the economy, and, when they closed it down, it all collapsed. It was a very fragile society, so a blow like that was quite severe. After that, it’s been a very conflicted society with a lot of fighting and so on, but a group did take over called the Islamic courts; they imposed their rule over virtually all of Somalia. There’s a tiny little corner near Ethiopia that was kept in the hands of the former government which the US recognized. They were doing… not badly; I wouldn’t have wanted to live there. It was Islamic law, but it was quiet and controlled. The violence subsided, and people were apparently pretty happy with it; but, the US wasn’t. Immediately, Ethiopia invaded with US support, and they were able to drive out the Islamic court government. They took over Mogadishu and so on, but very quickly a resistance started; the whole country just exploded into total chaos again, and it more or less remains that way. That’s one aspect of what was happening.
The other aspect was that foreign states, European states, and some of the Gulf states: Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and others began dumping toxic waste in Somali waters. Since the state doesn’t function really, these territorial waters are kind of like free garbage cans. So, they started poisoning it, and they also started fishing there. It’s a rich fishing area, and they quickly overfished it with factory ships and so on. The Somalis don’t have a coastguard, and they don’t have any international clout. So, their fishing grounds are getting ruined both from overfishing by rich foreigners from Europe, Saudi Arabia, and so on - I don’t know if the US was involved - and also from their waters being poisoned. These fishermen had very few options, so they started on piracy. That’s the background of it.
Piracy turned out to be very lucrative. It’s kind of like narco-trafficking in India with rich thugs. They expand to criminal enterprises and so on. That’s the background. It didn’t just come out of nowhere; if we want to understand it, we should pay attention to the background. If you want to eliminate piracy, then give the fishermen a livelihood and stop destroying their land and their waters…”
These people think, “I’ve done everything right all my life, I’m a god-fearing Christian, I’m white, I’m male, I’ve worked hard, and I carry a gun. I do everything I’m supposed to do. And I’m getting shafted.” And in fact they are getting shafted. For 30 years their wages have stagnated or declined, the social conditions have worsened, the children are going crazy, there are no schools, there’s nothing, so somebody must be doing something to them, and they want to know who it is. Well Rush Limbaugh has answered - it’s the rich liberals who own the banks and run the government, and of course run the media, and they don’t care about you—they just want to give everything away to illegal immigrants and gays and communists and so on.
Well, you know, the reaction we should be having to them is not ridicule, but rather self-criticism. Why aren’t we organizing them? I mean, we are the ones that ought to be organizing them, not Rush Limbaugh. There are historical analogs, which are not exact, of course, but are close enough to be worrisome. This is a whiff of early Nazi Germany. Hitler was appealing to groups with similar grievances, and giving them crazy answers, but at least they were answers; these groups weren’t getting them anywhere else. It was the Jews and the Bolsheviks [that were the problem].
I mean, the liberal democrats aren’t going to tell the average American, “Yeah, you’re being shafted because of the policies that we’ve established over the years that we’re maintaining now.” That’s not going to be an answer. And they’re not getting answers from the left. So, there’s an internal coherence and logic to what they get from Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and the rest of these guys. And they sound very convincing, they’re very self-confident, and they have an answer to everything—a crazy answer, but it’s an answer. And it’s our fault if that goes on. So one thing to be done is don’t ridicule these people, join them, and talk about their real grievances and give them a sensible answer, like, “Take over your factories.”
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36 Plays
Lykke Li - Tonight (Alternate Version)
Push my back so I make sure / You’re right behind me as before / Yesterday the night before tomorrow / Dry my eyes so you won’t know / Dry my eyes so I won’t show / I know you’re right behind me / And don’t you let me go, let me go tonight
75 Plays
We are a fever
We are a fever
We ain’t born typicalU.R.A. Fever - The Kills
