Having been raised in a crude one party military dictatorship in the first 24 formative of years of my life, to the USA in July 1988, I came equipped - not with a PhD or even an internationally accredited or recognized undergraduate science degree (from a little known alma mater in my hometown of Mandalay) - but with “my lived experience” — that redundant academic jargon! — of what a neo-feudal-Fascist dictatorship is. My previous life under the boot prepared me for Pax Americana.
Around 2000 when I started my short-live professional career, a day-job, in the city of Chicago —short-lived because I gve it up voluntarily to be a full-time grassroots organizer on my native Myanmar’s affairs, despite my immense joy of teaching (and learning) in classrooms full of adult students drawn from diverse classes and races — I received a Next Generation Leadership fellowship for 3 years from the Rockefeller Foundation (Standard Oil’s money, I am aware).
We were flown around and put up in some of the most expensive hotels — the kind that UN Secretary General Kofi Annan stayed, with heated toilet rims and your own private jacuzzi — in USA, Mexico, Vietnam and Jamaica - to study mass poverty and class and race conflicts in mixed, poverty-stricken neighbourhoods in places like Oaxaca, the Mekong Delta, (Little Rubio’s) Miami, and Jamaica. The great man was there in the same hotel with us in Mexico City, where Trotsky was killed, after his fling with Frida Kahlo, by Stalin’s assassins on the very day the young Saul Bellow, a Trotskyite and his comrades, from USA and Canada were scheduled to meet with the Soviet there, decades ago.
[A brief detour: Davos, of Switzerland, lest one needs reminding of the place as where the Nazis deposited their Jewish victims’ melted gold teeth, is of course the most glamourous: but, in essence, drinking champagne and eating cavier or fine smoked salmon served on silver trays while discussing poverty, sustainable development goals (MDGs), and the refugee flow of 100 million wretched of the earth is a typical behavior of the nobel elite, globally.]
The late great spineless UN man - yet another morally rotten Nobel Peace Laureate — who incidentally was college-educated at Macalester College in Minneapolis, the site of ICE brutality today, was there in the same hotel with us Rockfeller Fellows in Mexico City, where Trotsky was killed by Stalin’s assassins decades ago. Kofi Annan played a Yo-Yo to the Clinton-Albright Adminstration, as head of the UN Blue Helment in NYC, amidst Rwanda’s mass killings, and shelved the genocide cable from Rwanda. For he knew that his Masters wouldn’t like to see it.
Bingo! He was promoted to the Secretary General post at the UN, “a glorified Chief Clerk” of the world’s most bloated bureacracy, as my late Communist uncle in Mandalay put it to me, out of angry disgust that I was talking about the UN and our beloved chief clerk the late U Thant in glowing terms as a young ill-informed middle-school kid.
I do NOT complain or feel morally conflicted, but rather enjoyed the momentary luxuries with my usual (Buddhist?) mindfulness.
Humans are inherently twisted and excel in justifying our own (mis)deeds. To be brutally honest with myself, I like material comfort.
Most of my American cohorts were activist lawyers from top law schools where an insignificant percentage of the graduating class annually forego the lucrative career in corporate law, and do “public interest” law. [With six figures in debt putting oneself through law school, who can really blame top graduates to opt for money, which they need to service their loans, over socially meaninful legal practices].
This was in the presidential years of the born-again drug-addict, George W., processed through Yale — aren’t they all?!. Among the largely native-born Americans in our Rockefeller Leadership Program, I stood out like a sour thumb, whenever we had our own batch’s discussions about the rule of law, the Supreme Court, “democracy in America” and so on.
There I witnessed first-hand and intimately the Pavlovian behavior among some of the brightest, well-meaning American peers with their social justice activism. Their nearly absolutist confidence in their democratic checks and balances - and for lawyers and legal scholars among our group - the near absolutist faith in the Supreme Court which they apparently held in highest regards.
By then I had spent some years in Washington, DC, working out of Ralph Nader’s Center for the Study of Responsive Law. Ralph’s publicly espoused views that the two party system in USA is just the facade for the real corporate rule. For those of us who studied totalitarian and neo-totaltarian systems of the Eastern Bloc after the fall of the Berlin Wall in Nov. 1989 — the Burmese students’ national uprisings against Ne Win’s totalitarian system preceded both the Chinese uprisings in June 1989 and the GDR’s uprisings of Nov. 1989 — the conceptually useful term is “the really existing socialism”.
I argued with my American peers in the leadership program, telling them that their faith in the law in USA is Pavlovian and they failed to see the vast and irreconcilable gap between the really existing democracy in American and the French-academic tourist Tocqueville’s rose-tinted “democracy in America”.
Come the second invasion of Iraq post-9/11, and the Sec of State and ex-general Collin Power and his yellow cake, and I was becoming rather pained by the fact that my legal existence in the USA implicate me in the global crimes of the United States.
In 2004, when I was inducted, as “an influential Burmese activist”, into another “prestigious” leadership seminar, Georgetown Leadership Seminr - mostly international cohorts of about 30 individuals, all (but me) drawn from very Establishment circles in Europe, Middle East, Asia, Latin America and Africa, I was already asking uncomfortable questions with some of the powerful figures in the US Military Industrial Complex.
For instance, we would dine and wine with the likes of Madeline Albright, Denis Ross, Joints Chief General Peter Pace, some heads of national intelligence agencies and so on. I asked Peter Pace, who was a fellow of the same leadership program a few batch earlier than mine, “What’s the difference between the organizations that US designates as “terrorists” and the United States Armed Forces, given the fact that civilians killed in all wars since World War II far outnumber the enemy troops?” One of my peers in our cohour was an admiral and head of Counter-intelligence Division at Rumsfeld’s Pentagon, who later went on to become the Commander of the Ninth Fleet. I was glad that he was in the room.
In those days Washington prefer the word “enemy combatants” so that the American architects of invasions, wars and “accidental” mini-genocides could tell their wives and chilren at dinner that the daddy or the hubby is not violating the Geneva Conventions. Today little Pete of the Pentagon or little Rubio — in terms of their brain sizes and discernible depth of their intellect or wisdom — don’t even bother mentioning the “niceties” of international law.
Brazen summary executions suit their moral needs.
Time for renaming the “Center for the American Progress” as the Center for the American Decay or preferrably the American Death, insofar as the mass-murderous Rogue State of USA.
After a while, the experience of my own internal cognitive dissonance was such that I needed to cut my legal and formal ties with the United States as a political entity. I had spent 17 years - as a student, a white collar labourer (academic), a father, a husband and a taxpayer. I had grown so much, culturally, intellectually, ideologically and as a human in those years.
I will remain forever indebted to my American friends, the society, the educational and cultural institutions.
And I don’t really gloat “I told you so” or feel a sense of vindication.
I know that a large percentage of Americans are good, open-minded, warm and kind people. I also know that a larger percentage are Pavlovian.
The storied democracy in America is being butchered. It has been decaying for decades, thanks to the complacent and acquiesing American public. Democracy is not a permanent system of governance. It is a fortress for Citizens. If the citizens are on an opium - thinking “it can’t happen here” - then they are on a slippery slope, sleepwalking off a steep cliff.
The good Americans - liberals, in fact - are now waking up the ugly, scary reality - that their beloved America is in fact morphing from kleptocracy of corporate men (and-women) into a textbook Fascist entity. ICE is just the most visible tip of the berg. Fascism does NOT happen overnight. But hundreds of Americans were asleep. Now the Empire of Fascists are coming home in the streets of Minnesota. It is the land of the Thousand Lakes. It is being swarmed with deadly Trumpian Fascist militia - made lawful or “federalized” as part of the Department of Homeland Security.
MLK Jr. was incisive when he noted, “everything Hitler did in Nazi Germant was legal,” or to that effect, if not verbatim.
Trump America is a real textbook Fascist entity.
The good Americans are fucked, and so are we in the rest of the world.
For USA as such an entity poses a far greater threat to humanity at large than Hitler’s white-on-white crimes on the European continent and its peripheries of USSR.
I’ll leave you with a few really thoughtful items:American Progress by John Gast, c. 1872, which the Department of Homeland Security recently posted to social media.Courtesy of George A. Crofutt. Retrieved from the Library of Congress.
The Blood-and-Soil Nationalism That Killed Alex Pretti and Renee Good
“Pretti and Good were labeled “domestic terrorists” of The Homeland—rhetoric employed by the administration to justify the state taking life, by associating the dead with national villainy.”
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