From Death Row: The New Colonialism

FROM DEATH ROW: THE NEW COLONIALISM

By Mumia Abu-Jamal

[Colonies do not cease to be colonies because they are
independent.

--Benjamin Disraeli,
British statesman]

With the news that American political leaders are involved
in intense meetings with the deposed King of Afghanistan is
the revelation that the United States is trying to install a
king over another people.

What\'s wrong with this, people?

How does it make sense for a nation that calls for democracy
to impose, with its guns and military might, a royal house
upon a foreign people?

Muhammad Zahir Shah, an octogenarian who was overthrown from
the Afghani throne back in 1973, is now living in Rome and
is being groomed to be reinstalled in Kabul by the U.S.
government.

Gone from his homeland for almost thirty years now (28, to
be precise), why does the U.S. want to seat him, when the
Afghani people have expressed no significant interest in his
return for almost three decades?

It is hard for one to resist the temptation that the U.S.
wants to put in a puppet that it can manipulate, control and
rule through.

What seems clear is that the U.S. is doing, this time
through military means, what it has done before in the
region through spy craft.

In the 1950s, the CIA brought about the removal of Iranian
premier Muhammad Mossadegh, to return the Shah to power,
which in turn led the nation down the road that turned Iran
into a repressive state, to keep oil under Western control.

Are the Afghanis somehow too primitive (in U.S. eyes) to
appreciate the principle of democracy?

What emerges from this U.S. attempt to install a potentate
is the reality that the Americans don\'t really give a damn
about democracy.

Almost all of the states in the region that the U.S. calls
allies are as far from democracies as the earth is from the
moon. If the U.S. cared about democracies, why has U.S.
foreign policy for the last half-century been the
protection, sustaining and arming of anti-democratic
dictators? From Marcos in the Philippines, Suharto in
Indonesia, the Duvaliers in Haiti, to Mobutu in Zaire, and
on and on.

Indeed, we need not go that far.

The recent elections in Florida, which featured racial and
ethnic profiling of Black, Haitian and Jewish voters there,
and thereby denying them the opportunity to meaningfully
participate in the U.S. democracy by voting, proves that
Americans need not go abroad to protect or promote
democracy.

There is something unseemly about a nation that came into
being by declaring independence from a king to urge a king
upon a foreign people. Democracy begins at home