about it, but I couldn’t find much else. They subsequently published
another book of essays commenting on the first one, and I’ve never
seen a reference to that either.
The South Commission happened to represent most of the
world’s population, but the story they were telling just isn’t one the
Western media wanted to hear. So the “new world order” we
learned about was Bush’s, not the one advocated by the South
Commission, which reflects the interests of most of the people of
the world.
Back in the 1950s, there were Nehru, Nasser, Tito, Nkrumah,
Sukarno and others...
All of whom were despised by the US government.But there was also a period of intellectual ferment in the newly
independent countries. I’m thinking of people like Amilcar Cabral
[1924–73, leader of the independence struggle in the former
Portuguese colony of Guinea in West Africa] and Franz Fanon
[1925–61, the French author of The Wretched of the Earth, who
fought for Algerian independence]. I don’t see much of that right
now.
There’s still plenty of intellectual ferment, but it doesn’t have
the enthusiasm and the optimism of those days (although you can
hardly call Fanon very optimistic).
It had more of a revolutionary edge back then.
Yes, it did, but remember that since then there’s been a period of
extreme terror throughout much of the Third World—in which
we’ve played a prominent part—and that’s traumatized a lot of
people.
The Jesuits of Central America are very courageous people.
(Since they’re true dissidents within our domains, you hear very
little about them here, unless they’re murdered. Even their writings
are unknown.)
In January 1994, right before the Salvadoran election, they held a
conference on the “culture of terror.” They said terror has a
deeper effect than simply killing a lot of people and frightening a lot