On Sun, 01 Aug 2004 18:51:44 -0400 Ralph Dumain <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > It is always worthwhile to look beneath the surface and investigate > the > facts, but I don't trust Lil Joe's rhetoric. There's something > sectarian > and dishonest about this. Do you have any better sources that would > help > people unravel the situation? > >
Well Lil Joe had originally sent that piece directly to this list but for various reasons it bounced to me as moderator so I then forwarded it to the list. (BTW I found this political biography of Lil Joe at http://www.nathanielturner.com/liljoebio.htm. Well over at Uncle Lou's Marxmail list, there has been some discussion of Sudan, starting with the following piece that was posted by Uncle Lou, himself. NY Press, July 28-Aug 3, 2004 ONE HELLHOLE UNDER GOD Why the Republican Party suddenly cares about Sudan—or at least pretends to. By Christopher Lord Of all the unlikely places for America to be getting involved in another war, western Sudan has particularly little going for it. Unless you count a few million potential candidates for the Christian missionary business, there's little to interest outside entrepreneurs. What the country has in extraordinary abundance is problems. And thanks to a surprising chain of events, it looks as though some of these problems now belong to the United States, too. America's reasons for getting involved are complicated, and there are so many highly charged factors—slavery, religious persecution, fundamentalism (both Christian and Muslim), dictatorship, murder, ethnic strife, rape and famine—that it's difficult to see through the tangle of complications. This has led to a drastically simplified view of what is actually happening. The first oversimplification, dating back to Bill Clinton's presidency, is that Sudan means slavery. Though not the only serious human rights offender in the world, Sudan—not Brazil, not Egypt—caught the attention of human-trafficking activists. They, in turn, passed the fever on to congregations in African-American churches. From the churches, the issue spread into wider black political circles. "My ancestors were slaves. African-Americans can relate to slavery more intimately, politically, socially and spiritually, than they can anything else," said talk-radio host Joe Madison in 2001. It is this connection that first made Sudan an American political issue. During the Clinton years, the political path led to the Democratic Congressional Black Caucus, Rev. Al Sharpton and what you could loosely call a liberal idea. But the antislavery idea was not quite enough to reach mainstream white churchgoers, key members of the Bush II voter base. Hence, oversimplification number two: The war in Sudan was essentially about the persecution of Christians by Muslims. This "de-blacked" message made white evangelicals and Republican politicians comfortable, so on March 22, 2001, Republican Dick Armey, at that time House Majority Leader and ally of the evangelicals, said of Sudan: "It is the only place in the world in which religious genocide is taking place. People are being tortured, mutilated and killed solely because of their Christian faith." The religion-driven interest in Africa led directly to the bizarre spectacle in Kampala last year, when mystified Ugandans listened to George W. tell them that God sent him there. In fact, he wasn't talking to them at all, but to Christian voters back home. Church groups, in this case white church groups, had also begun organizing around the issue of an abstinence-based AIDS policy in Africa. Without this link to his fundamentalist base, Bush would be unlikely to ever mention the continent. But like slavery, the persecution of Christians is a side issue in Sudan, where some estimates put Christians as outnumbered two- or three-to-one by those with traditional beliefs in spirits and magic, and people now counted as Christians are recent converts, the targets of European and American missionary campaigns (and in many cases still believers in traditional spirituality). Even by evangelical standards, there are some weird versions of Christianity on offer. The notoriously brutal Lord's Resistance Army, for instance, a Ugandan group also operating in southern Sudan, claims to want a society based on the Ten Commandments—and abducts children to be soldiers. The Muslim/anti-Muslim explanation falls apart further when you consider that there are Christians in the south, and Muslims in the north. Many American activists are attracted to the fact that the Sudan People's Liberation Movement are Christians. While this group is the main opponent of the government in the south of the country, in Darfur the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) is avowedly Muslim, and the other main opposition group, the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army (SLM/A) has a message of equality of religions under the law. Fact is, the issue of self-determination for the south has been a contentious issue since the years before its independence in 1956, and it seems to cut straight across religious lines. Khartoum has been trying to run a centralized state, while the rebel leaders in the south of the country have wanted either to secede or achieve local power-sharing. full: http://www.nypress.com/17/30/news&columns/ChristopherLord.cfm ________________________________________________________________ The best thing to hit the Internet in years - Juno SpeedBand! Surf the Web up to FIVE TIMES FASTER! Only $14.95/ month - visit www.juno.com to sign up today! _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
