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 Sudanor 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 factorsslavery, religious persecution,
fundamentalism (both Christian and Muslim), dictatorship, murder, ethnic
strife, rape and faminethat 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, Sudannot Brazil, not Egyptcaught 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
Commandmentsand 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-de
