Comments on: Be Ready for Fresh Revolt: Prachanda http://focus.blogsome.com/2007/09/08/be-ready-for-fresh-revolt-prachanda/ focus for republic nepal Thu, 25 Sep 2008 22:37:37 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=1.5.1-alpha by: Stephen Mikesell http://focus.blogsome.com/2007/09/08/be-ready-for-fresh-revolt-prachanda/#comment-76 Tue, 11 Sep 2007 17:02:18 +0100 http://focus.blogsome.com/2007/09/08/be-ready-for-fresh-revolt-prachanda/#comment-76 Though I too tendered hopes, I never had great expectations for what they call the peace process as it has been framed. Not because peace is undesirable and that one should prefer war -- to the contrary, like the great Black American leader, W.E.B. Du Bois, I feel that war is always evil and that only evil can come of it -- but because the problem in Nepal is not peace or war but how the country's communities, both human and natural, are being re-integrated into the world political economy in an age of global corporate governance. Nothing is being done about the problem of almost universal rural debt and unequal distribution of property. Nothing is being done about the dismantling and destruction of communities and draft of Nepal's young people into urban labor and flesh trade markets. Nothing is being done about the destruction of the urban environment in Kathmandu and other cities. Nothing is being done to turn the process of designing a new government over to the communities to be governed. If peace negotiations are to have any meaning, all these issues and many more must be on the table. In fact, the whole thrust of twentieth-century new colonialists such as USAID and the international development banks has been to push for extending inequality, in what they call “privatization” and farming out governmental functions to international contractors, and protecting the creditors against all other claims, both human and natural, while opening up local markets and communities to the free entry of gigantic international corporations. These corporations, owned by stock holders and bankers indifferent except to their dividends and interest, directed by overcompensated gray suits in climate-controlled office towers looking down from the skies of the great metropolitan capitals, have basically no understanding of what it takes to run an agrarian society, and I might add, any society. The same people that call themselves peacemakers are for the most part involved hand-in-hand in this process and take it to be the normative starting point of their negotiations. Violence can be the only outcome of such a peace process, framed as it is by outsiders as a state of “no war,” which means passive compliance, based however on conditions of increasing subordination of the country of Nepal to international bankers and contractors. The question is whether the world's peoples should to their communities and environments crumbling around themselves and call it peace, or resist it and try to give substance to a different vision of the world. My caveat to this is that the ends will necessarily take form in the means, and that no ends can justify unjust or evil means: War cannot be Peace; Freedom cannot be Slavery; Ignorance is never Strength; and Lies are never Truth. Though I too tendered hopes, I never had great expectations for what they call the peace process as it has been framed. Not because peace is undesirable and that one should prefer war — to the contrary, like the great Black American leader, W.E.B. Du Bois, I feel that war is always evil and that only evil can come of it — but because the problem in Nepal is not peace or war but how the country’s communities, both human and natural, are being re-integrated into the world political economy in an age of global corporate governance.

Nothing is being done about the problem of almost universal rural debt and unequal distribution of property. Nothing is being done about the dismantling and destruction of communities and draft of Nepal’s young people into urban labor and flesh trade markets. Nothing is being done about the destruction of the urban environment in Kathmandu and other cities. Nothing is being done to turn the process of designing a new government over to the communities to be governed. If peace negotiations are to have any meaning, all these issues and many more must be on the table.

In fact, the whole thrust of twentieth-century new colonialists such as USAID and the international development banks has been to push for extending inequality, in what they call “privatization” and farming out governmental functions to international contractors, and protecting the creditors against all other claims, both human and natural, while opening up local markets and communities to the free entry of gigantic international corporations. These corporations, owned by stock holders and bankers indifferent except to their dividends and interest, directed by overcompensated gray suits in climate-controlled office towers looking down from the skies of the great metropolitan capitals, have basically no understanding of what it takes to run an agrarian society, and I might add, any society. The same people that call themselves peacemakers are for the most part involved hand-in-hand in this process and take it to be the normative starting point of their negotiations.

Violence can be the only outcome of such a peace process, framed as it is by outsiders as a state of “no war,” which means passive compliance, based however on conditions of increasing subordination of the country of Nepal to international bankers and contractors. The question is whether the world’s peoples should to their communities and environments crumbling around themselves and call it peace, or resist it and try to give substance to a different vision of the world. My caveat to this is that the ends will necessarily take form in the means, and that no ends can justify unjust or evil means: War cannot be Peace; Freedom cannot be Slavery; Ignorance is never Strength; and Lies are never Truth.

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