Cohousing-L Mailing List: I know your eyes are weary, but please read this.

[Joani Blank (joani]

The following is an excerpt from a very long piece written by my friend 
Steve Chase who is on the faculty of Antioch New England Graduate School. I 
hope each person who reads this will pass it on to at least one person who 
believes that the attack on our nation was completely unwarranted, and that 
a "war on terrorism" is both justified and will be effective.

I would be happy to send the complete "letter" to anyone who requests it 
.  It is of a totally different order than all the other remarkable email 
that has been passed around during the last week, reminding us (or 
revealing) what really happened in Vietnam, and including revelatory quotes 
from Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson and others.

from Steve Chase (schase [at] igc.org in case you'd like to respond to him)

"Back towards the end of the Second World War, US foreign policy planners
engaged in what they called "Grand Area Planning." It was essentially an
effort to figure out how to make the United States the world's most dominant
political, economic, and military power in the "post-war" world. In the
midst of this methodical planning process, George Kennan, the head of the
State Department's Planning Office wrote a secret memo summarizing the real,
operating foreign policy objectives of the US government that have guided US
military and foreign policy ever since. In that revealing State Department
report from 1948--reflecting a consensus in the highest policy circles of
the US government--Kennan wrote:

" 'We have about 50% of the world's wealth, but only 6.3% of its
population.... In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy
and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern
of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of
disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so,
we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our
attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate
national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford
today the luxury of altruism and world benefaction... We should cease to
talk about vague and--for the Far East--unreal objectives such as human
rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day
is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power
concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.' "

Are you chilled by these words describing our nation's actual foreign policy
goals? I am. This document, of course, was written only for internal
government consumption. Publicly, every military and foreign policy
initiative since 1948 has always been touted by government spokespeople as a
way to defend freedom, democracy, justice, economic opportunity, human
rights, goodness, even western civilization. Kennan even published articles
and gave interviews in the 1950s and 1960s acting as if these were the only
motives of US foreign policy. Of course, how else could these elites
possibly gain enough acceptance for their military actions from the
good-hearted majority of the American people who would be appalled by our
government's actual motivations--and their often terrorist tactics--in far
away lands in the Far East, the Middle East, Africa, and Central and South
America?"


_______________________________________________
Cohousing-L mailing list
Cohousing-L [at] cohousing.org  Unsubscribe  and other info:
http://www.communityforum.net/mailman/listinfo/cohousing-l