KARACHI: Search for your solutions within, says Barsamian
KARACHI, Dec 4: Destroying the perception that some external saviours were going to descend from the heavens and deliver to us the ideals many of us hold dear such as freedom, democracy and liberty, American intellectual David Barsamian said that any change in this country would have to come from within.
Delivering the Dr Eqbal Ahmad Distinguished Lecture at the Karachi Arts Council’s auditorium on Tuesday, he said this in response to some questions that had been earlier asked of him regarding what should be done to fight dictatorship and strengthen democracy in Pakistan.
“Democracy must come from the bottom up. This is your country. You must own what you do. There’s too many white people running around telling brown people what to do,” he told the audience in a mixture of English and Urdu, which he speaks quite fluently after having spent three years in New Delhi.
The lecture, organised by the Dr Eqbal Ahmad Foundation and monthly magazine Badalti Dunya, was well attended as the hall of the auditorium was nearly full to hear the award-winning radio producer, journalist, author and lecturer present his views on US foreign policy, history and current affairs. The lecture’s title, ‘What we say goes – America and the world’, was taken from one of Barsamian’s books, a compilation of interviews with respected dissident intellectual Noam Chomsky.
“You cannot trust the US to do the right thing when it comes to the Pakistani people. The US has always seen Pakistan as an instrument,” he said, though cautioning that “not all Americans are like George Bush and Condoleezza Rice. You have support from US civil society”.
As for the state of the US media, he said: “Five corporations dominate what Americans see, hear and read”, adding that “the majority of Americans know nothing about the East. Someone once asked me if Pakistan was next to Palestine”.
As for the roots of the current Middle East crisis, Mr Barsamian said that the US had eyes on the area’s energy reserves since at least as far back as the Second World War. “By 1943, it was clear that the US was going to emerge as the world’s economic and military superpower. The Middle East was declared the greatest strategic prize in the world by the US State Department”, he said. “The 1953 coup against Mohammed Mosaddeq (backed by the US) replaced the UK with the US as the region’s powerbroker. It illustrated the real intentions of the US – domination”.
Rhythm of the war drums
Regarding the constant pounding of war drums that can be heard echoing from the US and its allies in Europe for action against Iran, Barsamian said the rhetoric was eerily similar to what was being churned out before the invasion of Iraq.
“They’re taking the press releases prepared five or six years ago and changing the ‘Q’ in Iraq to the ‘N’ in Iran. They’re repeating the same lies. But when Iraq was fighting Iran, it was the good guy. It was supplied billions of dollars along with intelligence against Iran”, by the West, he claimed.
“Iran has always been in their gun-sights. They have never accepted the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Rice has said Iran is a country to be loathed, while Bush has claimed it was the biggest terrorist threat in the world. The US thought Iraq would be a pushover, then the tanks would roll into Iran, even though Iran had helped the US against the Taliban,” he said, adding that during Mohammed Khatami’s time, Iranian proposals for dialogue were rebuffed by the US, which was very humiliating for Tehran.
“It will be a disaster bigger than Iraq,” he cautioned.
“Oil is the fuel that drives the empire, while weaponry is its currency. The Godfather does not like any opposition,” he said, concluding his lecture with a bit of advice for Pakistanis: “Power concedes nothing without a demand”.
Earlier, Barsamian reminisced about his association with Eqbal Ahmad, which dated back to the early 1980s. He claimed that Dr Ahmad had predicted the current geopolitical crises when he had told Barsamian in 1998, three years before Sept 11, that “Osama Bin Laden is a sign of things to come. The US has sown in the Middle East and South Asia very dangerous seeds. We have to see how they should be reaped. Missiles will not solve the problem”.—QAM
KARACHI, Dec 4: Destroying the perception that some external saviours were going to descend from the heavens and deliver to us the ideals many of us hold dear such as freedom, democracy and liberty, American intellectual David Barsamian said that any change in this country would have to come from within.
