The video of this presentation can be found here:
Rwanda/Libya:
Same Counter-Revolution, Different Day
With the current intensification of the campaign for regime change in Syria (and finally a division of the
UNSC along WWII lines with China and Russia trying to dust off their old anti-fascist creds to stop the
anti-Palestinian madness), the repetition/compulsion syndrome driving this paramilitary activity that
passes for geopolitics may have, once again, disappeared into the fuzzy uniqueness of this, yet another
coup d’état against a popular government led by a mass party, Assad’s Syrian Ba’athist Socialists.
Rwanda’s regime change began more than 20 years ago now–right on the heels of the busting and
privatization of the Soviet Union. Then, similarly, came Yugoslavia’s violent buy-out. And most recently
Libya’s Jamalahiya was overturned and its leader murdered most gruesomely. All the while, there have
been parallel fascist acquisitions using this model for geopolitical privatization at work in Iraq,
Afghanistan and, with much less success though just as much violence, in Iran–actually, throughout
North/Central Africa, the Middle East, Eurasia, East/Central Europe–really, the military campaign behind
the venture capitalist wastage of the planet and everything on it has for some time now reached fully
global proportions.
I hope that by going over some of the techniques used to get us to accept just one more violent national
buy-out in the name of Human Rights and civilian security–the linguistics of it, the media lies and
manipulations in the use of terms like ‘genocide’, ‘rape as a weapon of war’, and duly elected leaders as
‘dictators or Stalinist strongmen’, the evisceration of the international Justice system (such as it is or ever
has been), and the flipping of international institutions for Peace into global militias for the IFI
(International Financial Institutions) to enforce their criminal contracts–I hope we can get a feeling for
how this latest crime against Humanity is neither unique nor singly correct, and that the subsumption of
use-value by exchange value, on a purely human and geopolitical level, has led to the uncontrolled and
uncontrollable destruction–for no good purpose and to no one's real gain: just wasting for waste’s sake–of
our entire material–and philosophical–ecosystem.
We are living through an inversion of reason and a perversion of decent human sociability that make
Orwell’s vision seem like Rogers and Hammerstein’s.
-Mick Collins
Wednesday, March 7, 7:30 PM
451 West Street, New York, NY 10014
(212) 242-4201
www.brechtforum.org
The Brecht Forum
Collins is either a washed up stage and screen actor/writer/director moonlighting as a geopolitical historian/agitator/propagandist, or vice versa.