ROSZAK QUINN AWOK FROMM BLACK ELK HIGHWATER VINE DELORIA ANARCHO-SYNDICALISM SCHUMACHER BITTU SAHGAL
POLITCAL ROCK COUNTERPUNCH COMMON DREAMS
DEEP ANTI-IMPERIALISM
WORKS- POEMS AND VIGNETTES- 2006
My Name is George Schubert.
My works are about the enlightenment that might
lead the people of our culture to a post-imperial mentality.
They address our history, conditioning, politics, and the
spiritual results of intellectual honesty.
DEEP ANTI-IMPERIALISM
Anti-imperialism is not just about the rights of indigenous peoples. qv
Anti-imperialism is not just about ending the economic and political repression of Latin America. qv
Anti-imperialism is not just about halting our betrayal of our own democratic ideals. qv
Anti-imperialism is not just about resisting the way that the will to dominate reasserts itself under the cloak of "realism." qv
Anti-imperialism is about pulling out from the spiritual sickness of megalomania, which has skewed us on all levels, from the international to the interpersonal to the internal.
Anti-imperialism is about recognizing how deeply we have all accepted and been practicing alienated imperialist logic, and how we must find workable alternatives to living that way, in order to live fully, and, it seems increasingly probable, in order to continue living at all.
Anti-imperialism is about reversing the fundamental flaw of our civilization, which is the dealing of death to everything that doesn't serve that civilization's growth, and it means accepting the growing enlightenment about what we have been doing to ourselves and to the earth for the past 10,000 years, as well as realizing the blindnesses we have had to cultivate to keep people pursuing that path.
Anti-imperialism means figuring out where to go with ourselves, with our amazing intelligence and our promethean and universalist impulses, after we drop our claims to and competition for the "all."
For those of us bred to identify with and continue our culture’s imperialistic drive, and ourselves already guilty of some of its crimes, abandoning the protection of the imperialist myth may seem like an invitation to a paralyzing self-indictment. The only alternative to becoming vulnerable to this indictment may seem to be to uphold that myth, even after we know it is destructive, that it is based on lies, and that it cannot deliver the never-ending ascent it promises.
But the rejection of imperialism is about saving ourselves from imperialism, too. The rejection of imperialism is about us, as maturing beings, passing beyond the rationalizing of our tyrannical applications of our abilities, recognizing and ceasing our poisonous activities, not in order to stand mortified in self-reproach and ready to suffer or die for the guilt, but to grow wise, to accept rather than reject life’s investment in us; to retain the abilities life has reached in us, but to become types of humans less other-destroying, less blithely hypocritical in our power relations, yet still fit, still able to look after ourselves and our comrades, still capable of enduring, and willing to explore what life can open up to us and through us. But it does also mean that we must renounce murder as a tool of increasing our share of this world.
Anti-imperialism can only be potent as a moral, not a self-absorbedly intellectual, exercise.
Anti-imperialism must start at home.
GIVE BACK ALL STOLEN LANDS.