{"id":692504,"date":"2022-06-09T12:26:29","date_gmt":"2022-06-09T12:26:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dissidentvoice.org\/?p=130360"},"modified":"2022-06-09T12:26:29","modified_gmt":"2022-06-09T12:26:29","slug":"for-the-peoples-of-our-region-the-failure-of-bidens-summit-of-the-americas-would-be-a-welcome-event","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2022\/06\/09\/for-the-peoples-of-our-region-the-failure-of-bidens-summit-of-the-americas-would-be-a-welcome-event\/","title":{"rendered":"For the Peoples of our Region, the Failure of Biden\u2019s Summit of the Americas Would be a Welcome Event"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Summit of the Americas is not the property of the host nation. The U.S. has no right to exclude, Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela, but has done so in disregard of their sovereignty. The U.S. is not fit to judge others or to be responsible for bringing nations together.\u00a0Every leader in the hemisphere should boycott what has become\u00a0a farcical event.<\/em><\/p>\n

I applaud the decision by Mexican President Andr\u00e9s Manuel L\u00f3pez Obrador not to attend this week\u2019s so-called Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles and hope that by Wednesday a majority of the nations in our region would have joined him. However, I am hoping that unlike President Lopez Obrador who is still sending the Mexican foreign minister, other nations demonstrate that their dignity cannot be coerced and stay away completely. Why do I take this position?<\/p>\n

If the threat by the Biden Administration as host of the Summit not to invite Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela, all sovereign nations in the Americas\u2019 region, was not outrageous enough, the announced rationale that the administration did not invite these nations because of their human rights record and authoritarian governance is an absurd indignity that cannot be ignored.<\/p>\n

I firmly believe that the U.S. should not be allowed to subvert, degrade, and humiliate nations and the peoples of our region with impunity!\u00a0 A line of demarcation must be drawn between the nations and peoples who represent democracy and life and the parasitic hegemon to the North which can only offer dependence and death. The U.S. has made its choice that is reflected in its public documents. \u201cFull spectrum dominance,\u201d is its stated goal. In other words \u2013 waging war against the peoples of our regions and, indeed, the world to maintain global hegemony. It has chosen war, we must choose resistance \u2013 on that, there can be no compromise!<\/p>\n

The peoples of our region understand that. It is historically imperative that the representatives of the states in our region come to terms with that and commit to resistance and solidarity with the states that are experiencing the most intense pressure from empire. The rhetorical commitment to Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela is not enough. The people want actions that go beyond mere denunciations of imperialism. The people are ready to fight.<\/p>\n

And part of this fight includes the ideological war of position. We cannot allow the U.S. to obscure its murderous history by dressing that history up in pretty language about human rights.<\/p>\n

The idea that the U.S., or any Western nation for that matter, involved in the ongoing imperialist project, could seriously see itself as a protector of human rights is bizarre and dangerous, and must be countered. The fact that the U.S. will still attempt to advance this fiction reflects either the height of arrogance or a society and administration caught in the grip of a collective national psychosis. I am convinced it is both, but more on that later.<\/p>\n

A cognitive rupture from objective reality, the inability to locate oneself in relationship to other human beings individually and collectively in the material world are all symptoms of severe mental derangement. Yet, it appears that this is the condition that structures the psychic make-up of all of the leaders of the U.S. and the collective West.<\/p>\n

It is what I have referred to as the psychopathology of white supremacy:<\/p>\n

A racialized narcissistic cognitive disorder that centers so-called white people\u2019s and European civilization and renders the afflicted with an inability to perceive objective reality in the same way as others. This affliction is not reducible to the race of so-called whites but can affect all those who have come in contact with the ideological and cultural mechanisms of the Pan-European colonial project.<\/p>\n

How else can you explain the self-perceptions of the U.S. and West, responsible for the most horrific crimes against humanity in the annuals of human history from genocide, slavery, world wars, the European, African and Indigenous holocausts, wars and subversion since 1945 that have resulted in over 30 million lives lost \u2013 but then assert their innocence, moral superiority and right to define the content and range of\u00a0human rights?<\/p>\n

Aileen Teague of the Quincy Institute points out <\/a>that the U.S. position on disinviting nations to the Summit of the Americas because of their alleged \u201cauthoritarian governance,\u201d is \u201chypocritical\u201d and \u201cinconsistent,\u201d noting the U.S. historical support for Latin American dictators when convenient for US policy.<\/p>\n

Yet is it really hypothetical or inconsistent? I think not. U.S. policymakers are operating from an ethical and philosophical framework that informed Western colonial practice in which racialized humanity became divided between those who were placed into the category of \u201chumans\u201d which was constitutive of the historically expanded category of \u201cwhite\u201d in relationship to everyone else who was \u201cnot white,\u201d and therefore, not fully human.<\/p>\n

The \u201cothers\u201d during the colonial conquest literally did not have any rights that Europeans were bound to recognize and respect from land rights to their very lives. Consequently, for European colonialists they did not perceive any ethical contradictions in their treatment of the \u201cothers\u201d and did not judge themselves as deviating from their principles and values. This is what so many non-Europeans do not understand. When Europeans speak to their \u201ctraditional values,\u201d it must be understood that those values mean we – the colonized and exploited non-Europeans are not recognized in our full humanity.<\/p>\n

Is there any other way to explain the impressive solidarity among \u201cwhite peoples\u201d on Ukraine in contrast to the tragedies of Yemen, the six million dead in the Congo, Iraq \u2013 the list goes on.<\/p>\n

That is why it was so correct for the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) <\/a>to call for a boycott of the Summit of the Americas by all of the states in our region. BAP argued that the U.S. had no moral or political standing to host this gathering because it has consistently demonstrated that it did not respect the principles of self-determination and national sovereignty in the region. But even more importantly, it did not respect the lives of the people of this region.<\/p>\n

A boycott is only the minimum that should be done. However, we understand it will be difficult because we know the vindictiveness of the gringo hegemon and the lengths it will go to assert its vicious domination. In the arrogance that is typical of the colonial white supremacist mindset, the Biden White House asserts that the \u201csummit will be successful no matter who attends.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet, if Biden is sitting there by himself, no manner of will or the power to define, will avoid the obvious conclusion that the world had changed, and with that change, the balance of power away from the U.S.<\/p>\n

And the people say \u2013 let it be done!<\/p>The post For the Peoples of our Region, the Failure of Biden\u2019s Summit of the Americas Would be a Welcome Event<\/a> first appeared on Dissident Voice<\/a>.\n

This post was originally published on Dissident Voice<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Summit of the Americas is not the property of the host nation. The U.S. has no right to exclude, Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela, but has done so in disregard of their sovereignty. The U.S. is not fit to judge others or to be responsible for bringing nations together.\u00a0Every leader in the hemisphere should boycott [\u2026]<\/p>\n

The post For the Peoples of our Region, the Failure of Biden\u2019s Summit of the Americas Would be a Welcome Event<\/a> first appeared on Dissident Voice<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":100,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1003,1010,51,1019,48622,3074,58,714,59],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/692504"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/100"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=692504"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/692504\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":692505,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/692504\/revisions\/692505"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=692504"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=692504"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=692504"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}