See Top Docs website:
BANANA Land: Blood, Bullets and Poison....
Reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez's memoir 'Living to Tell the Tale' where he mentions writing his first 'novel' (or novella) 'Leaf Storm' around age 27, it occurred to me how little I knew of his motivation for writing what he did. I hadn't read 'Leaf Storm' (though it sits on the shelf beside me - acquired, I notice, from an Old Town junk shop for 35p some years ago) but I remember well his masterpiece 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' from when I read it way back in the 80s (it was published in 1967 when he was 40) and his reasons for writing it are described on wikipedia.
Garcia Marquez was born just after the banana massacre that was so shocking to ordinary people they could barely talk about it, opponents of such corporate murder (instigated by the US govt on behalf of the United Fruit Company) formed alliances from which emerged the famous people's army FARC. It was this massacre that haunted Marquez and which he portrays in 'One Hundred Years of Solitude'. As he implies in his memoir: If you want to exorcise what haunts you then write about it.
The above Top Docs link reveals a range of outstanding and up to date documentary films on issues that I believe would have concerned Marquez, who died in 2014.
Publication of issues like this makes no difference, alas; the world remains dominated by untold greed and brutality, mostly derived from or supported by US politicians and the corporate outfits they support (and represent), as with the banana massacre. But to become aware... to look deeper and question everything.... of the true nature of the thugs we are expected to vote for every 4 or 5 years should be an obligation of us all.... only then might there be a chance that civilisation can prevail in the world.
In his 1997 memoir 'Palimpsest' Gore Vidal dedicates a whole chapter to Guatemala where he lived during 1954 when the US bombed Guatemala City because workers resisted that same United Fruit Company's attempts to enslave them. Vidal later discovered that a 'kindly' millionaire uncle of his who was heavily invested in United Fruit (and was close to the US govt) had inspired the attack which led to the overthrow of the Guatemalan govt and the installation of a US compliant Fascist dictator. He subsequently spent the rest of his life attacking the US establishment and its empirical ambitions.
Garcia Marquez eloquently denounces these and other atrocities in his 1982 Nobel Prize speech - but almost, I thought, as if they were a more or less inevitable part of a history of violence and massacres in Latin America. Even so, he declares his hope that such events remain in the past... yet 40-years later Western imperialists (in particular the US, UK and Israel) have only increased their imperial ambitions, but not just in Latin America: see, for instance: William Blum - scroll down through 56 chapters of invasions, massacres and plundering by the US alone between 1945 and 1992 - since when most notably there has been Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya... as well as continued attempts to overturn elected Latin American governments, esp Venezuela with its vast oil reserves like Iraq.
To talk about US, UK & Israel 'imperialists' I don't intend to implicate us ordinary folk bamboozled, fooled or otherwise forced - as we are - into accepting the Hobson's choice of 'selected' candidates to elect and who make political decisions on our behalf. The guilty are exclusively the self-appointed 'elite'. And their toadies include most politicians, who are frequently inept (except at fobbing-off persistent reporters) and seem to have little idea of the underlying malevolent agenda of their 'superiors', plus well-off supportive hangers-on and a whole army of indoctrinated bigots and misguided simpletons. All vulnerable to simplistic propaganda ('Get Brexit Done') or that bribes (promises 'trickle-down' or 'level-up', etc.) or sufficiently threatens their status or position. They're the 'soldiers', so to speak.
The 'generals' (to continue the metaphor), the true 'elite', are top politicians - esp very rich ones, together with representatives of BIG corp: ie, BIG oil, BIG military, BIG pharma, BIG food - esp meat - BIG investors (banks), BIG media (the MSM), plus BIG bosses: CEOs of FTSE 100 +, including billionaires like Dyson or Branson (who was active in trying to destabilise Venezuela, for instance), the traditional upper class landowning mob.... etc., they're the fly in the ointment, as it were, who like a poisonous fungus turn everything they touch into a deadly slime that spreads and infects so much of society, in the West at least. So many of us are left with a kind of moribund resigned acceptance or hopelessness.
The Brexit Fascists, unlike the Fascists who began the Spanish civil war, have achieved the first step in their ambitions without military conflict and so far with less carnage. Will the UK public wake-up to recognise the current specious propaganda for what it is? There's no sign yet, regardless of increasing poverty and the other consequences of decadence.
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