This recent letter from Professor Bernard Lown shows what can be considedred a new prospect for Global Health with more peace and justice to an aching world.
Tunisia
Dear Friends,
The rapidly unfolding events in Tunisia brings hope to the ossified Arab world. Far too long Arabs have been overwhelmed by wretchedness, corrupt governments, bypassed by the enlightenment, shunted by the age of science and modernity.
Those of us who depend on corporate media to be informed about the world must be taken aback. Wasn't Zine el-Abdine Ben Ali an enlightened leader, a friend of democracies promoting Western values, who fostered prosperity for his people and helped stem the tide of crazed Islamic Jihaists?
I'm old enough to have lived through an endless list of Frankensteins who found favor in Washington. These were frequently launched with a connivance of the CIA and kept in power by our largesse. Alphabetically–Omar Bango (Gabon), Fulgerncio Batista (Cuba), Papa Doc and son Jean Claude Duvalier (Haiti), Ferdinand Marcos (Philippines) Osama bin Laden (Saudi Arabia),), Hosni Mubarak (Egypt), Mobutu Sese Seko (Congo), Ngo Dinh Diem (Vietnam), Georgios Padapolos (Greece), Jonas Savimbi (Angola), Augusto Pinochet (Chile), Mohammad Rezā Shāh Pahlavi (Iran), Saddam Hussein (Iraq), Saudi monarchs (Saudi Arabia), Anastasio Somoza (Nicaragua), Alfredo Strösner (Paraguay), Suharto (Indonesia), Rafael Trujillo (Dominican Republic), Zia al Haq (Pakistan).
Each of you, no doubt, can add to the murderous list of dictators that the USA sponsored. All were proteges of the Ameerican government irrespective whether republicans or democrats were in power. The variable justification for support was that they were fighting communism, drugs, and now terrorists. Washington maintained that they brought order and were readying their wayward countries for democracy.
Several key and analyses will not appear in Western media.
1. Events in Tunisia, in part, reflect diminution of global dominance by the USA.
2. The revolution in Tunisia is secular. Islamism is largely the consequence of continuing economic colonialism by the West, primarily the United States and its petroleum dominated foreign policy in the Arab world.
3.Tunisian events may be viewed as equivalent to the fall of the Berlin wall. There is likely to exert domino effects sweeping the Arab world. If it happened in Tunisia, no Arab country is immune.
4.The revolution will not be easily contained since it is indigenous and arises from below.
5. This last point deserves pondering. The events preceding the Tunisian revolutionare are similar to what is ongoing on a far more colossal scale in the USA–pacification of the masses by having until recently made available easy credit, inflow of cheap commodities, destruction of trade unions, impoverishment of the middle class, militarization of society, widening gap in income between the few and the many, and ultimately the wealth of the country concentrated in the Ben Ali family or in Wall Street.
Enclosed is an informative analysis that brings coherence to the unfolding events in Tunisia.
As this is still January, a wish for the new year.
May 2011 bring more peace with justice to an aching world
Bernard Lown
 | Tunis revolution from Abdelnour 01-19-11.rtf 24K View as HTML Download |
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