Remembering Gandhi by Jeff Knaebel

Remembering Gandhi by Jeff Knaebel:

"I believe that Gandhi was totally correct when he said 'We must be the change we wish to see.' The point where change must occur is at the individual, personal level, multiplied by about 6 billion. As the cartoon character Pogo said, 'We have met the enemy and they is us.'

Once when Gandhi’s great friend, the Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore, was visiting a Bedouin camp in Iraq, the chief told Tagore, 'Our prophet has said that a true Muslim is he who, by his words and deeds not the least of his brother-men may ever come to any harm.' Tagore then noted in his diary, 'I was startled into recognizing in his words the voice of essential humanity.'

As I speak, the country of my birth is systematically, in cold-blooded calculation, destroying the Iraq of which Tagore spoke. When the killing will stop, no one knows. I stand before you with a deep sense of shame. My country’s actions are a stain upon humanity.

...Arundhati Roy, the Indian winner of the Booker Prize for literature, wrote in The Algebra of Infinite Justice '… a world laid waste by America’s foreign policy: its gunboat diplomacy, its nuclear arsenal, its vulgar policy of ‘full spectrum dominance’, its chilling disregard for non-American lives, its barbarous military interventions, its support for despotic dictatorial regimes, its merciless economic agenda that has munched though poor countries like a cloud of locusts…The International Coalition Against Terror is largely a cabal of the richest countries in the world. Between them, they manufacture and sell almost all of the world’s weapons, they possess the largest stockpile of Weapons of Mass Destruction. They have fought the most wars, account for most of the genocide, subjection, ethnic cleansing, and human rights violations in modern history. They have worshipped, almost deified the cult of violence and war…""