From: rifkin-AT-dept.english.upenn.edu (Mark Rifkin)
Subject: Re: India's tests in US media
Date: Tue, 19 May 1998 20:43:37 -0400 (EDT)


Questions about the CIA's culpability in this matter seem to rest on a far
more disturbing premise  -- the assumption that the U.S. *should* be able
to know what is happening globally at any given time, and that the U.S.
government has processes in place to intervene outside of U.S. borders.
This sounds like a neo-colonial nightmare, but it's actually true.
Furthermore, the fact that news programs seem to take this information for
granted, only directing questions to the seeming failure of U.S.
information networks, seems to me to point to a terrifyingly habituated
misrecognition by U.S. citizens of U.S. exploitation globally as
"peacekeeping."  Lastly, the threat that the U.S. will seek to pull India
into line with U.S. notions of nuclear safety through manipulation of the
world bank indicates to me that this vision of world order means a
nominally international consensus that serves as a front for a "peace"
brokered in the interests of nuclearly secured industrial powers, whose
ostensible beneficence actually functions de facto as politico-economic
domination.

distressedly yours,
mark




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