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“Malaysia & the Aboriginal Peoples Act”
Malaysia has a legislatively approved statute (sounds like an oxymoron) called the Aboriginal Peoples Act of 1950 in which is codified the state's obligations and fiduciary duties towards the aboriginal peoples of Malaysia numbering some seven hundred thousand people whose descendants inhabited the Malay Peninsula – once called the Golden Chersonese - several thousands years ago.
The interesting aspect of this legislation is that the state is obligated, and mandated, to honor and respect aboriginal peoples rights to their lands and to their general welfare as the nation's first peoples. Bush 43 has used the same words to describe the American Indians while not directly referring to their plight.
This superpower that is the United States does not have any form of protective legislation towards its aboriginal peoples like the Malaysian model, the Aboriginal Peoples Act of 1950. Various models of legislation, including Title 25 of the United States Code, are essentially prohibitive replete with verbiage outlining for the American Indians a host of "thou shall do this and thou shall not do that" exhortations, admonishments, and warnings.
Sometimes, during bouts of exuberant irrationality and wanton arrogance, the west has dubbed Malaysia a Third World developing nation. On the other hand the United States is constantly referred to as a superpower. Yes, superpower indeed if one takes into account the plethora of weapons of mass destruction that we have amassed and assembled. All for the "democratization" purpose. Superpower par excellence in the sense that no other power under the guise of statehood will ever wag its tail at the United States for fear of military reprisals. In this context, one ought to recall that Dean Acheson, a respected elder statesman and a senior adviser to the Kennedy administration, delivered a lecture to the American Society of International Law in which he stated that "no legal issue arises if the United States responds to any challenge to its power, position, and prestige".
"A page of history is worth a pound of logic", said Justice Holmes. And "historians are the guardians of mankind's collective memory", said Pieter Geyl (1887-1966). Just look back at the September 1973 US-backed coup in Chile. Also recall the August 1953 US-CIA-backed coup in Iran which installed the Shah and overturned the parliamentary democratic government of Mohammed Mossadegh. October 2003 marked the 20th anniversary of the US invasion of Grenada.
PEOPLE
The sad and untold part of the real story must begin with the "Notes of the Secret Debates of the Federal Convention of 1787", from Documents Illustrative of the Formation of the Union of the American States (Government Printing Office). These documents reveal the genesis of the Madisonian principle that the people are just too dangerous: power has to be in the hands of what Madison called "the wealth of the nation," people who respect property and its rights and are willing to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority, which had to be fragmented somehow.
People can be controlled. Woodrow Wilson's propaganda industry included people such as Edward Bernays, who became the guru of the public relations industry, and Walter Lippmann, a leading public intellectual of the 20th century. In their writings during the 1920's they spoke of how to control "the public mind". Once this is accomplished you control opinions and attitudes, and, in Lippmann's phrase "manufacture consent". Bernays said that the more intelligent members of the community can direct the population through "the engineering of consent," which he considered "the very essence of the democratic process". For references and more detail, see Noam Chomsky, Necessary Illusions (South End Press, 1989), pp. 16-17.
The framers of the US Constitution, often referred to as "founding fathers", as if the government is our parent, made sure that mobocracy will never prevail in America. Instead they entrenched a dollarcracy in this land where it is the government of the dollar, by the dollar, for the dollar. The almighty dollar is everything. The middle class is the sacrificial goat.
The framers made sure that elected legislators were men of wealth, power, and influence. How many truck drivers, plumbers, carpenters, and laborers, athletes, or entertainers do you see in the legislature?
Judge Naidu
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"Why do you call me 'Lord, Lord' and do not do what I say?" - Jesus, Luke 6:46