[The 90’s raw: Dr. Blase Bonpane]

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00:03Copy video clip URL Dr. Blase Bonpane in mid-speech talking about George Bush’s decision to start a war in 1991 and why he resigned. “A new world order would not depend on Saddam Hussein or on George Bush, but on an international consensus. We want to get private citizens to build a collective new world order, listening to each other and not have the ruling power make decisions about war. The ruling power always tries to define what the truth of a situation is, but that’s sometime’s different from what the truth actually is.”

03:26Copy video clip URL Bonpane adds this will change by empowering our citizens. “Our leadership was meant to serve the public, that was the structure designed by Washington and Jefferson. They didn’t want kings.” Some say the Iraq war was oil, some say democracy. Most of our tax money has gone to the military. He notes the US was Gung Ho in the Cold War, keeping society on the alert that Russia might attack. Then when Communism fell, we went in search of another war. “We needed to find someone to demonize. Bush, Quayle, Baker, Powell, Chaney, selected Hussein over a golfing trip. The fact that he was their old friend, that Reagan Administration gave him two million dollars in agricultural credits, that they supported him during the Iraq-Iran war suddenly seemed irrelevant. We got the war we were looking for. The 20th Century has been a century of war. Some of us are hoping the 21st Century will be a century of peace. There are those who have instruments for this: Ghandi, Martin Luther King, people will non-violent solutions. Boycotts, strike, non-violent solutions. By voting not to work, workers can fight a corrupt administration and demand response. It doesn’t require killing people. This is how we’d like to see the world change in the future.”

10:39Copy video clip URL Bonpane says people like Bush have the agenda that the US be the ruling authority and police the world, make the decisions for the world, as we were from 1946 until 1958 and the Soviets began to get competitive in the Space race. Then they followed us in the Arms race. “I’ve never seen a new idea from Mr. Bush that resembled diplomacy. This is an old fashioned way of operating. We want humanity. The US can’t do anything about pollution. Air quality. The environment. One nation alone can’t deal with it all. Most UN decision made after 1946 have been positive. If the UN were empowered, there wouldn’t be a war in Iraq.”

14:38Copy video clip URL When asked if he thinks the UN should be the governing organization throughout the world, Bonpane says only through the principle of subsidiarity. Each entity in a society has it’s sphere of decision making. We have 30-40 Saddam Husseins in the world. They are generally on good terms with the US. “We only attack them when they become uncooperative or out of sync with us.”

16:15Copy video clip URL He adds small nations will give up power to the UN, the trouble is the super powers. We would have a kind of global federalism, overlapping governments. We need to have an international order. It’s a matter of enacting international law and making it function. Who can we trust? We can trust a structure of the UN.

18:29Copy video clip URL On the subject of media domination, Bonpane thinks we can unravel ourselves from it. Commercial media exists for advertising. News is a bi-product of advertising. “Our news is infected by goals and objectives of the groups that pay for the news, General Electric and corporations tapping our tax money for weapons. We have to deal with the ideology of militarism, the fabric of our culture. If something is militaristic it is anti-democratic. Their concept is might makes right. You tell us there are terrorists in the world and they look like Arabs. We says the primarily terrorist act in 1991 was the US Air Force over Iraq. If you as a newscaster say that you’d be fired. You’re not free to say what you think. If you realize that you’ll understand the level of censorship you’ve been under. We have to get news people to understand that. I’ve had newscasters tell me that! They know what the rules are. These are the issues we need to deal with.”

22:58Copy video clip URL Many young people don’t watch TV news because they know it’s shallow. Young people today are being programed to think if you believe someone like Saddam Hussein is living next to you, blow up his house. If you don’t like someone, kill him. These policies are intolerable!  Those who have reverence for the past never repeat the mistakes made in history. “We never learned from Vietnam. We carpet bombed the country with the same bombers we used in Iraq. All we did, aside from killing a million people, was cause those people to unite against our aggression. The same thing will happen in Iraq because we refuse to learn from the past. This is unacceptable.”

27:05Copy video clip URL  Bonpane feels that today people have a very high level of consciousness. “There’s a swelling of resistance. We began our resistance to the war in Iraq prior to it starting. I returned from Baghdad, was here a few days, we demonstrated with thousands of people. On 16 January, prior to the war beginning my wife and I and our son were incarcerated. Handcuffed. That’s where I was when I heard the war began. Our people are conscious. We want impeachment proceedings to begin. Our people deserve an administration that matches the worthiness of the United States, not one that matches the mafia.”

29:24Copy video clip URL In response to what he would like for the elections of 1992, Bonpane says, “we need a new party. This can be done by an election of independence. Elect an Independent. We need a fresh perspective. I don’t have a candidate for President. I supported Jackson in the past. We can’t depend on individual, we depend on the consciousness of the people in the US. I’d rather see a new movement. A party that is humanist in structure, focus on demilitarization, focus on a gross social product: increasing education and health levels. A progressive tax structure, those who make less pay less taxes. These are the gauges we have to judge real change.”

33:35Copy video clip URL On the subject of religion, Bonpane says, “for many of us the gut religion of the United States is the United States. We have to break from this. This is why people go off and die in wars.”

35:19Copy video clip URL The interview ends. B-roll of Los Angeles street outside Bonpane’s window. B-roll of this office. Various random footage of office and workers chit chatting. A woman tells of a foreign visitor called Ernesto. “All he wanted to do in his free time was go to McDonald’s, buy a Dust Buster, go to bookstores, Radio Shack … things  he could only do in America.”

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