Roots Action Education Fund & General Assembly – 2017-11-26 19:06:48
http://rootsaction.org/education-fund
Spreading the Truth about Drones
Roots Action Education Fund
On the 5th of November, Cian Westmoreland spoke at a General Assembly in Berlin along with 69 other delegates from around the world. These delegates were addressing issues ranging from mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo — where a war has raged for over a decade, taking 7 million lives — to the abuses animals endure in our factory farms.
Cian opened his speech — after a video of Faisal bin al Jaber, who lost two members of his family to a US drone strike in Yemen — with words of author David Mitchell from a book that Cian first read in Afghanistan:
“Our lives are not our own, we are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.”
During the speech, Cian delivered emotional testimony on his role in Afghanistan; he called for a ban on UCAVs (armed drones) and a preemptive ban on killer robots. And Cian offered a deep apology to the people of Afghanistan.
“My crimes still keep me up most nights,” he said at the Berlin forum. “I was just following orders . . . Numbers, triple digit numbers on performance reports and awards.”
He added: “Numbers, they were human beings, people with mothers, sisters, fathers, brothers, sons, daughters, lovers. Entire lives filled with dreams and hopes reduced to numbers; easily digestible to the bureaucrats who sent us there.”
This forum compels parliamentarians to face the uncomfortable realities of their decision-making processes, and educates citizens on everything that went unspoken that year. It’s about putting faces to numbers, and creating real democracy.
Cian’s van is still in disrepair, and his laptop was recently stolen after speaking in Italy. Travel brings many uncertainties, and traveling for this work is nothing easy.
Next, Cian will speak about the Sigonella Air Base in Italy at the Festival della Pace in Brescia, and the need for a forum for “colluding nations” to demand transparency and hold their governments accountable for the violations of international laws they helped the United States commit with UCAVs and through surveillance.
Please support the work of Cian Westmoreland through the Drone Whistleblower Fellowship Program of the RootsAction Education Fund. Your support makes a big difference and it means putting more money where it can do good instead of harm.
RootsAction Education Fund
PO Box 10931, Murfreesboro, TN 37129, USA
Related News:
* ABC: Pine Gap plays crucial role in America’s wars, leaked documents reveal
* Democracy Now!: Air Force Whistleblowers Risk Prosecution to Warn Drone War Kills Civilians, Fuels Terror
* Los Angeles Times: “US veterans support legal fight by Yemini man whose relatives were killed in drone strike”
Inside Drone Warfare Symposium — Cian Westmoreland, Veterans For Peace (April 28, 2016)
General Assembly / Generalversammlung / Assemblee Generale
The Vision of a World Parliament
Schaubuhne am Lehniner Platz Berlin
with Live-Streaming to Theatre Nanterre-Amandiers Paris,
Theatre National Wallonie — Bruxelles, NT Gent,
Thalia Theater Hamburg and SPIELART Festival Munich
BERLIN, PARIS, BRUSSLES, MUNICH (November 3-5, 2017) — The “General Assembly” is a production of the IIPM — International Institute of Political Murder in collaboration with the Schaubuhne am Lehniner Platz, sponsored by the Federal Cultural Foundation, the multi-sector funding Berlin of the Senate Department of Culture and Europe and the Federal Agency for Civic Education and supported by Bread for the World, ECCHR — European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, medico international, Rosa Luxemburg Foundation and Rainforest Rescue.
Despite worldwide economic and political implications, there are neither effective legal institutions nor sufficient democratic structures on a global level to adequately regulate the world market, prosecute violations of international law, enforce human rights or direct ecological developments into the right channels.
The General Assembly, which is being held for the first time from November 3-5 2017 in Berlin, is filling this gap with its concept of an actual world parliament.
With “The General Assembly”, Milo Rau and the International Institute of Political Murder complete their work on the matter of the political and artistic conditions of global realism.
From November 3-5 2017, 60 delegates of the General Assembly from all over the world will gather in the capital with the intention of challenging the newly elected German parliament — representative of all those who are affected by German policy but who lack a political voice.
From the labor and feminist movement to Occupy Wall Street to current populism, the demand for adequate representation is constitutive of almost all political movements. This refers to its pivotal but always precarious status in any democracy: who is represented in the political sphere — and who isn’t?
When the assembly of the Third Estate declared itself the “Assemblee Nationale Constituante” in 1789, it was a revolution. But what would this General Assembly be today, in the age of globalization — and who would be part of the “Third Estate”?
While Europe and the US are debating the modernization losers and underdogs, the proletariat and the shift to the right in their own countries, the General Assembly goes one step further with regard to the global reality of politics and economy, giving a voice to those who are underrepresented, who are not heard, the global Third Estate: labor immigrants, children and future generations, war victims, textile workers, miners, farmers, economic and climate refugees, the victims of the dawning ecocide, the oceans, the atmosphere, animals and plants.
In five plenary sessions, the representatives of the General Assembly will debate on where we stand as a global community and what needs to be done — socially, ecologically, technologically, politically. What does political sovereignty mean in the age of globalization?
How do the interests of the world’s population relate to the democratic principles of the national states? Whose demands for independence, dignity, and happiness can become the demands of all mankind? A local parliament will be replaced by a global parliament, which will urge the members of the newly elected German government to join them.
The first world parliament in the history of mankind, which will be accompanied by a group of international political observers, will conclude with the passing of the “Charter for the 21st Century” and the “Storming of the Reichstag” on November 7, precisely one hundred years after the legendary “Storming of the Winter Palace”.
Posted in accordance with Title 17, Section 107, US Code, for noncommercial, educational purposes.
