This is was pulled from the archives and is approximately 13 minutes in length and is part of an experiment in the Counter-Racism Science Project forum entitled Constructive Information About Who Practices Racism? A few people got together to find out if what they suspected to be true is true. If in fact people do "vote their conscious". Melvin Butler designed and ran this experiment inquiring about the political agenda of candidates in regard to practicing racism (white supremacy). The experiment questions if people know if the person they are voting for has ever mistreated people on the basis of color. This is very interesting from the perspective if you don't know if the person you are voting for is a child molester chances are you are voting for a child molester. If you don't know if the person you are voting for is a white person that practices racism (white supremacy) chances are you are voting for a racist (white supremacist).

In 2001, a book came out about George Mitchell's diplomatic work in Northern Ireland that was titled To Hell With the Future, Let's Get On With the Past hopes that such a book will never be written about today's Arab awakenings. But watching events unfold out there makes it impossible not to ask: Will the past bury the future in the Arab world or will the future bury the past?

I am awed by the bravery of the Syrian and Egyptian youths trying to throw off the tyranny of the Assad family and the Egyptian military. The fact that they go into the streets – knowing they face security forces who will not hesitate
to gun them down – speaks of the deep longing of young Arabs to be free of the regimes that have so long choked their voices and prevented them from realizing their full potential.

But I am deeply worried that the longer the fighting continues in Syria and Egypt, the less chance that any stable, democratizing order will emerge anytime soon and the more likely that Syria could disintegrate into civil war. You can't
exaggerate how dangerous that would be.

Why? Because Syriais the keystone of the Levant. It borders and balances a variety of states, sects and ethnic groups. If civil war erupts there, every one of Syria's neighbors will cultivate, and be cultivated by, different Syrian factions in order to try to tiltSyria in their direction.

Syrianeeds a peaceful democratic transition set in motion now Ditto Egypt. But that is easier said than done. Events in both countries are a reminder of the multidimensional struggle for power across the Middle East – what I once described as the struggle between "The Lexus and the Olive Tree."

On one level, you have the very modern, deeply felt and truly authentic longing by Syrians and Egyptians for freedom,
for the skills to thrive in modernity and for the rights of real citizens.

Outsiders often underestimate just how much these Arab youths are determined to limit the powers of their militaries as a necessary step for achieving true democracy. What you see in Egypt today are young people from across the political spectrum and classes who are willing to join forces, break ranks with their own parties and return to Tahrir Square to press for real freedom. This is a generational rupture. It is the old versus the young. It is the insiders (the adults) versus the outsiders (the youth). It is the privileged old guard versus the disadvantaged young guard. These young Egyptians, and Syrians, who have stopped fearing their military masters, are determined to unleash a true transformation in their world. We should be on their side. But the weight of their history is so heavy. The new Lexus-like values of "democracy," "free elections," "citizen rights" and "modernity" will have to compete with some very old Olive Tree ideas and passions. These include the age-old civil wars within Islam between Sunnis and Shiites, over who should dominate the faith, the heated struggle between Salafists and modernists over whether the 21st century should be embraced or rejected, as well as the ancient tribal and regional struggles playing out within each of these societies. Last, but not least, you have the struggle between the entrenched military/crony elites and the masses. These struggles from the "past" always threaten to rise up, consume any new movement for change and bury "the future."

This is the grand drama now being played out in the Arab world – the deeply sincere youth-led quest for liberty and the deeply rooted quests for sectarian, factional, class and tribal advantage. One day it looks as though the revolutions in Egypt, Syria and Tunisia are going to be hijacked by forces and passions from the past while the next day that longing of young people to be free and modern pushes them back.

The same drama played out in Iraq, but there the process was managed, at a huge cost, by an American midwife – managed enough so that the communities were able to write a new, rudimentary social contract on how to live together and, thereby, give the future a chance to bury the past. But we still do not know how it will end inIraq.

We know, though, that there will be no impartial outside midwife to guide the transitions in Egypt, Syria, Tunisia, Libya and Yemen. Can they each make it without one? Only if they develop their own Nelson Mandelas – unique civic leaders or coalitions who can honor the past, and contain its volcanic urges, but not let it bury the future.

By THOMAS FRIEDMAN, New YorkTimes

Friedman is acolumnist for the New York Times and is a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner.

http://www.chron.com/opinion/e.....296078.php

Narrating Political Reconciliation advances a distinctive political discourse of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), and provides the first book length theoretical interpretation of the social and political construction of truth and reconciliation in South Africa. Dr Moon situates the appearance of the TRC in 1995 at the juncture of then emerging national and international narratives of post-conflict reconciliation and democratization, and shows how these interacted (constrained and underpinned by the terms of the peace negotiations of 1991) to produce the norms, truth and reconciliation and practices, amnesty and truth-telling, that became central to the TRC's work. Moon enquires in detail into the politics and practice of national history writing by looking at the way in which the TRC reconstructed South Africa's apartheid past as a sequence of gross violations of human rights perpetrated with a political objective, thus transforming competing moral claims about this violent past into an "objective" technical discourse of violations. This construction, Moon argues, has particular implications for thinking about and ascribing agency and responsibility. Additionally, Narrating Reconciliation enquires into the politics and practice of confessional and testimonial styles of truth, and to the various ways in which these truths invoked the new political subjects of South Africa as 'victim' and 'perpetrator.' Moon also investigates the construction of reconciliation as both theology in relation to forgiveness and Judeo-Christian interpretations of it and therapy as a discourse of healing both the individual and the national body politic and the particular social and political implications flowing from these constructions. The book shows how South Africa's particular reconciliation narrative shaped and promoted the norms and practices central to a subsequent 'reconciliation industry,' now global in its reach (having been deployed in contexts as diverse as Ghana, Peru, Sierra Leone, and East Timor, to name a few), and to the appearance of a new human right, the 'right to truth.' The insights generated by the book provide a unique theoretical framework through which to think and problematise the politics of reconciliation, transitional justice, human rights, and nation-building in post-conflict and democratizing states more widely.

http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/3258/

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Malcolm X - the last speech 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?N.....zadDomO5cA

MLK's Last Speech 

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Picture the frail descendants of Europe and Africa set at odds against one another by the Wealth Of Nations.  A global plutocracy in a "race" for excellence or in a 'race' to prevent the equal distribution of resources since if resources are available to all.....and everyone received equal education.....perhaps the rulers might seem rather unneccesary . 

Government by the Powerful Wealthy would fear the day when the Powerless poor are able to shake them off. 

Why would people invent race? Race was created in America in the late 1600s in order to preserve the land and power of the Wealthy aristocracies. Rich planters in Virginia feared what might happen if indigenous tribes, slaves, and indentured servants united and overthrew them. So, they cut a deal with the poor English colonists. The planters gave the English poor certain rights and privileges denied to all persons of African and Native American descent: the right to never be enslaved, to free speech and assembly, to move about without a pass, to marry without upper-class permission, to change jobs, to acquire property, and to bear arms. In exchange, the English poor agreed to respect the property of the rich, help them seize indigenous lands, and enforce slavery.   

In Carl Jung's psychology, metanoia indicates a spontaneous attempt of the psyche to heal itself of unbearable conflict by melting down and then being reborn in a more adaptive form. Jung believed that psychotic episodes in particular could be understood as existential crises which were sometimes attempts at self-reparation. Jung's concept of metanoia influenced R.D. Laing and the therapeutic community movement which aimed, ideally, to
support people whilst they broke down and went through spontaneous healing, rather than thwarting such efforts at self-repair by strengthening their existing character defences and thereby maintaining the underlying conflict. 

In theology, metanoia is used to refer to the change of mind which is brought about in repentance. Repentance is necessary and valuable because it brings about change of mind or metanoia. This change of mind will result in the altered persona deprecating sin, though replicating good will, benevolence, and integration of self in relation to Universal harmony or deity. The two terms (repentance and metanoia) are often used interchangeably.

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South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) held public sessions from 1996 to 1998, and concluded its work in 2004. In an attempt to rebuild its society without retribution, the Commission created a new model for grappling with a history of extreme violence. The basic premise of the Commission was that any individual, whatever he or she had done, was eligible for amnesty if they would fully disclose and confess their crimes.

Victims were invited to tell their stories and witness confessions. Through the TRC, many families finally came to know when and how their loved ones died. By the end of the hearings, the Commission took statements from more than 20,000 victims of Apartheid and received applications for amnesty from 7,100 perpetrators.