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TemiAdenijiFirstPaper 3 - 13 Apr 2010 - Main.EbenMoglen
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< < | It is strongly recommended that you include your outline in the body of your essay by using the outline as section titles. The headings below are there to remind you how section and subsection titles are formatted. | |
Gongo Aso | | Former President Olusegun Obasanjo eloquently proclaimed: “…at independence, our leaders inherited a colonial state built and previously made to function merely on the philosophy of Preatorianism. Its relation to the society was extractive, cavalier, and alienated. What was required at independence was for our leaders to radicalize these institutions by democratizing access to them and popularizing them and returning the focus of power to the people.” Unfortunately, all of our leaders to date have not done this, including the former president himself. They have had colossal state powers with virtually no mechanisms in place to resist them. The mass movement must involve the Nigerian people forcing their leaders back to paths of sanity by demanding it from them. They must themselves become the mechanisms of resistance against these leaders. | |
> > | This is a fine political
speech. It has no relevance to the actual situation, however,
because you have no more idea than anyone else how "the people" is to
be created in an empire that isn't a nation-state, and in which the
constituent nations have less in common than they have to fight
about. Titoism was a little miracle of post-imperial
nation-creation, but of course "Brotherhood and Unity" was destroyed
by nationalism at the death of the emperor. Not for nothing did my
Yugoslav friends say that Slobodan Milosevic was the first man to
notice that Tito was dead.
Compared to Nigeria, unifying the south Slavs in the Balkans is a
piece of cake. What you demand it would be good to have, but there's
no point demanding what no one knows how to do. Or rather, there is
a point, if such language is merely a cover for effective control of
violence: the music the State uses as accompaniment to the real
business of Empire, which is force. But you aren't seeking to be
despot; you are seeking to build a life for yourself inside a civil
society you wish for intensely, and which does not exist. If you
knew exactly how to make it, you could try. But without exact
knowledge of how, the motive is imminently tragic. | | | |
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