1/29/2005: Walden Bello is executive director of Focus on the Global South and professor of sociology and public administration at the University of the Philippines. He spoke at a World Social Forum workshop about cultural oppression and the role it played in the last U.S. election: "The cultural dimension is what led the Bush administration to victory by drawing its support largely based on white people in the U.S. If we just limit our analysis to economics and say it is just the corporations or just say it is because of the military industrial complex, we haven’t got it. The Bush administration in fact appeals to traditional forms of cultural oppression through traditional forms of cultural ethnocentrism and of traditional and old forms of racism.”
“The vision that unites the Bush administration is the vision of a white Protestant male dominated society that is sort of the small town America of the 1950's this is the vision that led many people to vote for George W Bush. What were these people voting against? They were voting against blacks, they were voting against immigrants, the feminist movement, foreign imports and foreign ideas that are not American.”
“If we are going to understand the Bush administration we need to realize that it is out to create a cultural political hegemony that will allow it to rule for the next 50 years. The struggle against this cultural hegemony they are trying to build is just as important as the struggle against corporate capitalism and the struggle against militarism. It can’t be over stressed how our struggle whether it is in Brazil, India, or Asia - that the cultural component must be given as much play and as much emphasis as the economic and military component.”
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