Che Guevara was killed in Bolivia on October 9, 1967, at a time when that country was under U.S. economic and military influence.  Today, Bolivia has a social-democratic government under an indigenous president, Evo Morales, a powerful voice for world change.  Latin America as a whole has moved decisively to the left, with Brazil’s former president Lula da Silva feeling sure enough of his international status to team up with Turkey to offer Iran a way out of its fuel reprocessing problem.

So what can we expect from the death of Osama bin Laden?  It will not take 40 years for the Muslim world to complete its transition to modernity, with its own version of social democracy.

Commentators are just now catching on to the fact that the upheavals in the Middle East are partly between Sunni and Shi’a, and partly between nationalists, modernists and tribalists.

Whatever happens, let’s not try to implement former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s ‘snowflake’ memo quoted in his recent book: Lets “pick ‘eight or ten important countries, asking ourselves what we would like them to look like five or ten years from now, and then fashioning plans to achieve that.’

It’s just been announced on TV that the government will release a photograph of bin Laden’s body.  Just like it did with Che. Let’s not repeat a century of interference in Latin American in the Middle East.  Let’s turn our energies toward home, and create our own social democracy.

The revolts, revolutions and wars that have suddenly erupted in the Arab world have taken the West by surprise because we no nothing about their antecedents.

Anyone who can read French will find an excellent background piece written by an Arab specialist, Mohamed Hassan on www.michelcollon.infoLibye-revolte-populaire-guerre.html?lang=fr. The takeaway is that Libya’s largely tribal society lacked the means to build on Ghaddafi’s revolution, whereas neither Egypt nor Tunisia ever had one.  This explains why Egyptians and Tunisians who took to the streets were seeking more equity, while Libyans, disappointed with Ghaddafi’s ‘revolution’ are seeking more freedom.

As for Iraq, it already had a relatively developed civil society when Saddam Hussein instituted a socialist-inspired regime, providing free education and health care; alas, Saddam continued the megalomaniac leadership that had for decades tried to take over Kuwait, and was a brutal dictator.

The Iranian revolution brought Shi’a Islam – the Islam of the downtrodden – to power for the first time in modern history, in a country whose sophisticated, educated, middle class resented not only its attention to the poor, but its medieval religious aspect.

I was in Cuba when the Egyptian crisis broke, and Latin American intellectuals meeting with Fidel Castro in a six hour televised roundtable, wondered what it might mean for the regime that had inspired their countries’ break with feudalism and American-style capitalism, but where coffee, cooking oil and rice were still rationed after fifty-two years of American blockade and encouragement of revolt.

As Barack Obama surely knows from his conversations with Brazil’s social democratic leaders, a Latin America that is no longer America’s back yard has tends to want development to benefit the many, and will not support efforts to topple any government which, however brutally or clumsily, is trying to level the playing field, for example, Mugabe.

In his role as elder statesman and op-ed writer, Fidel hammers home the message that nuclear power and climate change are the world’s two overriding threats. Were it not for the fact that most socialists tend to agree with his assessment, he would almost seem to be saying that political regimes are irrelevant. The Communist Party Congress to be held next month after more than a decade, will probably emphasize the planetary threat to the physical ‘nation’ while renewing its commitment to the cooperative aspects of  ‘socialism’ required  to solve both national and planetary challenges.

When Americans contemplate each day’s crop of upheavals, they need to bear in mind that socialists and intellectuals are inclined to support any regime that has a com-munity-based approach to problem solving rather than an individual one.  For the United States, the upheavals in the Arab world are about geo-politics – oil and Israel – while for most of the world’s leaders, they are, in one form or another, about equity.

Almost simultaneously, a Chinese writer and activist, Liu Xiaobo received the Nobel Peace Prize, angering the Chinese government; the Cuban dissident, Guillermo Farinas was refused a Cuban exit visa to receive the European Union’s Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, and Jullian Assange was arrested in London for leaking damning American military and diplomatic cables. This is at once striking and in need of clarification: the peace prize and the free speech prize can be said to reflect the overall primacy of American interests on the part of the Nobel and the European Union. But one must suspect much more than that in the charging and arrest of Assange.

As I wrote in a previous blog, it is hard to believe that two Swedish prostitutes, knowing Assange’s work, would report him for failing to take an HIV test, unless prompted by the CIA. Secondly, I do not believe that a social-democratic Swedish govern-ment would do the United States’ bidding by extraditing Assange to face espionage charges that carry a threat of death.  But right now, Sweden has a Conservative government….

Back now to the remarkable coincidence: Farinas was and Liu is in jail in their respective countries for campaigning for human rights.  Assange is in jail in London for publishing communications thought to reveal military and diplomatic secrets involving the United States. I see these events as one more example of the common ground shared by rulers. These three men are speaking out against the politics of their country:The policies of the Chinese and Cuban governments, which affect mainly Chinese and Cuban citizens, are treated in the same way when denounced, as the policies of the American government that affect people worldwide. The fact that all governments use every means at their disposal to prevent the citizens of the world from disseminating unpalatable truths indicate that the leaders of the world not only use the same tools, but agree among themselves as to conduct they will tolerate from the planet’s inhabitants.

The good news is that citizens around the world are beginning to take matters into their own hands. As governments scramble to act to limit information emanating from Liu, Farinas and the highly organized Wikileaks, they must also combat the dozens of loosely organized grass roots groups that converged on Cancun, Mexico, last week for a U.N. follow-up conference on climate change.

As happened a year ago in Copenhagen, thousands of people who made the trip from around the world were cordoned off in an area far from the site of the official conference, with U.N. and Mexican employees ‘just doing their job’ of preventing activists from being heard.  (You can see this by watching the videos from DemocracyNow.org on your computer.)

Not only do individual rulers stand together against the ruled, the United Nations, largely funded by the U.S. and the rest of the developed world, knows which side its bread is buttered on. It’s time for someone to start a campaign to elect Lula Ignazio da Silva, Brazil’s outgoing presi-dent, as the new Secretary General of the United Nations.  As seen on last Sunday’s 60 Minutes , the life-long activist and trade union leader explained his success with Brazil’s business class: “Do the obvious, which no one ever thinks of.”  In Lula’s case, that meant, for starters, paying poor families a stipend on condition they send their children to school and for vaccinations. This program reduced poverty by almost 30% during Lula’s first term as president.

The international community can go one of two ways: it can continue to bail out the leaking world boat with one had while clamping handcuffs on dissidents with the other; or it can reorganize the United Nations so that it becomes, effectively, the embryo of a world govern-ment, with the vastly increased powers to effectively deal with climate change and local conflicts.

The myriad people’s organizations that are endeavoring to serve as a shadow world government must unite to put Lula in the Secretary General’s chair. Ban ki Moon’s term will end on December 31, 2011, and there had never been a Latin American Secre-tary General. It’s time, and no political figure on the world scene enjoys the respect and popularity of Lula, a man who has proved he can get the rich to help the poor.

As long as the U.N. is the descendant of the organization sketched out by Roosevelt and Churchill in 1942, that was intended to maintain colonialism on the part of the great powers, it will not serve the needs of the twenty-first century, when colonies have given way to warring states, all of whom, whatever their form of government agree on one thing: dissent is to be suppressed.

By now it would be trite to say that from watching our airwaves for the last month, Americans can scarcely be aware of the wider world.

But one coincidence seems particularly ironic: while we are hoping against hope that our country will not be delivered into the hands of right-wing fanatics (as Marcos Moulitsas correctly analyses them in American Taliban, just out at PoliPointPress), the largest country in Latin America and undisputed leader of the BRIC countries that also include Russia, India and China,  rejoices over the election of a female president who was once not a witch, but a Marxist guerilla.

The daughter of a Bulgarian immigrant and a schoolteacher, Dilma Rousseff was jailed and tortured by the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985. She went on to study economics, but most of her energies were invested in Brazil’s long political fight.  After serving as President Lula da Silva’s Minister of Energy, she became his Chief of Staff in 2005, and Sunday was voted President of a country roughly the size of the United States, with the fifth largest population of the world.

While many Americans want to ‘take their country back’ to the time when average life expectancy was about fifty, when there were no iphones or ipads, no TV, no movies, no cars or planes and it took weeks to cross the Atlantic, Brazil, a country forty percent of whose population is of mixed origins, has elected its second Workers’ Party president.

Lula da Silva, the outgoing two-term president, has been called the most popular leader in the world, and I personally think he should be the next U.N. Secretary General. To our own president’s dismay, Lula is not only a major figure in the new Union of South American States, he negotiates worldwide, including with Iran’s Ahmedinejad.

Perhaps if Obama had sided with the Lula’s and Dilmas of this world, as the popular force that brought him to the White House wanted him too, Americans could be climbing up from darkness, instead of facing what could well turn out to be a right-wing coup.

How oblivious can folks be?  I just heard on CNN that the Chicago delegation to Copenhagen was planning a party tonight.  Oh, they weren’t partying in advance of the vote,no, said Tony Harris but they were all ready to party tonight.

To political junkies like me, sports is hardly worth mentioning. But we also know that everything is political.

When I worked in the Carter State Department as a speech writer for the Assistant Secretary of Cultural and Educational Affairs, Joe Duffey, I was privileged to receive every day on my desk a slew of cables on a variety of non-classified subjects from all over the world.  I’ll never forget the one that ended with the worlds: “And to think we used to run this place.”  Whatever the issue was, is unimportant.  What matters is the person writing the report somehow thought that the United States was destined to run the world forever.