They think the end is coming. They’re even smiling about it. Are these the people we want to have in charge when we discuss matters of global stewardship or keeping the peace in the Middle East?
In fact there are probably FCC regulations which would forbid these types from broadcasting their hate-mongering over the public airwaves. Something like pulling the fire alarm, or yelling fire in the theater or inciting a riot or encouraging the commission of a crime.
Activists have been protesting the trend toward trans-national globalisation since before the rest of us knew what was coming. The WTO is an unelected governing body with the authority to overrule any locally chosen laws or covenants.
Citizens can elect rulers, and rulers can make laws, but the World Trade Organization can undo those laws if they are deemed to restrict free trade. Environmental regulations, labor protections, health safeguards, all can mess up some corporation’s right to unlimited profits, and the WTO will strike those laws down.
When the WTO wants something, such as uniform labor codes, a nation’s ruler sometimes has to hold a referendum to ask its citizens for their approval.
When you’ve heard the press report that such and such referendum was a success or embarrassing failure for that ruler, did you wonder to whom that ruler had to deliver his success? Did you wonder with whom that ruler need feel embarrassed?
What a scenic view. This is the prison just outside Buena Vista. Too bad all the cells face inward. The vista is for us.
Driving by this lovely compound, I had to think about how easily we accept the need for prisons. They’re perfectly natural parts of society. There’s always going to be crime, just as there will always be unemployment. There’s a magic constant, a percentage. And that’s probably true.
But that wouldn’t explain why the percent of the American population living behind prison walls has been growing exponentially, and is the highest in the world. That’s not natural. In fact, it suggests that the incarceration rate is not related to the crime rate.
This is not the photograph I wish I had taken. I was in Snowmass for the Aspen Jazz Festival, Labor Day weekend. Crossing from Aspen to Snowmass we drove by the airport. Several evenings, past Gulfstreams and other private jets gleaming in the moonlight. More tailfins than you could count.
The point being, these weren’t Cessnas or twin-engine Bonanzas or even Lear jets. These were miniature passenger jets, parked higgledy-piggedly at both ends of the airport runway. The point being, wealth in abundance, overflowing the confines of their taxpayer funded playpen, for all to see, and only see.
This picture was taken at the weekend’s close, when the most of the jetset had flown.
Doing some wiki research I learned not enough about yellow journalism.
You and I know about yellow journalism, the subject rose through the cracks of our otherwise expurgated American history texts. Yellow Journalism. Jingoist press rousing the rabble to war. Leading example, REMEMBER THE MAIN! rallying us to fight Spain and liberate her colonial possessions, Cuba and the Philippines. Chief villainous yellow barron, William Randolph Hearst.
We all know about Hearst and his newspaper empire. We know of Marion Davies, Xanadu -I mean San Simeon Castle, Fallen heiress Patty Hearst. We believe Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane was about Hearst, and thus we have a vague notion that Hearst suffered a tragic fall. But did he?
What I was hoping to learn about yellow journalism wasn’t there. History records nothing about a reprimand. Hearst may have lost his childhood Rosebud, but not his media empire and blood-soaked gains. In fact the other chief Yellow miscreant was Joseph Pulitzer. His name is lionized because of the newspaper award that bears his name. A Pulitzer represent integrity in reporting. Isn’t that ironic? It’s akin to Alfred Nobel the father of modern explosives being remembered for peace. Nothing unusual really. Rockefeller and Carnegie are remembered for philanthropy.
Unfortunately we’ve got similarly omniscient barrons today who are blazing new onslaughts with their brazen yellow banners. Rupert Murdock and the xenophobes at Disney have taken Hearst and P.T. Barnum several adages further. Leave no sucker alone.
I’d like to propose that Congress at long last address the villainy of Yellow Journalism. Let our lawmakers consider a proclamation, nay condemnation, a posthumous censure of William Hearst for his unpatriotic, bilious fearmongering with the intent to provoke war.
Let’s propose that should anyone BE TRYING it again, let them face fines and civil liability the likes of which will bankrupt their empires. Let State Reservists sue them for lost resources, let class action suits represent survivors and victims.
War profiteers must be made to turn over their ill-gotten billions to the victims of their yellow-baited wars. The military-industrial complex is guilty, but so too is its mouthpiece the MSM.
Bush lied. Is that news?
Bush admits to existence of clandestine extrajudicial prisons. Bush admits to condoning torture. Bush admits to authorizing domestic surveillance program. Bush admits Iraq had no WMDs. Bush admits Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11.
We knew all this already. That’s not the story. Bush lied. And we knew that all along too. That’s not the story.
Is there anything more to ask Mr. Bush? We’re only ever going to get a lie and we know that already. Was Bush complicit in 9/11? Is Bush running up the deficit on purpose? Are we in Iraq for oil, for Halliburton? We know it already.
The question needs to be posed to the media: why do we keep looking to the president to tell us what he’s doing?
The president is lying., not about having an affair in the White House, about everything. About everything to do with our civil rights, our treasury, the lives of our sons and daughters. Bush has his hands around the neck of our democracy and our media can only ask, are your intentions, sir, honorable?
Bush has got to laugh at our deferential timidity. Who do we think he is, Urkel? Bush has never portrayed himself as anything but the brush-clearing, fun loving frat boy. Asphyxiation, date rape, mumble, mumble, what an absurd accusation.
Only when the bruise marks are irrefutable will Bush admit he got a little rough. He might argue that calling attention to what he’s done will only impede his efforts to continue. He might argue that the assault was consensual. With regard to the media, he’d be right. I don’t believe Bush will admit what he and the Neocons are doing until the marks are permanent and the Grand American Experiment is a corpse, with its coin purse gone.
Across the US political spectrum it is now widely understood that the US government does aggressively intervene in Latin America, no matter whether a Democrat or a Republican is in the White House. So no matter what political stripe your average Joe and Jane neighbor may be here in Colorado Springs, you are not too likely to have one deny that the US has historically intervened South of The Border in some form or another; militarily, economically, and culturally. The neighbor leaning Left might say that this has been negative for those countries, while the Rightist will most probably sing interventionism’s praises. The memory of Reagan’s Central American wars of the ’80s remains strong, because some of these wars were so widely covered in the press.
There is one caveat to mention here. The belief that the US is intervening, and has intervened in the past in Latin America, is mostly confined within opinion by the American public, that this is so only south of Mexico. Why? The answer is in that the US press as a whole, treats mention of US interventionism in Mexico and its politics as its grand taboo. Despite the fact that Mexico is a huge and populous country and is where the Third World meets the US to our South, the US press does all it can to keep Americans just as ignorant about Mexico as they can be made.
As one example, just how many non Hispanic Americans can name the Mexican states that border the US? How many of these same Americans know that Mexico is divided into states even? But how many of these same folk yet have strong and basically uninformed opinions regarding immigration from that country? The sum total of belief the US non Hispanic public has been taught by the English language US press, is that Mexico is poor and that many want to live here because of that. Further information is kept back, and the widespread Anglo public view is that Mexicans run their own country and the US has nothing to do with that. Unfortunately, that perception is totally false.
To illustrate the point that the US in fact has a major role in directing Mexican life, let me just mention a few facts about Walmart in Mexico. This American company is Mexico’s largest private employer with over 100,000 employees and over 800 stores there. It now is entering into the countries banking structure as a major player, too. It is just ridiculous to imagine that the Walton family of Arkansas is just standing to the side when political and economic decisions are being made, whether in Spanish, or not.. They have an agenda, and push it just as hard in Mexico as they do in the US. Their agenda, in short, is to make profits in that country and to move those billions to Bentonville, USA.
I don’t want to pick on Walmart here. They are just one of many prominent examples of US presence in Mexico, and exploitment of it. They have high level company officials, as other US companies and the US government itself do, that interact with the Mexican elites themselves to maintain a ‘good business climate’. What existed before the year 2000, was the longest running one-party dictatorship in the world. Both Mexican and US elites decided was that this was not good for business at that time. Previously, they had agreed that this dictatorship was absolutely just the thing for business and US government support for the PRI dictatorship was kept solid. And the US press’s silence about this ran solid for decades, too.
In the last 2 US presidential elections, the results left many believing that fraud had carried Bush into office twice. At any rate Bush received less votes (called popular votes, as if that made them insignificant) than Al Gore did in 2000, and yet got the office! Gore realized that though he had won the vote count and that the Republicans had fraudently purged voter lists of largely eligible Black voters, that he was not as popular amongst the US elite as Bush was at the time. So he laid down his claim for the presidency, and conceded without a struggle! And America has been as it has, ever since.
Mexico had its presidential election about 10 weeks ago. News of it was kept quiet in the US daily press, as if it was of no real concern to Americans. Pretty strange behavior for what bills itself as the ‘free press’, but not real shocking if we consider how the US press has been largely lap dogs in support of Bush’s multiple invasions, occupations, and wars. Not much coverage of Bush in Haiti these days, neither. How much real examination has there been of whether the Israeli invasion of Lebanon had roots in the White House?
But what came out of this election south of us was a fraudulent result that will possibly impact the US as much as Iraq now does. After all, the US and Mexico are intertwined on the North American continent, and neither country will ever become an island into itself,no matter how hard it is tried. I could go into the many details of why the results were fraudulent, something that is now being denied in US daily editorial after another. That would seem arcane and boring to most readers though. What counts, is that about half of the Mexican population is certain that the results are fraudulent and the official president stands with little legitimacy in their eyes. And the US supports that man, as do the Mexican church, government, and economic elites that have long impoverished that country.
What really is fearful to the US media, is that the official ‘loser’ of the Mexican presidential race, Antonio Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO), has chosen a path completely in contrast to that of our US loser of the past, Al Gore. He has decided to struggle against the fraud rather than to meekly surrender to it. Despite the effort to reconstruct Gore’s image amongst the US public as Mr. Ecology, he will probably go down in history as the goat that led to the construction of the Bush Administration. Mexico’s ‘loser’, AMLO, may well go down to being seen as a hero in the struggle against US control of his country, and the destruction of its national integrity.
The situation in Mexico now is quite complex. The country’s highest court just put a man in office, that even with fraud in his favor, gathered less than 40% of the votes! The south of the country went for AMLO, and the north went more to Calderon, now the official ‘president’. About 30% of the country stuck with the PRI, party of the no supposedly defunct one-party dictatorship of the past. Fact is, that both Calderon’s party and the PRI have been acting in conjunction with each other, as if they were but 2 wings of one corporate party. Does this ring a bell for some Americans?
Our government and institutions should not fall into line accepting Mexican electoral fraud as they are now doing. The fact that they have done so bodes poorly for our own embattled system. Neither country can afford to continue where only elites make decisions that effect all of us. Neither country needs Tweedle-Dee/ Tweedle-Dumb governance. That way leads to national insecurity for both nations.
Hmm. Another bad sign.
I saw CNN running a promo for its election season coverage, a teaser purporting to remind us to stick with CNN when the election is upon us.
At face value, is that not odd? Wouldn’t we be judging our news source based on its reporting of today’s news, instead of its relative foresight of tomorrow’s excitements? Also, are we not already CNN watchers if we are seeing the ads? This is not like advertizing one TV show to viewers of another. It’s like promoting the second half of the Superbowl during the first half. Pointless, I’d say, unless we have something to spin with the promotion.
CNN’s election 2006 hook? The CNN tagline was “Election 2006: How close will it be?”
How close will it be?
Has anyone said it will be close? At present the GOP is getting a trouncing. All the Republican yahoos have egg on their faces and the public wants to run the bums out. It’s happening all over, if not so widely celebrated on mainstream news.
Nevertheless, someone thinks the election in November will be close. Who? My guess it’s Diebold.
I’m guessing that Diebold would like to pave the way for an election result they can live with. To do this they first have to create an anticipation that the election will be close. Too close to call in fact. Then it won’t be such a surprise when the winners are… Republicans! By a nose!
When our media anchors began to report that the Mexican election was going to be very close, the fix was in. How chilling it was to hear. Until then everybody’s favorite Obrador had been leading throngs of supporters through the streets of Mexico City, leading a peaceful revolution against the entrenched pro-US corruption government. Mexico was following the populist flow of the Latin American justice and equality movement.
Then apparently the election was looking to be close. What, were there suddenly just as many entrenched corrupt bureaucrat voters as there were oppressed masses? Where would that voter parity come from, if not electronic ghost votes?
And now the Mexican election is being decided by their supreme court. Sound familiar?
To quote the late Herbert Sommers, who wrote about his childhood in turn of the century Colorado Springs, about Teddy Roosevelt’s visit to the city on August 10, 1901. Roosevelt was then Vice President of the country and within less than a month would succeed William McKinley after his assassination.
Theodore Roosevelt’s visit was an enormous bally-hoo and preceded his famous hunt in which he spared what became his namesake teddy bear.
In the 1900 election the Republican party was not popular in Colorado Spings, but Sommers wrote about the aftermath of Rooselvelt’s momentous visit:
If you do not think that this event gave life and character to every boy in Colorado Springs, then you do not know boys. Every boy became a Republican and all became active readers of our daily paper, the Colorado Springs Gazette. The Evening Telegraph was also a Republican paper at that time and it, too, had an increase in reader support.
We held a protest today at the front gate of Peterson Air Force Base. It was to commemorate the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 61 years ago. It’s an annual remembrance.
The event also offers us a chance to reflect on the lunacy of nuclear weapons.
The protest was lost on the airmen who drove through the gate leaving the base. None of them seem to know what date it is. Let alone that it represents a tragic milestone for mankind.
Vigils are not kept for the equal number of Japanese civilians killed by conventional weapons, fire-bombed before we had nukes. American bombers annihalated entire Japanese cities, including 60% of Tokyo, in a deliberate effort to kill Japanese civilians.
At a precinct meeting to suggest planks for the Democratic Party platform, a friend of mine was stuck on 9-11 truth telling. He’d like to write it on a blimp. I agreed but argued, first things first.
Anti-war first I said, then a Democratic majority in Congresss, then time to re-investigate 9-11. What condescension. I told him that I thought a truthful account of 9-11 would be too hard to swallow.
Since the party convention, and since this summer’s 9-11 breast-beating, I am absolutely certain that I was wrong. Ninety nine percent of Americans don’t work in skyscrapers, nor do they cross the Atlantic on airliners, yet the fall of the WTC threatened their sense of security. The myth of their insecurity has got to fall.
9-11 is still the GOP rallying cry. We must take it from them because we will not win an election without decrying their lie.
It’s our 9-11 crackpot theory versus their 9-11 crackpot fable. If the simple folk cannot swallow this, do we think they will buy black box voting or our American tradition of malevolent multinational corporate imperialism?
A branch of our local library is hosting a discussion about a recent work of popular fiction, One Thousand White Women by Jim Fergus. I’m thinking of stopping by to puke.
The novel begins by alluding that its unspeakable historical premise has factual merit. ALLEGEDLY the author’s great great aunt, a “May Dodd”, left a journal about her life experience, hidden all these years in shame by her family. The author takes it upon himself to tell her repressed tale, and because it is the untold fate of 999 nameless more, we infer it to be one of the dark secrets of the American national identity.
The story concerns 1000 white women who were traded to the Indians in exchange for resettlement and peace. One thousand white women. The title does grab you. It has undeniable where-the-white-women-at? appeal.
The phenomena also shares something with the White Indian Series by Donald Porter. That’s a western series for readers who couldn’t be bothered to know about the lives of the Native Americans unless they were WHITE Native Americans. These readers can’t sympathize with Indians as victims, unless they are white Indian victims, and then preferably of course they should be white Indian victims of Indians.
The mythic white Indian abounds on film, and it’s not just Indians. The story of The Last Samurai had to be about a white man in Japan (Tom Cruise) or who would care?
Here you have the fate of 1000 women sold, sacrificed or let loose down the river to become Indian squaws. One part romantic fantasy, several parts feminist grudge, (1000 parts rape fetish?), all at the hands of red heathen.
To be fair, the author does provide a disclaimer that 1000 white women never changed hands. Fergus implies however that an original Cheyenne proposal to be given 1000 white women was real and asks readers to ponder, what if?
If true, it’s a piercing lesson on the embarrassing legacy that can come from sarcasm.
How deeply insulting is it to suggest that Indian tribal leaders would have asked the army negotiators for white women? And as a condition of laying down their weapons? I think it’s indescribably racist to be susceptible to thinking that Indian fathers and braves sought white mates with whom to raise new generations of their tribe.
Neither in-breeding nor poor education are excuses enough for this prevalent self-centered bigotry.
Admittedly this is a picture of Tel Aviv residents protesting their nation’s militant actions against Lebanon and gathering to offer a prayer for peace.
On another level, is it also a picture of fair-skinned westerners on a Middle Eastern beach who’ve overstayed their welcome?
Maybe it’s time to close Club Med Judea.
Americans descend upon Baja Mexico all the time, we don’t try to annex it. Or Costa Rica, or Belize. There’s nothing wrong with vacationing in the tropics, but is it fair to emigrate there, declare it your own, and ask the world to protect you from the anger of the people who you sent packing?
Let American and European Jews have their promised land, as promised vacation land. Visit and sunbathe all you want, then go home. This idea that white man should colonize Arabia is so 19th century. Colonization doesn’t work, and we have no right.
Nowhere was this more obvious than South Africa, where white colonizers held themselves as superior to the natives, imposing apartheid to force the indigenous populations to keep to their own neighborhoods.
Can there ever be peace in the Holy Land? Of course there can. Return Israel to its rightful owners. Let Jew, Muslim and Christian live together in a secular state. Will there always be sectarian violence? Perhaps, we’re seeing it elsewhere between Muslims. Sectarian problems will have to be worked out between neighbors. It’s clear the answer was not to give the whole ball of wax to one religion. Especially not the white one.
Drinking the Kool-aid is an interesting illustration, a cliche to lampoon those who do not question what their leaders tell them.
To drink Kool-aid at all seems stupid enough, but do we forget Jonestown, Guyana and what was in the Kool-aid?
Whenever there is talk about the age of mankind, or the solar system, or the universe, a friend of mine delights in adding, “IN THEORY.” If the calculations denote an earthly past beyond the scale of a Creationist’s 7,000 year model, my friend considers it theoretical.
Someone might be addressing dinosaurs or geology or the Big Bang, speaking in terms of MILLIONS OF YEARS AGO, and my friend will chime “in theory!”
She’ll turn to me and justify her footnote by asking “how do they know?”
In truth, I don’t know. I don’t understand carbon dating or astronomy or quantum physics. I don’t disbelieve, I just can’t explain. I give her argument the credit of the electron-vs.-electron-microscope paradox. How can we know what an electron looks like if we can only see it with an electron microscope, which we invented with the anticipation of knowing how to look at an electron? Something like that. Yes, scientists tend to get the results they anticipate.
We attended Al Gore’s AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH the other day, about Global Warming, and researchers were charting climate changes by analyzing core samples taken from polar ice. We are able to sample ice which dates back 800,000 years apparently.
“In theory” my companion added.
“Apparently” I concurred, having no idea how ice was dated/carbon-dated.
Later in the program a scientist likened the layers of ice to the rings of a tree trunk. You can see the seasons of passing years in the grain of the wood. You can see when there might have been a forest fire, or years when the weather might have been different.
Individual layers of ice in the core samples represented similar changes in the environment. The composition of the ice trapped whatever mixture of gases comprised each year’s atmosphere. You can see each year’s climate as layers of ice formed over the last.
Then I remembered visiting Muir Woods in California and marveling at a cross-section of a tree trunk upon which scholars had marked various milestones in history. Columbus, the Battle of Hastings, the year 0 A.D., et al. Some living Grand Sequoias are as old as 3,000 years.
I can understand tree rings, and I can understand ice layers. It’s science we can see with our own eyes. Now I know where I can see 800,000 years of it. If my Christian friend wants to presuppose that God created the polar ice caps with 793,000 years of climate history already embedded in the ice, fair enough. But allow scientists the latitude to seek the lessons the Earth might have to teach us from its most distant “past.” Certainly God intended us to perceive it that way.
2.
The crux of this issue is of course the denial of global warming. There’s a strange correlation between those who refute man’s influence on the climate, and religion, excuse me, anti-science. If they’re end-timer Christians who are really just rooting for the end of the world, let them admit it and step out of the way. If they’re average Christians with a sane sense of responsibility to their fellow beings, they are being misled by preachers who teach them to doubt scientific research.
Science begat technology begat industry (begat pollution and population) which begat this mess. Human knowledge may be a Pandora’s Box, but we are inside the box ourselves, not at its lid. We have to use scientific tools to deliver us from global catastrophe. No one is saying worship it, just listen to it.
Harki is Algerian for collaborator. Zenedine Zindane has publically refutted the accusation before.
“Zizou” Zidane could not even speak the word on TV when asked what taunt had provoked his now infamous headbutt in the last ten minutes of the World Cup. He would only say that Materazzi had insulted his mother and sister, three times.
The western press has suggested that the term was “terrorist” whore. Doesn’t make sense, does it? What kind of traction do your mother’s combat boots have anymore? Zidane is the son of Algerian parents who emigrated to France after Algeria gained its independence.
But there’s a word in France that still burns every Frenchman. Collaborator. Use your imagination what it means to insinuate that your mother and sisters were collaborators.
While it still raises a Frenchman’s blood pressure to accuse his family of having collaborated with the Nazi occupation. There is sympathy as well for those accused. Quite a few French families did collaborate or had no choice.
The term that Zidane refuses to repeat, even in defending his action, was in his words, “a grave insult.” His parents speculated that the term might have been Harki. (If you Google: algeria +grave +insult, you get Wikidedia’s definition of Harki.) Harki is the name for Algerians who collaborated with the French against Algeria’s fight for independence. It is a term with which Zidane has a history.
Boy oh boy do I imagine the western press does not like to deal with insults being thrown at colonial sympathizers. At a time when the Iraqi people are trying to fight their American invaders, and Palestinians are trying to throw off their Israeli occupiers, and each repressive government is trying to recruit turncoats for their cause. There on television we’re shown the profund visceral resentment of being accused of betraying your own people.
At the World Cup Final on TV we saw that a person could forego the unblemished legacy of his sports career, even jeopardize the World Cup match for his team, just to repudiate the suggestion that his family slept with the enemy. The enemy being the West.
Ironically, the western press chose to translate Harki as “terrorist.” It wouldn’t seem to be much of an insult at all, unless it accurately referred to the French paratroupers use of state-sponsored terror to thwart the Algerian struggle.
Just as Iraqi resistance fighters are being called insurgents and terrorists. There will be a word to describe those Iraqis who collaborate with the brutal US occupation. Maybe that word will mean “terrorist” after all.
Knee-jerk patriots accuse critics of US actions of having nothing to suggest by way of alternatives. Indeed pseudo-rivals like the Democrats aren’t speaking any differently than the GOP.
But the answers have been out there and they are quite simple. Noam Chomsky does not take credit for them, but summarized them recently. Here’s what he suggests our country can do to try to redeem itself with the world community:
1) accept the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court and the World Court;
2) sign and carry forward the Kyoto protocols;
3) let the UN take the lead in international crises;
4) rely on diplomatic and economic measures rather than military ones in confronting terror;
5) keep to the traditional interpretation of the UN Charter;
6) give up the Security Council veto and have “a decent respect for the opinion of mankind,” as the Declaration of Independence advises, even if power centres disagree;
7) cut back sharply on military spending and sharply increase social spending.
Support the troops. These troops killed four and wounded nine unarmed anti-war student protesters at Kent State University in 1970. The soldiers from the Ohio National Guard were absolved of responsibility. They need your support.
On July 14, Bastille Day, the day on which the French celebrate the storming of their notorious Bastille prison, let’s consider the tough stance the soldiers had to take, firing at their own citizens, making the struggle for freedom and justice just that little bit more lethal.
Yes, support the ignorant, uneducated, bastard, patriotic mother-fucks being armed to stand against you the people.
I wanted to call them Christians with a capital H, but they’re not hypocritical per se. American evangelicals do not profess to do good, merely they pledge to do good by Jesus Christ. Meaning, what their preacher tells them, that the scripture tells them, that Jesus tells them to do. Go spread my faith, in a nutshell.
If you believe in Jesus you will be saved. If you do not believe in Jesus you cannot be saved. They turn this to mean do whatever you want, Jesus will forgive you. Thus, abusing the bejesus out of the ten commandments, does not enter into it, you’re saved! Kill pygmies, enslave them, starve them or ignore them, no harm done! Extra credit however if you convert them.
Traditional religions share this religiosity: an idea of benevolence toward your fellow man. Progressive religious thought embraces all religion as serving a same higher purpose.
This is where it’s important to draw a distinction between denominations. American christian evangelicals are not religious in this fundamental way. They are not at the core do-gooders. And they do not play well with others.
To say of a capital “C” Christian, well at least he believes in God, is like saying of a member of the Bloods or the Crips, well at least it keeps him off the street.
By Black Liberation Army prisoner of war Jalil Muntaqim.
U.S. International Warfare Initiates World War III Human Rights During Wartime
By Jalil A. MuntaqimIn the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, Americans have displayed their true colors of jingoism, a militaristic spirit of nationalism. Similarly, it was witnessed how the people of Iraq rallied in support of their President, Saddam Hussein, after the U.S. bombed to death 250,000 Iraqis, and continued devastation of that country with collateral damage of 1 million dead women and children. Hence, people rallying in support of their government and representatives is a common phenomenon when a country is attacked by an outsider. The U.S. has been foremost in the world extending foreign policy of free-market economy, to the extent of undermining other countries cultures and ideologies expressed as their way of life. Such conflicts inevitably positions the U.S. as the centerpiece, the bulls-eye for international political dissent, as indicated by demonstrations against the U.S. controlled IMF, WTO and World Bank conferences. The attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon did not occur in a vacuum. The people that carried out the attacks were not blind followers or robots with an irrational hatred of the U.S. peoples. Rather, this attack was part of an overall blowback to U.S. imperialist policy in support of zionist Israel and opposition to fundamentalist Islam.
There are essentially three primary world ideologies or world views: the capitalist free-market economy/democracy; the socialist production economy; and Islamic theocratic government, of which has been in competition for many decades. However, in the last 20 years the socialist economies has been severely subverted and co-opted by free-market economies, the ideals of American style democracy. This isolated, for the most part, Islamic theocratic ideology and system of government as the principle target of the U.S. in its quest for world hegemony. This reality of competing world views and economies is further complicated due to religious underpinning of beliefs that motivates actions, especially as they are expressed by U.S. and Western European christianity and Israel zionist judaism in opposition to Islam. From the struggles of the Crusades to the present confrontation, the struggle for ideological supremacy reigns, as the faithful continue to proselytize in the name of the Supreme Being.
When geopolitics are combined with religious fervor in the character of nationalist identity and patriotism, rational and logical thinking is shoved aside as matters of the moment takes historical precedents. It has often been said that “Truth Crush to the Earth Will Rise Again”. Since truth is relative to ones belief, can it be safely said that America has reaped what it has sowed? The American truth of capitalist christian democracy and its imperialist hegemonic aspirations has crushed both socialist and Islamic world views. It has extended its avaricious tentacles as the world police and economic harbinger of all that is beneficent, in stark denial of its history as a purveyor of genocides, slavery and colonial violence.
The U.S. was the first to use biological-germ warfare on people when it distributed blankets infected with smallpox to Native Americans; it has refused to apologize for Afrikan slavery acknowledging it engaged in a crime against humanity requiring reparations; it is the first and only country to use the atomic bomb on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and intern thousands of Japanese and Italians in this country; it used carpet bombing and defoliates against the peoples of Vietnam; it has initiated embargoes, coup d’etats and assassinations against those it opposes, while propping-up right-wing military dictators; as well as continued military bombing of Vieques. In essence, the U.S. governments hegemonic goals has created the ire of millions of people throughout the world. While domestically, racial profiling, police killing and mass incarceration of Black and Brown people has eroded patriotic sentiments in opposition to white supremacy.
As America weeps and laments its loss, the public find itself joining the torn ranks of those whose heartaches beat opposing U.S. greed and international profiteering. The American public acquiesce to U.S. international folly has cause them to feel the economic pains of those who live daily in poverty. Indeed, Americans should brace for years of economic uncertainty, where the American ideal of freedom and liberty will resemble plight of those who live under the right-wing dictatorships the U.S. has supported. The tyranny suffered by others in the world as a result of U.S. imperialism, has come full circle to visit this country with the wrath of the U.S. own mechanization. Since the U.S. taught and trained right-wing military dictators in the School of the Americas, including the CIA training of Osama bin Laden in the Afghanistan proxy war against the Russians, it will be this same kind of terrorist activist that will be unleashed on American soil, as El-Hajj Malik Shabazz stated after the assassination of John Kennedy, a matter of the chicken coming home to roost. Therefore, American civil liberties and human rights are being garrotted by the yoke of the right-wing in the name of national security. The legalization of U.S. fascism was initiated with the war against political dissent (Cointelpro); the war against organized crime (RICO laws); the war against illegal drugs (plethora of drug laws) and now culminating in the war against terrorism with the American Joint Anti-Terrorist Taskforce and Office of Home Security, further extending police, FBI and CIA powers to undermine domestic civil liberties and human rights.
The U.S. Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, recently stated that the U.S. need to create a new language in defining how to combat terrorism. This Orwellian propaganda in the media espouses the U.S. is venturing in a new type of warfare to defend the American way of life. However, what this double-speak propagates as a long-term and sustained initiative against terrorism is essentially a way of embellishing and enlarging U.S. counter-insurgency activity it has been engaged in since the advent of the Green Berets, Rangers, Delta Force and Navy Seals. The U.S. has been involved in counter-insurgency activity in Afrika, Latin America and Asia for decades. But due to the September 11, 2001, attack on U.S. soil, the government has seized the opportunity to offensively pursue left-wing revolutionaries and Muslim insurgents throughout the world. This U.S. military action extends and substantiates its position as the international police.
Since the establishment of the Trilateral Commission that initiated the process for the development of one world government, the U.S. has broaden its capacity to impose and enforce its will on oppressed peoples globally. The FBI and CIA has been operating in Europe, Afrika, Asia and Latin America establishing the long arm of U.S. law and order. Its bases of operations have conducted surveillance, investigations to arrest, prosecute or neutralize left-wing revolutionaries or Muslim insurgents. As the U.S. consolidates its political and economic influence throughout the world, it will seek to protect its overall hegemonic imperialist goals. After the Gulf War, and the air (bombing) campaign in Yugoslavia, the U.S. has employed its military might to ensure its foreign policy are achieved.
Because NATO has evolved into a European military entity that Russia is seeking to join, today, the U.S. has positioned itself beyond the mission of NATO. The U.S. now concentrates its military might in opposing Islamic countries (Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Afghanistan, Philippines, etc.) and those the U.S. deem as rogue nations (North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, etc.). The new military initiatives will be directed to towards Southeast Asia as the secondary target, as it continues to direct the Middle East conflict to preserve its oil investments and zionist interest. As the U.S. expand its imperialist military mission, as seen with committing military troops in Uzbekistan to also protect oil interest in the Caspian Sea, it has sought to redefine itself by targeting what it identify as the terrorist thereat wherever in the world it might exist. Hence, with the employment of conventional warfare combined with counter-insurgency tactical activities, the U.S. has pronounced itself as the military guardian of the world.
Although, the U.S. states its actions are in its self-interest, in terms of what is euphemistically defined as defending the free world, the truth of the matter is this action is a prelude to evolving one world government with the U.S. as its governing authority. Once the Peoples Republic of China becomes a full member of the WTO, and North Korea and Vietnam has been compromised, with Russia becoming an ally of NATO, the U.S. political-military influence in the world will be consolidated. The U.S. geopolitical strategy is not confined to the present crisis in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attack and targeting Osama bin Laden as the world’s nemesis. Rather, the U.S. strategy is to preserve its capacity to establish one world government as originally envisioned by the Trilateral Commission.
Nonetheless, there are some serious obstacles to this hegemonic goal, of which the world of fundamentalist Islam has become the principle target. Here, it should be noted that Islam condemns suicide or the mass killings of women, children and non-combatant males. Yet, the U.S., Israel, western Europe, Russia, India and China all view Islam as the enemy. Although, there are over 1.2 billion Muslims in the world, the current alliance of economic interest headed by the U.S., are united to vanquish what they consider the growing menace of fundamentalist Islam. It is with this understanding of U.S. geopolitics one is able to comprehend why the U.S. has redefine its military mission, as opposition to globalization and U.S. imperialism metamorph into a political struggle without borders or territorial imperatives.
The ideological struggle between capitalist free-market economy and Islamic theocratic determinates has exploded into an international conflagration of insurgency with the potential of initiating World War III. The Islamic fundamentalist movements throughout the world has the potential to test the U.S. military, political and economic resolve as the world’s leader and authority of an one world government. With over 1.2 billion adherents, Islam has become a formidable foe to contend with for ideological supremacy in the world’s geopolitics. Even without discussing the religious (moral and ethics) aspects that motivates the geopolitics of Islam in opposition to U.S. imperialist hegemony, the call for Jihad/Holy War against the U.S. presents a serious threat that could precipitate WW-III. Therefore, the U.S. find it necessary to redefine its military mission, develop new language to codify warfare and legitimize its international political and economic purpose. Yet, many of the world’s oppressed peoples’ have already experienced U.S. military counter-insurgency tactics (Ethiopia, Somalia, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Chile, Congo, etc.), including parts of the Islamic world. No matter how or why the U.S. attempts to persuade Americans that it is entering a new type of warfare, in reality it is more of the same, only extending the military arena to further protect its authority to establish one world government.
However, the U.S. is not the homogeneous country that people are deluded into believing exist. Rather, the U.S. has been held together due its ability to exploit the world’s resources and distribute (unequally) the profits amongst its citizens with its culture of conspicuous consumption. But, the recent attack on the U.S., and its aftermath may very well lead to the untangling and unraveling of the U.S. fabric as has been witnessed with the USSR and Yugoslavia. In understanding this true history of U.S. imperialism, outside and within its borders, essentially tells a story of why U.S. imperialism has been and will continue to be attacked.
Ultimately, the U.S. will eventually find itself at war with itself, as the ideology of a free democratic society will be found to be a big lie. This is especially disconcerting as greater restrictions on civil and human rights are made into law eroding the First and Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. As during the Vietnam conflict, internal contradictions of racism, poverty and inequality will be exacerbated as a result of the U.S. military campaign and domestic undermining of civil and human rights. It is expected that strife in America will eventually become violent dissolving any semblance of the illusion of America the Beautiful. In anticipation of U.S. progressive activist opposing this claimed war against terrorism, the federal government will pass new laws to severely restrict protest, demonstrations and dissent. In the ’60s, U.S. progressive activists evolved the slogan “Bring the War Home!” – the question is what will be the slogan this time, now that the war has been brought home?
Free the Land!!
Not mob rule as in democracy gone awry. Not lynch mob. The mob mob. To borrow what Serbs used to say about their country:
Many countries have their own mobsters. America is the only place where mobsters have their own country.
While the television public is fascinated by the stereotype Italian Mafioso, the real mob is comprised of corporate dons who enforce their capitalist tyranny on anyone worth squeezing, turnups included.
The poor are starving, falling victim to plagues, genocide, war and catastrophe. The middle classes are falling into debt, soon to be poor, meanwhile the rich are hording more and more. Instead of caring for their indentured subjects, the rich build their castle walls ever higher.
Organic, range-fed, non-toxic food? Not for us. Reserved for their progeny. Instead of ameliorating the plight of the serf by sharing the bounty of the land, we get mad-cow infested gruel.
Who’s paying the bill, who’s tendering the bill?
U. S. gas prices have hit over three dollars per gallon. Let’s see: we have oil men in charge of the country, they conduct secret meetings with energy companies, they convince us to invade Iraq with the world’s second largest oil reserves, the oil companies post record breaking profits, and we’re paying twice as much as we used to for gasoline. Who’s the patsy? Though that word might be a little insulting if you’re the parent of someone killed in this charade.
Whose conscience was not bothered by secret prisons?
If CIA officer Mary McCarthy was not the source of the leak about the network of secret prisons to which America is abducting people, the question that comes to mind is not who was, but rather, who else was not? Who among the CIA, government and military administrators knew about the illegal un-American activities and didn’t blow the whistle?
Diplomatic immunity for beachheads?
On the subject of flouting international law, it has been revealed that plans for the American embassy in Baghdad include facilities for mounting military operations. Since when has it been permissible to treat embassies as military beachheads? When Iranians stormed the U. S. embassy in Tehran, they claimed that the diplomats held hostage were in reality CIA operatives. Our country vehemently denied these charges, but history has shown the Iranian accusations to have been true.
Air quote, Zaqawi, end quote.
A recent Al Zarqawi videotape issues new warnings to Iraq’s occupiers. It renews the defiant posturing and reiterates the link between Iraq and Al Qaeda. When the BBC reported the latest story, they used quotations when refering to “Zarqawi.” Whose quotes might those be? Of what footnote to the Zarqawi story is the BBC reminding us?
Which came first? This is not a question. To think that there is no answer to this question seems to dismiss the reality that both exist dependent upon one another.
If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is there to hear it, was the impact any less material? Is the impact of a tree to hear it?
I heard a writer pose this question: if she visits her mother, but her mother has alzheimers and doesn’t remember the visit, should she have bothered to visit?
If everyone’s lives come to death in the end, how much should we bother with life?
I visited the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo yesterday. They have a newborn baby gorilla who is needing special attention because he has been abandoned by his mother.
Except for having arms which can reach well over his head, there is little to distinguish him from you or me don’t you think?