…Why are we Americans not afraid as we watch our freedoms evaporate – not concerned – not interested in stopping the erosion of the rights that our forefathers fought and died to achieve? Why is it so hard to understand that the way we deal with enemy prisoners today will be the way our government will deal with Americans when the time comes to “re-define” the “enemy”? Why indeed did the average German not object to the gradual loss of his freedoms during Hitler’s rise to power? How did we not object to Ruby Ridge or Waco? There are many answers none of which is absolute, but each is contributory…
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“A government able to give you all you want is powerful enough to take all you have.”
Author Unknown.
This very valid observation remains completely hidden by the counter-reality presumption: “This is America and IT cannot here”. Not only could it happen; IT has already happened in the United States. What is IT you say? IT is an alarmingly large portion of our freedoms having been taken and replaced with the arrogance of a self-made fool who believes that arrogance, stubbornness and the advice of equally corrupt cronies represents stoic statesmanship.
FREEDOM is all we Americans or the citizens of any other country have. It is the precious commodity that gives us the ability to make our own choices. It is also the precious commodity that our politicians have used to bargain away our freedoms for years – using welfare and social engineering of all types as the medium of exchange. Today there is no bargaining with our runty megalomaniac-in-chief. Today he feels, “I have taken your freedoms and your laws and discarded them because “I” have the power to do so and “I” know what is best for you and your country.
Why are we Americans not afraid as we watch our freedoms evaporate – not concerned – not interested in stopping the erosion of the rights that our forefathers fought and died to achieve? Why is it so hard to understand that the way we deal with enemy prisoners today will be the way our government will deal with Americans when the time comes to “re-define” the “enemy”? Why indeed did the average German not object to the gradual loss of his freedoms during Hitler’s rise to power? How did we not object to Ruby Ridge or Waco? There are many answers none of which is absolute, but each is contributory.
Some believe that our “stupor” is not a stupor at all, but rather a backlash to having been given so many freedoms that we thought we could abuse and “give up a few of them temporarily” while our politicians fought the wars (using our children) they had started against enemies they had manufactured. We used the freedoms given us by our Constitution to promote pornography as a “freedom of expression”. We used our religious freedom to turn from “unhandy” Christian ethics to the much more unshackling, “feel-good” teachings of hedonism. We used everyone’s freedom of speech to enhance the balance sheets of such intellectual luminaries as Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly and Neal Boortz as he or she spread the propaganda of “Karl Rove Goebbels”. We branded everyone who used even one brain cell to think for himself as a “liberal”,” leftist”, “Communist”, terrorist sympathizer – or anti-Semite.
Our president started a war which he hopes to make unending. He hopes to slither into the sunset with a “brush axe” in one hand, a presidential library hammer in the other and the title of “Worst President of the Great American Experiment” clenched firmly between his teeth while someone (hopefully as corrupt as he) is left to deal with the legacy of an unprovoked war of aggression which has not only alienated 1.3 BILLION Muslims and Arabs to murderous, revengeful outrage, but has repaid his largest campaign contributors in full. And slither he will because there is no outcry or outrage to his lies, out-of-sight Executive Orders or secret deals even when they are exposed.
What size outrage would it take for the Democratic Party to make even a token contribution toward his impeachment? Where is the grassroots groundswell that no politician can ignore? Does every politician in the Republican Party believe he can contribute to the present outrage toward America by doing nothing to stop our out of control lunatic-in-chief and not be judged a co-conspirator at the next November Day of Reckoning? Is the loss of the majority in either the Congress or the Senate to the Democrats only a loss of power for Republicans, or does it also signal the launching of Democratic Party investigations into congressional and White House corruption as the Democrats take leadership roles in committees that would like nothing better than to spend two years searching out Republican corruption in the run up to the 2008 national election?
Today we Americans are given a rare opportunity to glimpse our American future if we can tear ourselves away from the current episode of “American Idol” long enough to focus on events “not reported on Faux News or CNN”. Today even though Sean Hannity doesn’t tell us, the “Salvadorian type death squads” making life such a living hell for the average Iraqi are, as previously in El Salvador, being run by “our” CIA. “Our” CIA controls today’s Iraqi Ministry of the Interior with its assignations, private torture prisons, car bombers and private militias all used with the intent of fomenting a sectarian civil war that will ultimately lead to a breakup of Iraq into smaller, weaker entities whose resources can be more easily stolen. This same approach lies in wait for the control of America’s future enemies (today’s average American) who insist on clinging to “that goddamn piece of paper” called our Constitution.
Today’s war in Iraq needs further historic background to more fully explain its dismal failure (as if listening to George explain his reasons for going to war does not fully explain the war’s present condition and its probable outcome). It is not the “war” which needs further examination; it is the role of Americans as “liberators” in modern history that needs further scrutiny.
To explore the “liberator’s” role in our present condition, some assumptions will have to be made.
1. Our decision to invade Iraq was not made in the best interests of the United States, but was influenced in no small degree by the “best interests” of Israel and presented falsely to the American people and the American Congress as a retaliatory move against a country that had launched an invasion against our country.
2. The decision for the pretext to be used for the invasion of Iraq was one that American policy makers agreed could be most easily “sold” to the American people. “They plotted to sell them a war”. [1] As the White House unfolded pretext after pretext, “liberating” the Iraqi population from the evil Sadaam Hussein became a very popular rallying cause.
3. Israel has no interest in living in “peace” with the Palestinians no matter what roadmaps, concessions or peace plans are brought to any table. “We shall start another war” . . . [2]
4. American foreign policy and foreign aid policies of the United States are influenced to such a degree that America is becoming known as The United States of Israel. [3]
History is not kind to America’s role as the “liberator” of the German population from Prussian totalitarianism in general and Hitler’s Nazism in particular after World War II. Allied liberation failed in Germany because “liberation” was equated to “occupation”, and no occupation has ever succeeded. [4]” . . . the American Military Occupation was Draconian; men cannot be taught to hate and kill on Wednesday and to love and cherish on Thursday”. [5]
Perhaps this explains our surprise in finding that our troops were not met with flowers, waving flags and candy as we “liberated” Iraqi town after town. Surprisingly enough our troops were not greeted with kisses at three o’clock in the morning as our troops kicked down the doors of homes, looted the households, handcuffed the male adults over and under the age of 15 and sent them to Abu Ghraib. Oh yes, you say, “There was information that led our troops to particular homes to search for “insurgents”. Yes, information in many cases obtained by torture no less draconian than that used by Sadaam Hussein – or the Israelis. . . . the interrogators at Abu Ghraib included a number of Arabic-speaking Israelis who also helped U.S. interrogators develop the “R2I” (Resistance to Interrogation) techniques. Many of the torture methods were developed by the Israelis over many years of interrogating Arab prisoners on the occupied West Bank and in Israel itself.
As a further comparison, war against Germany and war against Iraq have been fought by Americans as “wars against houses”. The meaning of the comparison?
“Americans, . . . how could they understand the world of broken stones that once were houses”? Houses mean people. The war against houses was a war against people. “Strategic bombing” was one of war’s little jokes; the strategy was to hit railroads and power plants and factories – and houses. Right up until the total collapse of steel fabrication at the end of 1944, the Germans had four rails for every rail in use; within two to six hours after a yard was hit, it was moving again. But sleepless workers weren’t moving so fast, and terrified workers were moving still slower, and workers whose homes were gone (and maybe a wife or a child) weren’t moving fast at all.” [6]
“The way to win wars is to hit the pictures on the worker’s, the miner’s, the soldier’s parlor wall”. [7]
“Words are worthless, and pictures, each of them worth a thousand words, are worthless. Seeing is not believing. Only having been there, having been hit or not hit running to from it, and being bedeviled forever by what might have been done a half-hour before or a half-minute after is worth anything. A book might have been saved, or a pair of shoes, or a mother or a child. Or a passport. Or a child might been saved if a pair of shoes had been let go, or a mother if a child had been let go”.
“And words and phrases like, ‘hit. . . talk about prize fights. . . All that words can say is that Stuttgart was ‘hit’ or Bremen ‘hit hard’ or (Baghdad was “shocked and awed”) . It’s like saying that Christ, in the course of his carpentering, got a nail through his hand”. [8]
And now we are about to liberate the Iranians. We are about to make war against their houses. The difference between our “liberation” of Iraq/Iran and our “liberation” of Germany lies in the vast difference between the types of people involved. The meaning of “collateral damage” has far different connotations then and now. Our hypocrisy in dealing with “collateral damage” is monumental. “Collateral damage” was one of the OBJECTIVES in the war against Germany in order to cause the German worker to slow his efforts towards the defense of the Fatherland as a result of losing his home and his family.
But the objectives of our wars have changed. “Collateral damage” against the Iraqi/Iranian drives him immediately to thoughts and actions of revenge on the perpetrators. While the German was no less devoted to his home and family, his motivating reaction was not revenge. The Muslim (fanatic or not) has been reared in an atmosphere of tribal retribution for real or imagined harm. His religion is his comforter in a normally harsh life and he is more than willing to sacrifice his life for his religion’s guarantee of eternal bliss. Regret for “collateral damage” is all right for newspaper PR, but as a weapon of the war being waged by our neo-cons, collateral damage creates a truly dedicated enemy. But of course, that is the “plan”.
While our leaders (sic) delude themselves into thinking that we Americans are willing to again fall for a bogus national crisis – this time to save Israel from destruction – the task of getting even marginal support from the world community is going to be extremely difficult. It shouldn’t be hard, however, to get our Israeli funded Congress to give our president anything and everything he wants. The task of getting ourselves into the Gulf of Hormuz should be easy enough; getting ourselves out is going to be the trick.
Copyright 2006 Nolan K. Anderson
Written by Nolan K. Anderson, and published at www.populistamerica.com. Nolan is a retired engineer and a veteran of Korea. He welcomes your feedback at nkanders@bellsouth.net
References:
[1] www.tvnewslies.org/html/the_white_house_iraq_group.html
[2] www.voicesofpalestine.org/ArielSharon.asp
[3] www.counterpunch.com/fisk04272006.html
[4] They Thought They Were Free, page 299, [5] page 301, [6] page
296, [7] page 297, [8] page 297.