The EDSA Revolution, also referred to as the People Power Revolution and the Philippine Revolution of 1986, was a mostly non-violent mass demonstration in the Philippines. Four days of peaceful action by millions of Filipinos led to the downfall of the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos and the installation of Corazon Aquino as president of the Republic. EDSA stands for Epifanio de los Santos Avenue, the main highway in Metro Manila and the main site of the demonstrations.
In the last year or so I’ve posted more than a few articles protesting various aspects of the Cheney/Bush administration and their ill conceived, illegal and insane policies and on several occasions I’ve led the pieces with pictures that cast Cheney and Bush in Nazi uniforms. I have no facility with Photoshop so I “borrowed” the images from here and there around the web. My apologies to those unheralded graphic geniuses whose work I “borrowed.”
The pieces were generally well received around the liberal blogosphere but locally, here in Dayton, Ohio I took no small amount of heat for comparing Cheney/Bush and his criminal minions with Hitler and his henchmen. I received some very unflattering comments, some hate mail, more than a few invitations to an ass kicking, mine was intended I believe, and one grammatically challenged death threat.
It is not always a friendly house we play to here in the “heart”land, this crowd can get tough.
I’ve long believed that no matter how great my fears of the criminal depths to which the government of my country has sunk, no matter how bad I suspect things have become, the reality is always, always, worse. much worse, way worse.
That is why I’m seldom surprised by reports of governmental abuse of the rights of our citizens and other human beings around the world and why I wasn’t surprised when I read an article (“The CIA’s torture teachers”) in Salon today in which Mark Benjamin points out the emerging facts in several investigations currently underway which point to the active participation of members (Doctors, I believe) of the American Psychological Association with the CIA and Special Force components of the US military in the criminal interrogations of prisoners being held at Guantanamo and other sites known and unknown around the world.
I also believe that I’ve reached an age and a level of experience at which, if I notice that if someone is pissing in my boots and simultaneously trying to explain to me that it’s raining, I have no problem kicking his ass without benefit of further evidence.
Bullshit, I feel, announces itself well in advance by it’s unmistakable aroma, and my sniffer has only improved with age. And so, I believe, has yours.
This makes me what they call a loose cannon, so be it.
I knew, for example, long before the first court proceeding that Scooter, along with everyone in the VPs realm and the entire “unitary executive” had signed on to destroying Joe Wilson, his wife was just necessary “collateral damage.” And so, I believe did you.
I knew that Bush’s pathetic little sycophant at Justice was balls deep in doing exactly what Karl Rove told him to do the moment I read the first story of the attorney firings in the press nearly a year ago, as, in my mind at least, did you.
And, to the point, I knew when these assholes started beating breasts and investigating and charging and arranging courts martial for a few poor enlisted saps, and hanging fully expendable reserve officers out to dry over their involvement in the criminal abuses at Abu Graib, I knew that the policy directives/orders had flowed like water, down the big hill, always seeking the path of least resistance, right from the headwaters of criminal madness in the big White House on Pennsylvania Avenue, down through the office of “Gee Willikers” Don, to be signed off on by every cowardly, ass kissing “General” in the sickening group of careerist traitors that passes for military leadership in this Alice in Neocon world, and rolled inexorably on, like some, some, giant nightmare snowballing turd, crushing the hapless, low level few who would be sacrificed so that the dreams of empire could continue on and the profits would not abate. Somehow, I don’t believe that I was alone in my “knowledge.”
This story, of which I’m sure I have not heard the end, coupled with the “The General’s Report” in the New Yorker by Seymour Hersh about the downfall of Antonio Taguba, an honest and honorable officer and how he became one of the millions of human casualties of the human filth in neckties who have taken control of my America and Glen Greenwald’s piece this morning about Norman Podhoretz the lunatic who represents the “spiritual” core of this piratical band of psychopaths has pretty much driven my rage level to the ceiling.
I now live in a country that forces brave men like Antonio Taguba into retirement for behaving like honorable men, like soldiers, a country that rewards pathological scum like Norman Podhoretz the “Presidential Medal of Freedom.”
I was right to portray Cheney/Bush as Nazis, but they are potentially far worse.
I’m ready for the barricades. I know it… let me know when you know that you are.
Bob Higgins
EVERY day is a good day to die.
If indeed there there are any barricades, of course.
I personally believe that there will NOT be any.
None that show any serious possibility of changing things, anyway.
The end of personal, in your face “revolution” has already come, at least in the more developed areas of the world.
Info-war has grown too powerful to allow that to happen until it is too LATE for it to happen.
More likely?
An overall societal collapse brought about by a national emergency.
WHICH national emergency?
Dunno.
Could be terrorism-fueled.
Could be environmental.
Could be economic…say a REAL oil/gas shortage. Or a total, systemic bankruptcy.
Could be a societal panic brought about by the use of nuclear weapons to “win” a war that our conventional forces cannot win.
Probably a combination of several of those factors.
But when it comes…it will be a criminal breakdown.
NOT a revolutionary one.
Because the shock of awakening to the truth of the matter will be too great and too quick to allow masses of people the time that they might need to effectively organize.
And because our police state system will come down too hard on it.
Wanna get the Army out of Iraq?
It’ll be back here in a WEEK if people start food/fuel rioting.
Bet on it.
ALL ready and thoroughly trained and experienced in street/city insurgent fighting.
And just who will “the insurgents” be?
Who is thoroughly armed?
Urban gangs.
And maybe a few rural militias.
Lame opposition after the Islamic resistance.
Quick work.
The iron fist will finally come out of the velvet glove at home, just as it has for so long abroad.
We done been WAITING for THIS shit!!!
Watch.
Short of a literal electoral revolution…and I give that possibility only an outside shot, maybe 50 to 1…that’s where we are headed.
Ain’t gonna BE any barricades, Bob.
Not really…
Just pictures of them on TV.
As they burn, baby, burn.
Sorry…
AG