The world has been taken hostage in the most gigantic, megalomaniac and malevolent plot that has ever been conceived by man. Words like democracy and freedom no longer have any meaning. We are all pawns in a huge game of 'get-the-booty' and 'rule-the-world'. Individuals have strictly no value. People only exist so as to be used as slaves until they die from exhaustion or survive in utmost misery and total insecurity, until their children can take over in the same kind of miserable treadmill.
The larger the number that succumb to disease and starvation, the better, in the view of the perfectly callous creatures who are the skippers of the ship at this time. The poor are just ballast and are better gotten rid of.
Who are the people who call the shots in today's world? The real leaders are the financiers who work in collusion with governments, the transnational corporate leaders who care about nothing except immediate gain. The big corporations swallow up the minor ones and it's a free-for-all in this jungle where money is king. Money is what matters and nothing else does.
To make this plunder appear reasonable, the U.S. empire which holds most of the strings to world power, has to have a reason for gobbling up the rest of the world. There are no restrictions due to moral principles, civil rights, international treaties or any constitutional principles whatsoever. Everything has been done to empower the leaders of the empire and the corporations to crush anyone who stands in their way.
An enemy is needed
Since the United States wants to hold on to the image that it is a somewhat civilized nation, an enemy has to be created. It is of no importance whether the enemy has any existence in the world of reality or if it is just a product of propaganda, as long as the world can be convinced that there is one, and one that presents a real threat to the United States and to the world.
Communism or its cousin, socialism, was an extremely handy pretext for world-wide attacks, from Vietnam, to Chile to Panama to Nicaragua. And in cases where communism had nothing to do with the embattled regime, the myth was created. After the great debacle of Vietnam, the empire ran out of breath for a while. During Nixon/Kissinger, Reagan, followed by H.W. Bush and Clinton, however, the American people was convinced again and again that the Communist dragon was threatening to consume us. Warm-up exercises to prove our military superiority were conducted in Chile, Central America, Sudan and Iraq, among other places – these wars usually undertaken with the principal aim of boosting a tottering public image of the incumbent president . The object was also generally to prove that the empire still had the fangs to carry out vicious and, from an international viewpoint, totally illegal attacks to consolidate its superiority.
After the end of the cold war, a new enemy had to be created. After the neoconservative clique in Washington laid their plans for a take-over of the world through an endless war, the administrations, from Reagan on, played the conquer-it-all game with great conviction. Then came September 11, like manna from heaven, and the road was open to world domination. And so the war on terror was launched on the world scene with great hysteria and fanfare. Fear would be the clue to keep Americans subdued. Continually renewed fear would keep the American population from getting out of order and try massive anti-war demonstrations and civil disobedience acts. People had to be made to believe that they were in danger and needed to be defended against the Big Evil. So the propaganda machine was set to convince people, with renewed vigor, that the United States was the most morally upstanding country in the world.
Orwellian double-speak was employed with much success – Pax Americana for eternal war, liberation of Iraq for the theft of Iraqi oil resources, the greatest democracy in the world for a nation where civil rights were increasingly curtailed and popular voting rights were made to be a meaningless concept, through the multiple ways of rigging the election process.
War, however, was essential not just to invade and dominate countries like Iraq and whatever countries are going to follow, but in the interest of the arms industry that was being enriched in the most obscene way. The huge corporations, the oil and arms industry in the first place, were all the big players in this winner-take-all game for Money and Power.
People are of no importance
In this totally callous race for profit, the little people, the people who actually did the work, counted for nothing. The leaders took it for granted that the workers would always be around to take care of the drudgery jobs. Social expenses were cut ever more seriously, unions lost their meaning. Everything that smacked of welfare, expenses for education, for health, for the psychological wellbeing of ordinary people, was cut out of the budget as being part of socialist politics that were anathema to the neoconservative leaders. The goal was to set the clock back to the period before F.D.R.'s New Deal.
Where are we now?
So where has this extraordinary megalomania taken us? A nation that was once looked up to in the world, seen as a leader in various fields, education, research, free speech, civil rights, high living standards, has now become universally despised and distrusted.
Where does the United States stand today, with all its enormously wealthy corporations? It is on the brink of an economic collapse. The working people have no more buying power and the values of their homes are collapsing, while the one tenth of one percent of Americans are wallowing in obscene wealth. The land that used to pride itself on the possibility of going from rags to riches, is now a debt-ridden nation with no internal strength left, all set to crumble at the next serious economic or military downturn.
Siv O'Neall was born and raised in Sweden where she graduated from Lund University. She has lived in Paris, France and New Rochelle, N.Y. and traveled extensively throughout Europe, the U.S. and other continents, mainly several trips to India. Siv retired after many years of teaching French in Westchester, N.Y. and English in the Grandes Ecoles (Institutes of Technology) in France. In addition to her own writing, Siv has also provided Axis of Logic with translation services. She has been living in France, first Paris, then Lyon, for 30 years. In addition to her political activism and writing, her life is filled with family, music, animals, reading, traveling and she also feels that 'A thing of beauty is a joy for ever'.
