As Hermann Goering, the infamous leader of Nazi Germany’s Luftwaffe said while on trial at Nuremberg for crimes against humanity:
“Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”
Those fateful words by one of modern history’s most sadistic mad-men take on an air of prognostication when they are superimposed onto the pre-invasion(s) propaganda of our current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and the threat of another in Iran.
The sad reality is that in America this most obvious Nazi-playbook model apparently seems to work. I don’t quite understand why but it does. What else can explain the “any-at-all” much less “more-then-a-quarter” of American’s continued support for the Iraq war, a war which has seen ever claim of justification and prediction of outcome fall flat on its preverbal face.
America has a long history of war and just as long of a history of being proud warriors in the face of conflict. But how can we possibly be proud of using trumped-up-charge bully tactics to go to war only to make already obscenely rich people richer. This reality flies in the face of everything that America claims to stand for and calls into question the very caliber of us as Americans.
If America doesn’t wake up and stand up to these obvious efforts by the unscrupulous few at using the might of this proud and powerful nation to enrich themselves at the expense of the worlds easy targets, not to mention the lives and well-being of our soldiers – both public and private – then we are a sad, sorry people. And with that admission we should stop claiming to be the “land of the free and home for the brave” and more accurately start admitting to being the “land of the lazy and home of the sucker”
Timothy Cavanaugh is an independent writer specializing in political, environmental and social justice issues (e-mail: twcavanaugh@hotmail.com).
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