The drugging of 'America'
U.S. citizens have been drugged to oblivion about what is implied in a good life. And yet; they are the ones who should be the most concerned. It's the United States that is so sorely in need of real improvement of healthcare, an improved educational system, good-quality public transportation systems as well as support for a great number of social programs on the state level. Those programs are badly needed for the educational and cultural as well as esthetic and artistic stimulus of all strata of the U.S. citizenry. They are also essential for the good functioning of society on the family level, daycare centers, after-school activities for young people, free school lunches and much more. These essential entitlements have been steadily cut back ever since the beginning of the Bush/Cheney era.
As long as there is a so-called war going on, it will always be possible, or so it seems, to silence any possible opposition from Mainstream America. As long as there is an administration that sets as its major goal the continuation of the United States as a superpower, they will always depend on inventing one or several wars, such as 'the war on terror'. And as long as there are wars to spend money on - for the profit of the military-industrial complex - there will obviously not be enough funds left over for the urgent peaceful needs in the U.S. of today. Add to this the fact that, during the neocon regime, the quite visible policy was the starving of the beast, the dumbing-down of the people so that they would be easy to fool into a state of religious-patriotic fervor that would squeeze out all traces of possible tolerance and broadmindedness. Knowledge and the development of a critical mind are essential to create a powerful opposition to a ruling run-away clique, blinded by hubris and greed. Deprive the people of good education and authentic news and they will never know what is going on in the real world, what is being done to fool them. Drug them with propaganda and infotainment and they will become sleepwalkers who work, eat, have sex and watch Fox news.
Is there any such thing as democracy?
Democracy was a beautiful thought, but did it ever get to be more than a utopia, a chimera, such stuff as dreams are made on? Greed will always get in the way of compassion and rational thinking, which ought to bring us to fight for a livable and a durable world for everyone. What we have now is a short-lived amassment of goods and spectacular high living for the obscenely wealthy, who must be thinking 'Après nous le de'luge'[1] if they are thinking at all, which is doubtful. Instant profit, instant pleasure and the world be damned! To even whisper the word democracy in the context of the destruction and remaking of Central Asia in their own image is obscene. Democracy is a lost dream in the world of today and we can ask ourselves if it ever did exist.
The fire in Central Asia
Washington is still today doing its best to pour fuel on the fire in Central Asia. In spite of assertions to the contrary, Iraq is still a powder keg with regularly occurring mass killings taking place between different factions of the splintered Iraqi society. And even if, by some magic, Washington decided to let the Iraqis work out a solution to their own conflicts, the way most countries do, we still see the flaring up of violence and mass killings in Afghanistan, with Pakistan having been dragged into the conflict to an ever increasing extent since the new U.S. President began his clone bombing campaigns in the border areas where the Pashtun Taliban are holing up. The Karzai government is at a loss for a working solution, walking a tightrope between their natural solidarity with the Pashtun anti-American fighters (the Pashtuns are the largest of the many ethnic minorities in Pakistan, the Punjabis being the majority ethnic group) and the demand from Washington that they strike down on the rebel areas along the Afghani-Pakistani border.
Pakistan was given a chance to get a civilian government under Asif Ali Zardari, the current president and the husband of Benazir Bhutto, a former president who was assassinated in December, 2007. He is totally corrupt, like most other political leaders in that part of the world, and maybe everywhere, but it still looks like an improvement after the military rule of General Pervez Musharraf who came to power in a military coup in 1999 and ruled the troubled country in a dictatorial way. The Pakistani people themselves actually very recently protested so strongly against this form of rule that Zardari saw himself forced to reinstate the Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry, who had been ousted by Musharraf, to his former post on March 16, 2009.
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