---Paul Robeson
Virtually every day our mendacious corporate media publicizes the farcical “debate” between officials of the Bush Regime and Congress. While numerous polls have indicated that over 2/3 of US Americans want an end to the war in Iraq, and voters positioned the Democrats to exercise the will of the people, the war rages on.
Between the Gulf War, the subsequent US-driven draconian UN economic sanctions, and the seemingly endless US invasion and occupation of Iraq, well over a million Iraqis are dead. Infrastructure essential to vital human needs, including transportation, health, utilities, water, and sanitation has been decimated. Depleted uranium will continue to visit misery and death upon the Iraqi population long after the imperial invaders have been sent packing, as we were in Vietnam.
Yet despite the overwhelming concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a relative few individuals and corporate entities, each of us in the United States is complicit in the crimes of our nation to some degree. Obviously, some bear much more responsibility than others, but we have each had a hand in the obliteration of the Iraqi nation.
While a majority of US Americans now vehemently oppose the Bush administration and its abominable war, too many of us still believe that both are anomalies which will be “corrected” once we “elect” a new cast of characters to take the political reins in 2008. Sadly, little could be further from the truth. As with most putrescence, ours runs deep beneath the surface.
Fed a steady diet of carefully crafted agitprop from cradle to grave, many of us zealously pursue the American Dream of suburban utopias bordered by white picket fences. Utterly oblivious and indifferent to the staggering cost we impose upon the rest of the world, we ignore the stack of bloodied corpses on which we climb as we reach for the sacred brass ring. Ready-made delusions eagerly provided by our corporate masters assure us that we are entitled to all that we desire, convince us that we are morally superior to those we bleed dry to gratify ourselves, and shield us from the grim reality that we are the “monsters on Maple Street.”
Beneath the gilded façade of truth, justice, and the American Way lurks a corrosive and rapacious socioeconomic system which is inimical to democracy, a relative handful of opulent overlords ruling a “constitutional republic”, and hundreds of millions of poor and working class individuals who are all too willing to participate in crimes against humanity in exchange for “the good life”, which as Hurricane Katrina so clearly demonstrated, is not nearly as “good” as we have been programmed to believe.
Since it is unlikely that conscience will impel us to muster the collective will necessary to dismantle this abhorrence, let’s pray that resistance movements in Iraq and other nations that we oppress and occupy serve us a healthy portion of humility by sending us home with our tails between our legs.
In the event readers need a summary of the case for divine intervention on behalf of humanity against the detestable monstrosity we have become, here it is:
1. We are a gluttonous herd of swine devouring resources at a rate well beyond the Earth’s capacity to renew them. Metaphorically speaking, we are one of twenty people populating the globe. Yet we greedily gobble a quarter of the pie, leaving our nineteen neighbors to divvy up the remaining 75%.
2. Our socioeconomic system, in which our de facto aristocracy, myriad “think tanks”, textbook authors, and mainstream media whores have inculcated us to place an unwavering faith of cult-like proportions, is only several generations removed from feudalism, mercantilism, chattel slavery, and the early industrial capitalism which fostered the abject human misery about which Dickens wrote. Concentration of wealth into the hands of a few, exploitation of the working class and the poor, various forms of servitude, profits and property over people, unbridled consumption of resources, and an insatiable need for growth and expansion are inherent malignant aspects of our much vaunted “American Capitalism”. Encouraging and rewarding greed, narcissism, hyper-competitiveness, selfishness, and ruthlessness, the “best system there is” has propelled shamelessly decadent pigs to obscene opulence while leaving over half of the world’s population to wallow in extreme poverty.
3. Rather than dismantling the military leviathan we created to facilitate our involvement in World War II, we chose to embrace a perpetual Military Keynesianism under which a mere 5% of the world’s population spends more on war than the rest of the world combined. We have no problem “tainting” our capitalism with a little socialism as long as it enables the continued existence of the parasitic “defense” industry, allows us to maintain over 700 military bases in at least 130 different countries, and empowers us to wage the covert and overt imperialist wars necessary to advance the interests of capital.
4. We have a long history of spouting off about our devotion to “freedom and democracy,” decrying (and sometimes lynching) authoritarian rulers who refuse to surrender their nation’s sovereignty to our empire, and installing and supporting brutal tyrants who serve the needs of our beloved plutocrats. Iran, bad. Saudi Arabia, good. Venezuela, evil. Colombia, righteous. You get the picture.
5. In the course of our “infinitely benevolent” quest to democratize and free the world, we have left a bloody wake of annihilated human beings euphemistically labeled as “collateral damage.” Millions of Native Americans “sacrificed their lives” so that we could found and expand the United States. At least 600,000 Filipinos were felled as we toiled under the crushing responsibility of our “white man’s burden.” A half million Japanese died so we could display our power to Russia, a significant threat to capitalism’s hegemony. Factor in the 135,000 at Dresden, over two million Koreans, three million Vietnamese, the aforementioned million plus in Iraq, and millions more (counting those murdered via covert operations, smaller military interventions, and by proxies like the Shah, Pinochet, and Israel…not to mention the blacks who died as a result of the slave trade and Jim Crow lynchings), and the malevolence of the Third Reich pales in comparison to the criminal enterprise known as the United States of America.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
