Valenzuela's Veritas

In ominous times truth always finds a way out from darkness into light. Always. Through truth knowledge grows into the power and strength to question the actions of governance. In times that try men's souls it is those who seek enlightenment who are truly free. Given the choice of possessing ignorance or knowledge, even when ignorance would lead to an easier life, I would choose knowledge,thus escaping the life of sheeple, escaping the bondage of not knowing, not caring and not understanding.

Name:

Manuel Valenzuela is a social critic, commentator, Internet essayist and author of Echoes in the Wind, a novel now published by Authorhouse.com. His essays appear regularly at various alternative news websites from around the globe. Mr. Valenzuela welcomes comments and can be reached at manuel@valenzuelas.net. He encourages readers to surf the collection of over 100 essays he has written which can be found visiting his archives and by searching the Internet. He welcomes comments at euromeximan@yahoo.com

Thursday, July 22, 2004

Part IV: George W. Bush’s Lasting Legacy to America: Boomerangs and Devastating Blowback

America Reaping What it Sows


Fundamentalist Islam’s Uncle Sam is George W. Bush, the perfect recruiting tool and poster boy for waging jihad against US interests throughout the world. It is he who has made possible the continued expansion of al-Qaeda-inspired organizations into a network of franchised movements following the ideology of Osama bin Laden. From a small network of mujahadeen, al-Qaeda has, thanks to Bush’s self-defeating war in Iraq, extended enormous tentacles into dozens of countries, slowly but surely building independent organizations capable of unleashing terrible carnage. As a collective goal these new splinter groups want to wage war with the US, bringing to the Empire the same death and suffering it has engendered throughout the world but especially in the Middle East.

Since the US invaded Iraq, terrorism has only increased throughout the world, manifested by bombings, assassinations and general mayhem that are giving birth to a worldwide guerilla warfare movement. This evolution of bin Laden inspired groups has become a growing and unstoppable forest fire that is slowly extending itself out of the control of American military might. Muslim mujahadeen have learned they cannot take on the American military in open battle. In order to equalize the battlefield, they have created a strategy of urban guerilla warfare against both US forces and the puppet regimes America supports, with innocent civilians caught in the very middle of this ongoing war of attrition. Clandestine and ambiguous, this state of warfare gives an advantage to groups of insurgents fighting governments. They can strike anywhere, at any time, quickly disappearing like phantoms back into the city streets. Attacking key sectors of infrastructure, soft targets and even civilian areas thus becomes a strategic and ruthless aim in waging war against the US and its interests.

This most ominous blowback is helping to feed a so-called war on terror that, immediately after 9/11, was but a mere hiccup to the giant tremor it is today. Bush’s invasion of Iraq has only succeeded in helping feed the vicious circle of violence that today sees no end in sight, with terror activities growing at an alarming and yearly rate. What the most ignorant and inept president in modern memory has achieved has been the creation of a world that is much more dangerous and violent than before he usurped office. His every action is being turned into a dangerous reaction. He has succeeded in creating more jihadis than American jobs, helping to keep a movement strong and attractive. The folly into Iraq and his continued one-sided support of Ariel Sharon and Israel assures that America, its interests and even its citizens will be in great danger in the years to come.

Before Bush, Saudi Arabia was a safe harbor for American contractors. Before Bush, Iraq posed no danger to American civilians. Before Bush, Americans could traverse the occupied lands of Palestine. Before Bush, anti-Americanism was minimal, not the enormous ball of fire it has become today. Before Bush, Americans could travel abroad in relative safety and calm, never insecure that their nationality made them a most inviting target. Before Bush, Americans felt safer at home, secure in happiness, devoid of paranoia and lacking the schizophrenia that hovers today. A nation once loved is no longer respected; a land once looked up to is now spit at. From bastion of good to being seen as the second most hated nation on Earth, after Israel, the US has lost the great adoration untold millions once shared. And we have George W. Bush to thank, the most hated man since Hitler, not to mention the most dangerous, even less popular in many nations than Osama bin Laden.

The American President’s triumph has not been the liberation of a beleaguered nation. Rather, Bush’s folly into the Middle East has had the intended effect of breeding a new generation of American-hating mujahadeen whose ranks swell more each passing day, thus justifying and feeding the so-called war on terror that is being marketed as a war of perpetuity. The Iraq debacle has had Bush’s intended desire of creating an army of Arab bogey-men that will supply the US economy and its corporate masters with untold profits and power, as well as spawning the excuse to extend its imperialist hegemony over foreign lands and peoples under the rubric of fighting the mirage called the war on terror. Thus has come to pass that a new enemy rivaling even what the Soviet threat represented to the military industrial complex, with its vast profit and power garnering opportunities, has been assembled through the conveyor belt of American invasion and occupation. Hail to the Chief.


George W. Bush, Osama’s best friend


George W. Bush has shown the world he is bin Laden’s best friend, showering him with blessed opportunity after blessed opportunity, endowing him with enough propaganda from which to keep expanding his already growing legions of holy warriors intent on waging war against the Great Satan. Both men are intertwined in a symbiotic and malevolent relationship where one’s actions has as a consequence the benefit of the other and where each decision made by one has the effect of empowering both fundamentalist religious zealots. Each bin Laden attack allows Bush’s power and control to grow while each Bush decision in the Middle East only makes bin Laden a more revered figure. One and the same, feeding off each other’s warmongering and terrorizing platform of destruction and suffering, Bush and bin Laden are comrades in a war on terror that continues building momentum. Without one the other would have ceased to exist. Without confrontation and war to stir the hornet’s nest of Muslim discontent neither would be the relevant world figure they are today. In such an obvious win-win relationship, better business partners one cannot find.

The invasion of Iraq has had the intended consequence of creating all the adversaries the military-industrial complex will ever need in its pursuit of perpetual war and its creation of the perfect enemy. Hatred of the United States over its devastating invasion and exploitative occupation of Iraq has fueled the burning inferno of thousands of disaffected men, most of which are indigent, uneducated, unemployed and suffering the policies of American supported puppets in the Middle East. These young and mature men, and a growing number of women, see the decimating effects of non-Arabs occupying their brethren, robbing the region’s oil, oppressing their relatives, raping their women, torturing their children and maintaining in power dictators, monarchs and despots that make worse the lives of ordinary civilians and boiling frustration mutates into scorching hatred and animosity.

Many thus turn to fundamentalist Islam as a way to escape the grip of indiscriminate animosity. With little education and much ignorance, little to live for and suffering perpetual poverty, religion easily gobbles them up into its well-oiled machine, transforming easily brainwashed ticking time bombs ready to explode into eager warriors of Allah, trained and dangerous holy warriors ready to die fighting the 21st century’s Evil Empire. The ingredients that help form the Molotov cocktail called the jihadi are not hard to grasp, and many are mixed together by the same Great Satan most jihadis will in the end sacrifice their life against in battle.

It is American foreign policy, that purveyor of subjugation and suffering in the Arab world that helps foment the flames of al-Qaeda and its growing tentacles around the world. It is American policies in the Middle East that are creating the blowback that we see today and that we will be witness to in the near future. The United States is reaping what it has sowed. Its putrid actions are being returned in retaliatory reactions. Cause and effect has been and will continue to lead to untold levels of negative karma in the near future, putting at stake the very existence of an America we have all come to know.


The Israeli Connection


Its continued financial, political and military support for the state of Israel continues to exacerbate an already volatile situation. The travesty and injustice that is the ethnic cleansing, apartheid state, dehumanization and Nazi-like oppressive occupation of the Palestinian people is fanning the flames of hatred and vengeance as Muslims throughout the world see the severe crimes against humanity being perpetrated in Palestine. Yet the more the Muslim world burns the more wood America adds to the fire.

Married at the hip, with Israel wearing the pants thanks to its control of two branches of government inside the US, in essence dictating American foreign policy, the two nations are intertwined in a self-destructive waltz of convenience. America gives unconditional support to Israel’s Nazi-like oppression, backing to its indifference to world opinion, political cover to the many egregious evasions of international law and billions of dollars a year in welfare checks that usually go towards maintaining the fourth strongest military in the world and toward the construction of settlements, bypass roads and the massive apartheid wall splitting Palestine into South-Africa style Bantustans. Israel can thus do as it pleases, laughing at the world community as it fuels worldwide instability through its dehumanizing, Nazi-like treatment of occupied Arabs, all of which it considers sub-human. With the most powerful nation in your pockets, backing your every move, providing billions in welfare, the worries are minimal and the arrogance omnipotent.

To the Muslim world, and increasingly to the globe at large, America and Israel are now a two-headed beast wearing the same colors and espousing the same interests. Today, these two nations are the most reviled countries in the world, one becoming a pariah and rogue nation and the other an imperialist warmonger. It is this relationship, along with the occupation of Iraq that the American public most needs to fear. The support of Israel is causing irreparable damage to the interests of the United States, and should be of utmost worry to anyone with a minute knowledge of technology, human progress, human behavior and psychology, and a vision of the inevitable actions to come.


The Coming Boomerang


Eventually America will have created enough enemies that out of the thousands of new jihadis and hundreds of new Osamas a few intelligent, radical, organized and sophisticated ones will find the tools needed to unleash horrific blowback on the lands and cities of the mighty American Empire. It is inevitable that some of these new al-Qaeda inspired franchises will eventually unearth the ability to create and disseminate chemical and or biological agents inside the cities we call home. It is only a matter of time and, if America continues on its suicidal foreign policy, what it helps release will boomerang back onto its vast cities.

As modern man progresses with time, so does his knowledge and technological capability. As more intelligent and sophisticated insurgents join the ranks of an already swelling Muslim jihad against America, it is inevitable that those possessing vast knowledge of chemical, nuclear and biological agents will use their talents in order to fight the Great Satan. Well educated men and women who see the devastation of the Palestinians and the occupation, rape and pillage of Iraq will or already are joining the al-Qaeda cause. The injustices seen in the Middle East, many thanks to the US, are making technologically savvy individuals resentful, angry and hateful of what America stands for. It is, therefore, only a matter of time before this nation is attacked in a way never thought possible.

With one unknown strike, America will be brought to its knees, destroying a society and a form of governance we have known for so many years. Twenty lunatics, each carrying a vial of biological agent, each destined to release their contents in one American city will bring the entire nation to a most wicked end. The danger presented thanks to Bush’s blowback cannot be ignored. If a biological attack takes place, even if it is in five major cities, the way of life we have known will come to an abrupt end. Tens or hundreds of thousands will become infected and die, many more will suffer horrific disease and its aftereffects, and major cities will be quarantined. Vast numbers of people may be placed in camps against their own will, split up from their loved ones. Chaos and anarchy will arrive as the populace loses all semblance of rational thought and becomes the primitive animals embedded in all of us. Absolute mayhem can be expected, with food, water and basic supplies in short supply. An eerie paranoia will overcome Americans in every city, town and state as a feeling the world has come to an end will emerge. With the arrival of disease our government will cease to exist, replaced by military rule and martial law. The America of yesterday and today will be no more.

In a very real possibility, every American or immigrant of Muslim/Arab descent may be imprisoned in vast internment camps hidden far from cities. Millions may be taken from their homes in an attempt at protecting the homeland. Thousands may be attacked and murdered by vengeance-filled Americans. To be Arab and Muslim living in the United States when the next wave of attacks takes place is to risk a most ominous future filled with uncertainty and danger. In a world gone mad, with a citizenry no longer capable of rational thought, scapegoats will emerge and those innocent millions who happen to be associated with the evil that has taken place will soon find themselves living in a nation foaming at the mouth.

The next attack is an inevitability we need to take very seriously. It can neither be predicted nor stopped. A small vile of biological agent can kill thousands, but the effects of what it does to the populace and the nation are even greater. The question is not if, but when. It is a certainty that with Bush’s continued policies and warmongering ways, the end of America will come sooner rather than later. We must be realists and pragmatists. What the Bush administration has and continues to do is seal our fates through its self-destructive actions. The war on terror cannot stop twenty individuals from unleashing Hell on Earth onto our cities. It cannot possibly fight to prevent this from occurring. What it does do is make the blowback that much more inevitable. We cannot fight the adversary through military armies and guided missiles. They cannot be defeated nor stopped using war as a means. The only solution is looking in the mirror, understanding our failed foreign policy and its suicidal mechanisms, finally realizing that we are helping to seal our own fates and beginning an era of communication and dialogue with those whose grievances can destroy America and our way of life.

The above mentioned example of blowback is no paranoid delusion. It is reality, and it is fast approaching, speeding like a runaway freight train with every Arab death, invasion of their lands, dehumanization of their citizenry and subjugation of their people. The American people hold the key to their own future. We can demand change for our own good by altering the course this country takes, or we can re-elect Bush, granting him a greater mandate to continue the ignorant power trip he believes the Almighty has chosen him for. If we keep him in office, a strong message gets sent to the world that the American people support his war and death policies, his invasion and occupation of Iraq and the manner in which the United States runs over the entire globe. This message would be disastrous.

This November, we can send the rest of the world, and the Middle East in particular, a strong message that the American people do not agree with the failures of George W. Bush. We can send the message that what he has done is anathema to what America stands for and that the people do not give their backing to such immoral men or their malevolent actions. We can begin to cure the wounds that refuse to heal and the reputation that has been trashed. By voting Bush out of office we can send the message that the American people are not represented by the sinister actions of a small cabal of corrupt men and women. Our voice should be heard throughout the world, and a new course must we take before all that we have is lost and the memory of a once great nation erodes with the passing sands of time.

The future is now, and the wrong turn must we avoid. Because of George W. Bush America is in great danger. This will be his lasting legacy, his ultimate gift to the American people. For the future of this marvelous nation we must rise up and take the steering wheel before it guides us down a precipice of self-annihilation. The consequences of such failure will be hard to fathom and horrific to live in.

Wednesday, July 21, 2004

Part III: George W. Bush’s Lasting Legacy to America: Understanding Worldwide Animosity against the United States

Oh how the incompetent fail when granted the keys to the world.

It was just after 9/11 that all corners of the globe came together in support of America. From Europeans to Latin Americans, Africans to Asians, and Arabs from throughout the Middle East, the world proudly displayed the red, white and blue in solidarity with the American people. The monstrosity that developed on 9/11 outraged the vast majority of the world’s population, and, in a show of universal fraternity, billions exhibited the warmth and compassion we humans are capable of releasing onto our fellow beings.

During those eerie days when the world had gone mad and the planet turned on an ominous axis, we were all American, from every corner of our vast blue planet, comprising every diverse color, ethnicity and religion. Our common language became humanity, our common belief was empathy. People from over 60 nations died on 9/11, their lives made to disappear among apocalyptic ruins and the gushing ash and debris chasing thousands of New Yorkers through the streets of Manhattan.

At that very moment the government of the United States had been forgiven, at least temporarily, for a devastating foreign policy that had made human suffering a national mandate through the corrosive exploitation of developing nation lands and peoples. Yet no sooner had the Twin Towers fallen that the Bush administration began planning for the most comprehensive and self-destructive foreign policy strategy in its history.

The invasion of Afghanistan soon began, followed by an immoral invasion of Iraq, a sovereign nation pussing out untold suffering and indigence at the hands of American sponsored and supported economic sanctions that had left the people of ancient Mesopotamia living among the ruins of times past and the rotting erosions of the present. Iraq was a threat only to the camels grazing on the banks of the Tigris. Only its carcass remained after war and economic genocide, struggling to feed, educate and provide medicine to the hundreds of thousands who by American crimes against humanity no longer grace the dimensions of this great Earth.

An outraged world soon saw the Bush administration discard international laws and organizations in an arrogant display of bravado, ignoring world opinion and momentum to achieve its own purposes. The energy of the world’s people quickly saw through the haze of propaganda, realizing the moral cavity devoid of justice and honor. America the beautiful had become America the warmonger. The red, white and blue was now the flag of the profiteer, the greedy and the imperialist.

The American Empire had become the bully that in childhood was denied discipline, attention and rearing by its selfishly obsessed parents. This abandonment gave birth to a future beast, unknowing of society’s rules, modes and behaviors, whose adult life would be marked by psychological demons and societal scars. Lacking the ingredients by which humans behave and interact, the superpower, like a young mammal whose parents have been taken before being able to impart knowledge to their progeny, never grasped the correct behaviors of worldwide human society, thus becoming a self-destructive entity failing to learn the lessons of history.

The spoiled-brat had grown up, like so many born into wealth, demanding that what it sought be granted, ignorant and uninterested to the opinions and wisdom of those it saw as lesser than itself, regardless of the ramifications and never aware of the sacrifices. Failing to ever understand suffering or forgetting it altogether, the Empire that had always been given what it wanted now pouted that it be allowed to invade a nation rich in oil and geopolitical location. Without understanding it demanded, without knowing it sought, arrogantly bullying the fraternity of nations it either threatened or bought. The insatiable appetite for exploitation that marked its history needed to be fed once more, for the belly inside the beast was rumbling, hungry for blood, destruction and gore. A rich child was now a rich adult, apathetic to the plight of the people’s of the world, unaware of indigence and suffering, failing to realize how much its continued exploitation damaged both its own existence and that of millions more.

America, ignorant, uneducated, unwise and not reared, suffering from attention deficit disorder and hyperactivity, left off its meds and brain-altering pills, suffering the aftereffects of its many addictions and vices, decided that only it mattered on the world stage, bullying less powerful nations, buying off others, using its mighty power to get what it wanted. With arrogance it swept away those not with it, insulting and belittling, discarding as inconsequential those nations preaching wisdom and tolerance. It ignored much older civilizations trumpeting advice learned from a history littered with the same mistakes America would soon make. Alone it would go, invading and marauding, conquering and pilfering, for it was the Only Superpower, it was the Pax Americana.

Voices of hundreds of millions of world citizens were sequestered, their mass protests made to disappear. When worldwide momentum dictated peace and dialogue, America decried only war and violence. When the collective thought of humankind saw injustice, immorality and wrongness with Bush’s actions, America only saw blind patriotism, freedom and democracy, and vengeance.

An absorbing energy became apparent, ingrained in every country and every society, that saw the invasion of Iraq as anathema to human civilization, nothing but a black stain devoid of any semblance of righteousness. A universal belief in the wrongness of the war in Iraq is not easy to reject, for it supercedes imaginary boundaries, national flags and human division. When billions stand up together to shout in one loud voice that invasion and occupation are wrong, there emerges a strong possibility that the action by America is indeed unjust and contrary to universal principles of humankind. Billions of people worldwide cannot all be wrong, for their collective energy against Bush’s war comes not from ideology or politics, but rather from deep inside the soul, mind and heart common to every man and woman alive today.

If one wishes to understand why the world did not agree with America’s invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq, the principles of humanity, of right and wrong, good and bad, moral and immoral, justice and injustice must be understood. Human morality, when compressed in such a wide amalgam of diverse peoples, should open our eyes to the wrongness of Bush’s war against innocent human beings that has left the people of the world resentful and angered by the crimes against humanity committed by America, without so much as a whisper of protest from those residing inside the belly of the beast.

What has happened in the last two and a half years is hard to comprehend. What was once steadfast empathy for our national tragedy mutated into outright animosity for a foreign policy that was seen more and more as a tool for imperialism, exploitation and the eventual subjugation of an entire region. In defiance of world opinion, momentum and institutions, Bush and his cronies, with an arrogance hardly ever seen on the world stage, usurped the will of the nations and peoples of the world, unleashing hell and fury through devastating missile strikes and machine gun assaults. In a war with no cause, of choice and not necessity, profit not principle, the people of the world saw through a haze that does not seem to lift from the lands of the United States. They saw the inherent wrongness of a war based on lies, deceit and charades. They saw the way the American government handled itself and how it walked over the world as it blitzkrieged its way to a new era of warfare, colonization, violence and worldwide threats.

Billions of individual energies have seen the devastation of war, the severed limbs, heads and faceless bodies, the blood, entrails and burned out torsos. They have seen the evil unleashed by American military might, the destroyed homes, the wrecked infrastructure, the evisceration of families and devastation of one of the oldest civilizations in humanity. Tens of thousands will never again breathe the dust- filled air of the Fertile Crescent, where the rivers Tigris and Euphrates helped spawn all mankind. Tens of thousands more lie forever maimed in body and mind, having lost limbs, friends and families. Entire houses once filled with love, emotion, happiness and personality have been extinguished; livelihoods that provided sustenance and comfort erased from the books of history.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, from cradle to grave Eden is now lost.

Why, we ask, has the world turned against a nation billions once admired? Why did so few countries support the war? Why did billions protest America’s actions? Why are we no longer seen as the beacon of hope and the inspiration of humanity?

George W. Bush, that is why. Presidents are easily replaced, yet the reputation they erode, the hatred they birth, the anger they foster, the foreign policy they unleash and the damage they give rise to are hardest to repair and undo, taking years if not decades to rectify. Bush’s legacy is a nation rotting at the bottom of the pit of world opinion that will survive long after he ceases to strangulate our last remaining vestiges of humanity.

Tuesday, July 20, 2004

Part II: George W. Bush’s Lasting Legacy to America: These Days of Fear

These Days of Fear

Out of the coffers of antiquity and history have been opened the days of fear, emancipated to hover above the land of the free and the home of the brave. Yet it is fear that is slowly eroding both our freedoms and bravery. The days of fear have been reintroduced by a government intent on milking the fear factor for everything she’s got. It is fear that paralyzes, the ultimate weapon of power and control, a mechanism that attacks primitive human emotions and insecurities. If the citizenry is made to fear, whether it be real or invented, those in power can garner whatever they want for their own sinister motives. Fear freezes us dead in our tracks, it erases our rational and analytical human mind, replacing it with the fright of animals in danger. Fear is the headlight that makes the dear freeze. It is the sharp claws that makes a herd of gazelle flee. Fear is the unmistakable evasion of humans most animals in the wild exhibit.

An unknown commodity before 9/11, fear was conveyed back to Americans with the grizzly and almost surreal images of New York City under attack. Played over and over again, for the first time in modern times mass murder on such a violent scale could be seen again and again, ingraining into our minds the evil perpetrated on that malevolent day. If before 9/11 we did not know fear, after that day fear certainly made her presence known. In our minds remained entrenched the images of such cruelty, paralyzing the nation and its economy to the point the government had to beg us to return to our consumerist ways. For months it was fear that returned Americans to churches, mosques and synagogues. A nation that mourned soon turned to a nation suffering the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder, from our youngest children to our oldest grandparents. Thus, the seeds of perpetual fear were dispersed to the citizenry along with the avalanche of white dust rushing down the glass steel canyons and concrete jungles of New York City.

For the last three years, the Bush administration has used a vast array of fear tools to control the masses, pressing different buttons for different results. When a war with Iraq was called for, the administration launched the vocabulary of fear with a full assault on our fragile and still insecure minds. “Imminent threat,” “grave and gathering danger,” “smoking gun in the form of a mushroom cloud,” “WMD’s,” “nuclear weapons,” “45 minute strike capability,” “another 9/11,” “Saddam-al-Qaeda connection,” “our way of life is in peril” and many more phrases were used to condition the American mind to the upcoming offensive war against a nation that could not even threaten its neighbors. In short, at a time when we were still vulnerable to the memories of the devastation unleashed on 9/11, when flags still draped homes, cars, streets, shops and clothing, and at a time when scars had yet to heal Bush and company exploited our every emotion to launch their war of choice and profit.

Bush, lucky to have been president on that fateful day and riding the tidal wave of support from the meteoric collision of planes with buildings used the American people to unleash a war that had been in the making during the previous year. During that time, Big Bird could have been Commander-in-Chief and he would have garnered the same level of support. It did not matter who led, the nation gathered behind the Office of the President. With the constant barrage of fear phrases being used by the administration, the Iraq war became a reality. The cowards in Congress dared not go against the swell of public support. When the administration had incessantly manipulated the masses that Saddam had some connection with 9/11 and al-Qaeda, it was impossible to not grant the President full warmonger powers.

In the last year, the Department of Homeland Insecurity has been charged with pressing the buttons of fear for the President’s political needs. Together with the ruling party and an Attorney General wearing McCarthy-style delusions mixed with evangelical zeal, fear has been used for convenience and control. At various times during the year, the media is used by the administration to deliver a reminder to the American public that Arab bogey-men still linger, that al-Qaeda still wants to kill us and that our bridges, tunnels, cities, buildings, restrooms, highways, restaurants and all other places we do commerce could be possible targets. Yet these warnings, when yellow turns to orange in the gay-pride like warning system, always seem to come about when it is politically convenient to the Bush administration. The use of this color-coded system is manipulated every three or four months to remind us of our duty to fear and our obligation to acquiesce.

At present, the days of fear are getting more severe, increasing in number and the innate level of fright. Presidential elections are fast approaching, you see, which is why the Secretary of Insecurity rushes towards the cameras ready to command us that fear must not be lost, that it is now an American institution, to be cherished and adored. To fear is to be patriotic; to fear is to be American.

The days of fear are being used to erode our rights and freedoms from right under our noses. The more we are made to fear, the theory goes, the more freedoms we will gladly exchange for more security (police state). It does not matter that what America once stood for is made to disappear, we want to be safe from the perpetual dark-skinned bogey man lurking in our closets and underneath our beds. It is our own fear that is eviscerating our rights, it is the fear implanted into our primitive minds by those in power that is turning our children’s future into one missing all we have taken for granted.

The case is being made, quite successfully I might add, that our way of life is under attack. The corporate media bombards us with fear-inducing news stories and analysts predicting the next terror wave. It systematically conditions our mind to the mistaken belief the nation is in great peril. Fear is being bred into the American psyche. It is being used to erase rights and freedoms, even with the consent of the governed.

The Soviet scare has ended, along with the fear-inducing propaganda our government used to control us for so many years. Today, the newest enemy to be resurrected is the evildoer personified, the Arab terrorist. This entity has no country, no home; he lurks in every city and in all regions. He is our new marketable enemy, a perpetual evildoer that will not implode like the old Soviet Union nor collapse under his own weight. This enemy is the perfect enemy for the military-industrial complex, better than the American Indian, the German Nazi and the Soviet Communist. He is Muslim, wanting nothing more than to attack Christians and to end our way of life, because, if the truth be told, he hates what we stand for, he hates our freedoms and democracy, and so he fights to the death. This assures those who market war that Americans will always comply with the “intelligence” and “commands” they are given.

The Muslim terrorist can be branded and re-branded since he is like a ghost, unseen and seldomly heard, moving clandestinely through the randomness of daily life. Names, whether real or concocted, can be turned into the next Osama bin Laden, demons reincarnated from the fires of Hell that personally unleash terror around the world. Nobody will ever know, or care, or ask or investigate whether or not he is fiction or real, a figment of one’s creative imagination or the product of years of seething hatred at America’s foreign policy. This new enemy cannot be touched or seen or found. He can be at many places at once, omnipotent and omnipresent, commanding thousands at a time, forever able to escape the greatest military the world has ever spawned. He is the perfect adversary for the perfect profit making scheme. Since we fear what we do not know, these ghost-like terrorists are the cleverest invention ever created by the warmongers and the profiteers. They are the product of sheer genius, for an enemy that cannot be found equates to a perpetual stream of profits for those who favor the economies of war.

As the election approaches, the outbursts of fear keep increasing. They are in place to remind us who the “War President” really is. These announcements are meant to awaken inside us the memories of the man who stood bewildered as New York City’s twin towers collapsed. Every fear factor orange, as always unsubstantiated and without details, commands us to remember who is conducting this so-called war on terror and is bringing the wrath of American vengeance to those innocent thousands of Arab and Muslim descent.

If BushCo finds itself on the verge of losing this upcoming election, fear factor orange will be manipulated and played like a symphony orchestra, booming threat after threat and warning after warning to make us feel even more insecure. Fear will be used to convey the message that during times of danger and war it is unwise to change leadership. Of course the absurdity of this conjecture will not stop them from using it. The national paranoia will be milked for all its worth in order to re-defraud the American people. Our communal schizophrenia will be used and abused so we vote against our interests and those of the nation. Our minds will continue to be scared by a complicit media that plays to the tune of the government and the commands of its corporate parents.

Manipulation of reality, conditioning of fright, stress on our lives and anxiety at night, what Bush wants most is for us to be terrorized. He wants us to continue giving him power and control over our daily lives. He wants us to fear so that we give him the shredder that will tear to pieces the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Our fear imputes to our children, our paranoia helps transform our lives. Freedoms, liberties and the last vestiges of democracy are we compliantly giving up.

Beware the leader who instills fear into his citizenry, for it is he who we must most fear. Beware the leader who preaches war abroad and enemy attacks at home, for it is he who is the real enemy. Beware the leader who robs the people of rights and freedoms, for it is he who must be shredded. Beware the leader who stirs up misguided patriotic fervor, for it is he who is treasonous. Beware the leader who never tells the truth, for it is he who is the biggest liar.

Over a land of freedom has been growing a volcano of lies, spewing its hot molten magma of fear onto millions of honest, descent people whose only concern is living in security for themselves and their children, without fear being bombarded onto their daily lives. Inside the raging crater of lava the fire of Bush do we see. It is leaders such as he who impute fear for selfish, political and self-aggrandizing reasons onto the very people they lead that are the epitome of human malice. It is so-called leaders such as Bush whose volcano must be made dormant, never to spew toxic malignancies into the breathable air we inhale and never to surface again from the once-pristine lands of Earth.

George W. Bush’s Lasting Legacy to America: Part I of III

Induction into the Hall of Shame


At no worse time in America’s history could we have been cursed with such failure, ineptitude and incompetence at leadership as we presently find ourselves infected with. The failure where the buck is supposed to stop has been monumental, deserving of an old worn down and rusted placard gracing a Hall of Shame adorned by the worst men ever to carry the purple robe of power. To this undistinguished group we therefore include the name George W. Bush, forty-third President of the United States of America, anointed by the Almighty, appointed by fraud, chosen by brand name, purveyor of cronyism and corruption, enemy of the common man and best friend to corporate interests and the elite that own them.

This Hall is reserved for those so-called leaders that throughout history preempt humanity, sending us spiraling backwards in time and into realms of most ominous circumstances. Endowed with faculties devoid of intelligence, analytical investigation, wisdom, morals, compassion, virtue, honor, integrity and possessing an indelible ability to turn eras of gold into periods of feces, these men have historically almost single-handedly done their best to ruin human progress and civilization. In spite of these miscreants, we have managed to survive, yet not thanks to those who by whatever wave of the magic wand find themselves perched at the top of society’s hierarchical pyramid.

The latest candidate to the Hall of Shame is our very own buffoon-in-chief, a man who through the careless alignment of the stars and planets collided with the horror of 9/11. It does not take a rocket scientist to realize, through ordinary observation, the limited capacity and painful psychiatric dilemmas of the person residing in the White House. Those of us who do discern the reality of this troubled, incoherent and mentally-weak individual cringe at the realization that the world has been living the last three and a half years under the shadow of this less than able person. At no time in America’s history has a man been so unqualified for the job of “most powerful person in the world” as has good old 43.

Has America been degraded so much that its leader is George W. Bush? Is his ascendancy a symptom of our disease and the result of our dumbing down? Perhaps the answer to our problems is looking in the mirror and trying to answer these questions.


43, the anti-Midas


From the moment of birth everything George touched turned to poop. He was born with the “Bush Touch,” the anti-Midas, after all, and it would follow him wherever he planted toxic roots in fertile soil. From being one of the worst, most ignorant and incurious students in college and Business School – all vividly remembered by professors and classmates – to multiple failures in business – always being bailed out by daddy or daddy’s friends – to a governorship granted him thanks to his last name, daddy’s connections and corporate anointment, George has almost always been less than a success, clearly unworthy of the job he now besmirches on a daily basis. The only thing he has ever had, the only talent ever endowed to him, has been a marketable last name filled with fame, connections and money and a penchant for crony capitalism and corruption that has enamored him to the corporate oligarchs. It was these that enabled him to blatantly and without remorse usurp the will of the people and commit outright fraud in becoming president.

Without a mandate his administration set out to unilaterally destroy numerous world treaties, protocols and institutions, including the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the Convention on the Prohibition of Landmines, the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, the International Criminal Court, a protocol to create compliance for the Biological Weapons Convention, decisions concerning the Chemical Weapons Commission, the UN framework Convention on Climate Change and the Convention to Limit the Sale of Small Weapons to name but a few. The seeds of worldwide discontent had been planted, yet the interests of the military-industrial complex and the Corporate Leviathan had been harvested.

Instead of concentrating the maximum efforts of the government on knowing, understanding, learning and combating the growing threat of terrorism, as many professionals throughout academia and government had advised, his administration focused their energies on Cold War era weaponry and Star Wars programs that were dubious at best and fantasy-laden at worst. Terrorism was ignored, shoved into a dusty and dark closet that would only see light on 9/11. This dereliction of duty, this malfeasant ignorance of a grave and gathering threat was as purposeful as it was criminal, in the face of such apparent threats that were left to fester and gather steam, slowly gaining a momentum that manifested itself with the horrific images we all saw and felt on 9/11.

The time has arrived to seek accountability where the buck is supposed to stop, where once honorable and wise men sat, ready to place the heavy weight of blame exclusively on their shoulders. For they understood that leadership entails taking responsibility for the failings under their watch, especially when the failure was as severe as it was incompetent in this instance. When every decision emanating from the White House is based on politics, however, the buck is passed around and around like a hot potato, never to touch the President’s hands. Three-thousand men and women died because the threat of terrorism was ignored, even when Bush knew it was of utmost importance. Three-thousand innocents perished because corporate interests were number one on the agenda, higher on the radar screen than a possible terrorist attack. Three-thousand energies were extinguished and sacrificed because an attack on America was needed to grease the engines of raging and blind patriotism, the instruments of war and the assembly lines of the military-industrial complex.

With the collapse of soaring towers and the arrival of toxic clouds of debris America and the world were introduced to the workings of George W. Bush, 43rd President of the United States of America. On that infamous day a fork in the road was reached, and unfortunately America headed in the wrong direction, entering a pitch black tunnel from where light ceased to exist, led by animalistic emotions run amok, tribal passions resurrected, nationalistic tendencies exploited and blind trust in one man. Thinking himself a conduit of the Almighty, appointed to rid the world of evil through the introduction of death, suffering and destruction and the indoctrination of crony capitalism and debauched democracy to lands seeking neither, George W. Bush exploited America’s searing hunger for revenge and the emotions rising from the most primitive parts of our brains to unleash fury at those nations who coincidentally happened to have been targets of opportunity for the Bushies and their corporate masters in the months preceding 9/11.

The world has been forever altered, distancing itself more and more from sanity and from a peaceful co-existence. We are on a collision course with ourselves, the most dangerous of enemies, heading in the direction of self-extermination, led by warlike and unwise leaders, loyal not to people but to profit, seeking advice not from the mouths of the wise but the pockets of the greedy, intent on transforming happiness into perpetual fear, dissent into subservience and freedom into control.


The Division of a Nation


The battle lines are being drawn, red and blue do we now stand, polarized into two groups, split apart by the workings of one man. The incredible unity after 9/11, when red and blue became one, blind to our colors, ethnicities and creeds did we become, has been lost to the passage of time and the polemics of an administration politicizing everything for its benefit. At no time before, or since, have we all felt the unity of communal integration, when we truly became unaware of our differences on our way to universal fraternity. Complete strangers became sisters, enemies became brothers and what seemed like the inevitable coming together of a most diverse nation seemed at once assured. A people heterogeneous in character were fusing into one nation indivisible. It would only be a matter of time, however, before the workings of one man became the undoing of a most beautiful weave of humanity whose momentum was halted before it could become a threat.

A mandate from Heaven descended like a virulent plague into the delusional mind of 43, spawning forth the evisceration of civil rights and freedoms at home and the decimation of Mesopotamians abroad. A war pre-planned without the necessity of 9/11 was ordained, assured through the workings of the new Pearl Harbor, morphed into a vague ‘war on terror’ and rationalized through an amalgam of lies and deceits. The drums of war were sounding, its trumpets calling us to battle, the boots of a nation on the warpath could be heard.

The Bush administration had Americans hypnotized under the glaring trance of misguided patriotism born out of primitive emotions whose tribal antecedents never leave our human condition. Under the veil of the red, white and blue the questioning of authority ceased to exist and the followers of warmongers did we become.

Exploiting the fragility of our psyches in the wake of the World Trade Center tremors, Bush had free reign to do as he pleased. At no time in human history had such a horrific event affected so many millions, literally transforming us into vengeful-filled, acquiescent, easily controlled and manipulated creatures blindly following and trusting a government whose interests had nothing to do with ours. The power of television and the macabre images it recorded for all to see was the perfect tool to mobilize an entire nation towards the construct of war and the economy of the military-industrial complex.

At home the Orwellian-like Patriot Act was shoved down into our lives, so blind were we to its fascist tentacles and despotic structure, in one instant losing several freedoms and rights our ancestors had fought so hard to attain. The first blow to freedom was enacted, the first step towards a police state attained. From peek-and-sneak searches to library and bookstore snooping to “free-speech zones” to surveillance of phone and email accounts to introduction of police brutality and intimidation during peaceful protests to the threatening posture of questioning one’s patriotism to labeling dissenters terrorists America soon fell silent and intimidated to question an administration whose power was growing more each day. If you are not with Bush, you are against him, after all.

American Arabs and Muslims were silently picked up and disappeared, deported, lost among America’s growing infrastructure of gulags and prisons. Today, this can conceivably happen to any American, any day of the week. The Red scare has given way to the Terrorist Fright, and slowly we are being turned into spies, snitches, snoops and the instruments of a police state. This transformation of America is as clandestinely fast as it is shatteringly alarming. Yet the conditioning continues, and today more and more Americans are being asked to keep an eye on each other, whether it be government employees, truck drivers, neighborhood watches and even our own children. The old Soviet Union and East Germany could not be more proud.

The politics of division soon appeared as those supporting the administration’s actions at home and abroad clashed with those opposed. Since then, the division among the masses grows more each day, having begun like a small dry-river bed one day and since becoming a mighty and wide canyon whose powerful river erodes more soil each day. With each new Bush policy decision, lie, corruption or deceit the sides of the people’s canyon continue growing wider. The rift expands with each new tremor sent down from Washington to the lands of the United States, crossing imaginary borders and cookie cutter homes, sending shockwaves that are fostering a new era of divisiveness that is shedding the great American experiment and the tangled web we weave.

Lying before the notorious Florida Fraud took place that he was a “uniter,” not a “divider,” Bush has polarized the citizenry more than at any time since the Civil War. He uses cultural issues such as the controversy over gay marriage and his clandestine elimination of the separation between church and state to divide neighbors and colleagues. Using ideology for political gains, he has cemented a deep upheaval between Americans, separating us into rich, poor and middle class, black, brown and white, rural and urban, religious and secular, progressive and conservative, doves and hawks, educated and ignorant, gay and straight, those willing to fear and those willing to dissent, those giving up freedoms and those fighting for them. Republican and Democrat, our nation is deeply divided, becoming the antithesis of what we almost became three years ago.

The reason for our polarization is the pivot we all stand on. George W. Bush is the catalyst for our division. Half of us stand with him, half against, half believe him the ultimate patriot, half think he’s the ultimate terrorist. This most controversial of figures is seen by half of us as moral, a teller of truth and a friend of the common man. The other half, however, sees beyond the façade and knows him for the debased, immoral, compulsive liar and enemy of the people that he truly is, making the last four years for the corporate elite an orgasmic journey to the eternal heavens of metaphysical belief. One man has divided hundreds of millions, using it to his political advantage to split brothers, families, friends and neighbors. In our divisions he and his minions thrive, from the negative energy we create their power grows.

A brief yet unified past has given way to the divided present of today, creating animosity, resentment and frustration between and among us. BushCo would not want it any other way. To divide is to conquer; to separate is to crush the power of the people. United we cannot remain, for those in power begin losing their grip on the populace and the power they once controlled. Better that we be made to clash into perpetuity, failing to come together, failing to join hands to defeat a sinister yet evasive common enemy.

Those that purposefully divide us would rather we fight each other, declaring ourselves the adversary, rather than to see us fight as one the same entity destroying the fabric of our lives and the backbone of our nation. When divided we stand, the commons cannot exist and the veil of obscurity hinders our eyes from seeing the great disservice we do onto ourselves. Splintered and unwoven peoples stand not a chance against the puppeteers controlling the system. It is strength in numbers, not weakness in division, that will save this great nation.

The unity after 9/11 sent shivers down BushCo and the Corporate Leviathan’s spineless bodies, for in front of them stood the greatest superpower known to man: humankind united. Instead of fighting ourselves they feared we would fight the system and those in control. This evolutionary step could not be allowed to continue which is why we are where we presently find ourselves in.

We will never know how close we came to the wonderment and benefits of a united citizenry that could have transformed humanity and our nation, and we have the manipulations, policies and corruptions of George W. Bush and his brethren to thank for that.

If 9/11 was the closest we have ever come, today we are at the complete opposite of the spectrum, finding ourselves at the farthest region of unity. George W. Bush, uniter indeed.

Saturday, July 17, 2004

Unleashing Terror Abroad and Preserving the Charade at Home

Preserving the Charade


As the incompetent failure that is Iraq continues to be purposefully vanished from our collective conscious by a corporate media complicit in its undertaking, George W. Bush strolls along America, waging his reign of terror onto an ever-more paranoid citizenry. Slowly but surely the defeat in Iraq is being eliminated from the airwaves and the printing presses now that puppets and charades have replaced proconsuls and occupiers. A mirage of so-called ‘sovereignty’ has been granted to Iraqis, you see, thereby cleansing our hands of the debacle our leaders and armies created in Mesopotamia.

Thus, the need to report on a war that still rages, ravages and kills has been surpassed by the need to shift the American mind back to good old American dumbing down news stories focusing on Martha Stewart’s sentencing, Brittney Spears’ engagement and George Bush’s terror-filled re-election campaign. Our minds are being conditioned away from the death and suffering created by our leaders and back to reality shows and summer blockbusters, for to acknowledge the sound defeat of the mighty empire by those ‘dead-ender’ resistance fighters battling to rid their homes and lands of terrorist occupiers is to delve into a mental quagmire Americans cannot be made to comprehend. We must be made to return to ignorance, to unquestioning drones filled with the curiosity of a three-toed sloth slumbering its life away.

The fallacy that is our great morality and virtue remains intact; the charade of the grandeur of our power and invincibility of our military has been made safe once more. America stands proud, returning to indifference, world and cultural ignorance, unhindered arrogance and the utter decay of its society. Since we are the ‘Good’ in war against the ‘Bad’ we can do no evil ourselves. Anointed by a ‘higher power’ the United States has been chosen to bring ‘freedom and democracy’ to the world, even through the barrel of a gun and to those who do not seek it. The entire world craves to be like us, you see, even if they do not realize it. They simply need a little push in the right direction, even if it takes missiles and bullets to achieve this.

We are America, after all, chosen by the Creator to free the world of evil, tyranny and injustice, or so says George W. (Burning) Bush, whom the Almighty converses with, instructing our President to do His will, even if it means murdering tens of thousands and creating suffering in the minds of thousands more. American style capitalism is the Creator’s chosen form of governance, full of exploitation, subjugation and greed, and so we must introduce it to the world, even at the barrel of a gun and the decimation of a bomb. The communalism of billions must not be allowed to stand in the selfishness of the few.

What the peoples of the world realize but we in America fail to learn is that the cherished ‘freedoms’ and ‘democracy’ exported abroad are but cynical code words disguising crony corporate capitalism, debauched democracy, geopolitical hegemony and puppet control benefiting only America at the expense of hundreds of millions of people worldwide.

Hegemony Halted

The political defeat in Iraq cannot hide the reality that had it not been so, had the colonization and occupation of Iraq succeeded as those in power had envisioned, Bush and the neocons would today be emblazoned, confident and powerful, preparing to attack Iran and Syria, extending the machines of war and death yet again, terrorizing the world, killing thousands more and making America a much more dangerous place to live. The debacle in the sands of the Middle East has at least temporarily halted the advances of military devastation onto other sovereign nations. Were it not for the very successful guerilla war in Iraq, history might be directing us toward a truly bleak future controlled by warmongers and evildoers.

It was Iraqi nationalists and freedom fighters who prevented catastrophe from extending its grip to other lands and peoples; it was they who history will one day thank for halting the evil that state sponsored terrorism unleashes; it is they who prevented the terrorists in Washington and Tel Aviv from fulfilling their sinister vision that would have murdered thousands more innocent civilians and patriotic but misguided American soldiers conditioned to fight for the corporate masters under the rubric of blind patriotism. It is they the world will one day look back to as the ones who defeated the lunatic administration in Washington and the Zionist puppeteers whose call they heed.

Unfortunately, it was American men and women who had to pay the ultimate price for the profiteer, warmonger and corporate driven war that sent so many to untimely death and debilitating injury. If blame is to be passed, which it surely must, then it should be directed at those in power, those who war benefits most, those who under false pretenses sent soldiers to die and those whose interests are furthered by unleashing state sponsored terrorism onto innocent civilians in distant lands. Do not blame freedom fighters for the death of American soldiers, they are simply doing what you and I would do if invaded and occupied, humiliated and oppressed. Blame Bush, blame Sharon, blame the military-industrial complex and the corporate media for a war without cause or necessity based on an amalgam of premeditated lies disguised as liberation, WMDs, democracy and wrapped in the charred remains of a post-9/11 American flag that has so far led to the death of 900 US soldiers and to the injury of 10,000 more.

Love of America covered in blind, ignorant patriotism was conveniently exploited by warmongers intent on altering an entire region. The simmering rubble of the World Trade Center had yet to dissipate and already the terrorists in power were manipulating its deep emotional discharges in the American psyche for their own evil intentions on the peoples of Muslim faith possessing oil, the devil’s excrement. Thinking they were fighting the perpetrators of 9/11 and protecting America from the WMD’s of a madman – thanks to sinister manipulation of lies and deceptions by leaders – and believing Bush’s rhetoric of bringing freedom and democracy to distant lands, America’s soldiers were sent to a war that was lost from the very beginning.

In Iraq we see the truth

The Iraq war was but a mechanism to enrich the corporate world through the pilfering of the American taxpayer. It was a war to loot black gold from the lands of Iraq for the sake of Bush’s and Cheney’s oil friends. Billions of dollars have been pilfered from America’s treasury; billions more from Iraqi capital. The privatization of Iraqi infrastructure has enriched American corporations; the so-called reconstruction has been but a malfeasant fallacy devoid of humanism. The Iraqi people are worse off today than before the invasion, even when a US sponsored war of economic depravity that lasted a decade is taken into consideration. Ten years of sanctions devastated Iraq and its people, killing up to one million innocent people.

This war was never about freedom and democracy, never about 9/11 and never about good versus evil. It was, pure and simple, a war sponsored by greed, profit and the almighty dollar. It was a war for the Corporate Leviathan, using and exploiting its slave army of rural and urban children, fighting not for their freedom but for the profit driven evil inherent in crony capitalism and corrupt governance. Disguised so an entire nation could fall hypnotized to the glaring colors of the red, white and blue, the Iraq war took advantage of the myopic view of Americans who fail to question authority or seek accountability. Our own government used us as pawns subservient to their lies, manipulations and deceptions. Our complacency led to the invasion of a sovereign land and the death and maiming of tens of thousands whose blood is smeared on our hands.

Iraq has been decimated and decapitated, a once proud people destroyed. A decade of sanctions and a year of occupation have ruined the cradle of civilization. The Tigris River is now a polluted cesspool of disease and death. The Fertile Crescent has, thanks to depleted uranium, been transformed into a radiation filled land spawning deformed births and cancerous deaths that will linger for hundreds if not thousands of years. The people of Iraq now live trapped in guerilla warfare, existing among bombings, maimings and explosions. They live in perpetual fear; their nation is occupied by alien armies and are led by American puppets whose interests lie in pleasing their masters, not their fellow citizens.

A new invading Crusader army has imprisoned their men, the vast majority of whom are innocent, dehumanizing, torturing, sodomizing and humiliating them in the process. Their homes are randomly searched in the middle of the night, their crops razed, their towns surrounded by tanks and razor-sharp wire. Sixty percent are unemployed, academics are being murdered by the dozens, kidnappings are commonplace, murders prevalent and freedom nonexistent. Their women are raped by American forces, their infrastructure pillaged by corporate interests, their oil stolen to feed the American beast.

Whether they like it or not, they have become a colony to the United States. They have become a land and a people suffering from the evils of greed and American capitalism. Privatization has meant ruination; American democracy has brought charades and escapades. The invaders are building bases, sending more troops and dictating the future of their nation. Mercenary armies run amok; divisions are growing between those few embracing occupation and the majority opposed. The Battle of Algiers is now the Battle of Baghdad; the American Revolution is now the Iraqi Fight for Independence.

Bush and America have only brought misery to Iraqis, exporting suffering and devastation to the lands from where we all derive. While we bask in the glow of our exorbitant lives Iraqis dwell in the crisis that has befallen them. While we enjoy the corporate media news about Martha’s little indiscretion Iraqis struggle to comprehend the fate that has landed at their feet. A war against one man has led to the death of thousands and the suffering of tens of thousands more. A war they did not ask for has relegated them backwards in time. American genocide of the 1990’s and crimes against humanity in 2003-2004 has rendered their nation a vast wasteland of lost opportunity and stolen wealth. The American Empire has brought along with its invasion a plague of military might and a sinister form of capitalism that is imposing principles and beliefs at odds with thousands of years of civilization.

What have we done to 25 million Iraqis? We promised Eden and delivered Hades, espoused freedom and unleashed anarchy. From the tanks of salvation death and untold suffering has been spawned. Guided missiles have rained from the heavens above only to exterminate life and decapitate heads. Craters fill the land, poison lingers in the air, sewage runs in the rivers and the devastation of a once proud society continues to be played out by the hands leading the United States of America. The Fertile Crescent has mutated to Hell on Earth, thanks to American foreign policy and its plague of weapons of death and destruction.

Barren and impotent have Iraqis become, invaded, occupied and used as pawns. Their interests have never been a priority, nor will they ever be to an American machine that gave birth to genocide through sanctions and violent death through war. It is from observing the ramifications of evil unleashed that we can discern from its creators the evil they possess. From the terrorist in the White House to those in the Pentagon and Tel Aviv, in power have we placed wretched souls whose malignant and empty humanity parallels the utter destruction of homes and decimation of lives of the same people they claim to liberate from tyranny, suffering and death.

Wretched are those who…


Wretched souls are those who use religion to justify death and suffering. Wretched are they who claim good while unleashing human evil. Wretched are those miscreants who lie and deceive the masses to thrust human evil onto the world. Wretched are the exploiters whose vices grip us in eternal subjugation. Wretched are those whose lack of empathy for human suffering is only surpassed by their ability to help exacerbate it. Wretched are those criminals whose control of power transforms them into heroes and leaders, for it is they the citizenry must purge. Wretched are the terrorists who wrap themselves in the American flag and claim to be doing good, for it is they whose patriotism should be questioned. It is those claiming to act through the principles of Jesus, granting themselves permission to devastate, occupy, expand war, hate, exploit and humiliate their fellow man that the world needs to fear. It is those wretched energies exploiting religion and patriotism in order to expand their interests who should be sent to die in war, made to experience the horrors of the evil they help foster.

It is manipulators, exploiters, warmongers and profiteers that care nothing about you and me. It is they who are the scum of the Earth, born from toxic cesspools of waste, enriching themselves and their cronies at the expense of people like you and me who simply want to live in happiness, peace and security. It is those sentencing tens of millions to death through AIDS in order to protect profits that should be sent to live in Africa. It is those enjoying the fruits of the instruments of war they create that should have to live in lands filled with depleted uranium. It is those whose sanctions condemned hundreds of thousands to premature death due to lack of food and healthcare that should experience starvation and disease. It is those espousing salvation from tyranny for one people and denying it to another that should be forced to endure the scorching temperatures of Sudan. It is those preaching ‘Never Again’ but exacerbating Nazi like treatment of an entire people that should be made to live in the apartheid, ghetto and Bantustan-like existence of the Palestinians where suffering and dehumanization parallels anything created in 1930’s Germany.


Let us give thanks


And so, as life begins to return back to normal in the land of the free and the home of the brave, where monumental failures give way to whitewashed triumphs and fear becomes the air we breathe, let us give thanks that we are not Iraq, that we do not inhabit the lands believed to belong to religious zealots and that bombs and missiles do not thunder down onto our cities and homes.

Let us give thanks that our carbon dioxide emissions have not affected us as they have the developing world and that genocide and ethnic cleansing is not part of our daily lives. Let us give thanks that AIDS medication is making fruitful the lives of those infected who live in America and that we do not have 30 percent of our population suffering from the deadly virus. Let us give thanks that we live inside the belly of the beast, not outside it, enjoying the fruits of its devastation rather than suffering at the hands of its existence. Let us give thanks that we are the Empire, not its satellite or colony whose role as provider of exploitable land or people places us in the crosshairs of its corrosive foreign policy.

Let us give thanks that we do not live in countries whom the Empire has anointed with puppet regimes, monarchs or dictators that place the interests of the Pax Americana ahead of those of their people. Finally, let us give thanks that our corporate media manipulates and conditions our minds so that we can escape from all ills that affect the rest of mankind, thereby helping to erase from our memory all destruction, murder, crimes against humanity, all evil and all the suffering our government boldly and unapologetically releases into the corners of the globe. Let us give thanks to the dumbing down of America that vanquishes all curiosity of diverse peoples, knowledge of the outside world and understanding of the plight affecting billions worldwide. Let us give thanks to live in a nation devoid of accountability and a questioning citizenry. Let us give thanks we live in a nation of exorbitant lifestyles, materialistic mandates and consumerist tendencies.

If ignorance is bliss, then in Heaven is where we live. Not knowing, not caring and not understanding, intoxicated with greed, superfluous lifestyles and a materialistic society, the American Nirvana is what we call home.

May the Almighty Dollar continue to Bless the United States of America.