To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he is doing is good... Ideology - that is what gives devil doing its long-sought justification and gives the evil doer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own eyes, so that he won't hear reproaches and curses, but will receive praise and honors.
--Alexander Solzhenitsyn
A nation's citizens are often the last to realize that their leaders have become fascists. Together with recent history, the documents produced by The Project for the New American Century (offsite) leave little doubt that fascism has taken root in the U.S.
The authors of PNAC state: Established in the spring of 1997, the Project for the New American Century is a non-profit, educational organization whose goal is to promote American global leadership.
They further explain how they will accomplish this militarily. Their plan is not leadership, it is military domination.
These folks are key advisors to President George W. Bush. Indeed, the most recent manifestation of PNAC philosophy is the agressive military doctrine known as Shock and Awe which was much discussed before the war against Iraq.
While i was growing up the movies glorified our participation in World War II. My adolescent fascination ultimately resulted in the acquisition of many hundreds of books about war. One of the most telling is the hefty History of Warfare by HW Koch. It records constant warfare in the world from the time of the Roman Empire to the present. So many wars, so much dying.
Warfare grows ever more dangerous, and the fate of the human race hangs precariously in the balance. If warfare is indeed the typical pastime of the elites who have long controlled our societies, we desparately need not only changes of leadership, but also a global change of consciousness.
I studied World War II in particular. That was the war against Hitler and fascism.
Indeed, many people of conscience fought against Hitler even before it became fashionable, in 1936 during the Spanish Civil War. There's an expression, premature anti-fascist which purportedly captures the sentiment of the American establishment against the leftists, socialists, wobblies, and communists who fought against Mussolini and Hitler in 1936. "We didn't know enough then to oppose Fascism, so their motives were suspect!" Indeed.
I haven't been against every war--for example, I supported the war in Bosnia. Month after month of following the siege of Sarajevo, learning the sordid details of the concentration camps, of the massacres of Srebrenica, one became desperate for someone to do something. Bosnia and Kosovo were ethnic cleansing in progress. The extermination of other ethnic groups is a horrendous thing to watch.
But the war in Kosovo revealed a curious value of the American war-fighting machine. For "safety" reasons, aircraft were required to bomb from above 12,000 feet. At that altitude a convoy of tracters looks like a convoy of tanks. I remember the shrapnel from one bomb killed more than a hundred civilians on a lonely Kosovo road.
Such atrocities demonstrate plainly that humanitarian goals are entirely subordinate to geopolitics.
Not only is U.S. government policy brutal and self-serving, the supportive corporate media propagandizes that it is not brutal and self-serving. The tidy war in Iraq is anything but tidy, as witnessed by watchers of foreign (and especially Middle Eastern) media.
One of the most dramatic changes in recent years is undoubtedly the advent of media outside of western corporate domination. This shall ultimately change the world, i believe.
In World War II the military forces didn't have much choice. The war of the cities was for the soul of the world, and the existing technology couldn't fashion any other strategy.
Yet a sole superpower need not exercise extreme brutality to secure its interests.
Today we still kill everything that moves in the theatre of war, not because we must, but because we choose to. Policy dictates that lives of our troops are important, second only to policy. (If too many soldiers die, policy is challenged).
Lives of civilians are expendable. Our policy, our technology and our rules of engagement decree that we shall live while their people (civilian and combatant alike) shall die.
Our method of war-fighting encompasses practices that are utterly inhumane. We utilize Depleted Uranium in the battlespace, a substance with a half-life of 4.2 billion years.
We launch cluster bombs in civilian areas. We use mammoth fuel-air bombs that suck the oxygen out of the air, silently killing civilians as they helplessly huddle in their houses. We refuse to sign world agreements about landmines, even though they maim hundreds of thousands of civilians (often children) after wars are finished.
Our technology insures that we can be brazenly efficient, and frequently indiscriminate, killers. It never insures that we are honorable, just, or fair-minded.
The escalation in Vietnam was based upon a lie, the so-called Gulf of Tonkin Incident.
Citizen support for the First Gulf War was based in part upon at least two lies, the incubator story (Iraqis portrayed as the ultimate evil) and satellite photos that didn't exist, allegedly showing armored divisions massing on the border (a bogus threat to our principle oil supplier, Saudi Arabia).
We go to war instigated by a media long on jingoism and short on introspection.
In my view September 11th was an "act of war". It demanded a response. I question whether we employed the right response. I have yet to see one serious article in the mainstream American press seriously examining the motivation behind the terrible tragedy on September 11.
How many actions by the United States government are responsible for the sentiment behind that atrocious act? Osama Bin Laden is malevolent and murderous, but his objections to U.S. actions and policy in the Middle East are shared by perhaps a billion of the world's population.
The CIA created Osama, just as they nurtured Saddam. The list of tyrants we've supported is quite long. Pinochet. Marcos. Noriega. Diem. The Shah. All have haunted us in one way or another.
They have a term for such eventualities: blowback.
As i type this, the United States still has not captured Osama Bin Laden. Some of our three hundred thousand soldiers deployed to the gulf are already coming home. It seems most curious that attacking Iraq was falsely justified on weapons of mass destruction which may no longer exist, and on the as-yet unproved Al Queda connection.
Yet Bush seems unwilling to send this immense military force to Pakistan, where Osama appears to be hiding.
Oh, i forgot. Pakistan is not centrally located among the world's most productive oil fields.
"Iraqi Freedom" has been justified on a plethora of lies, from uranium in Niger to a heisted student's out-of-date handiwork passed off as secrets of the realm. We go to war for lies.
The war in Iraq has been singularly sharp and brutal, but the dying hasn't ended. Nor have our imperial proclivities lessened.
Oh, there's one more objection to war. Wars are fought by common folk, workers. Wars (including Iraq) are often fought for corporate profits. Workers die, investors get rich. T'ain't just.
Do you have the right to dissent from the views expressed on this website?
About The Anti-war Movement
