Posted by pancho (64.160.45.250) on December 22, 2001 at 08:28:18:
I can't be sure...seems to me I posted this just now and it's gone already? Whassamater, we aren't supposed to think around here either?
Let's not say the United States propped up Communism all those years...let's not say politicians here used a fear of the country that couldn't make enough butter to feed its own people, or any more than one car...at a time... and was never a threat to the United States. Let's not admit that communism was a great unifying fear that brought together the same elements in Puritanical American society we see congregating around Islamic Terrorists today...that they used the same fear of the outsider the one "jealous" of our toys to drive away and prosecute and jail and break any number of loyal and true and great Americans who dared ask the same questions we are being made afraid to ask today.
Leave us not remember that it was the Soviet Union that had every reason to be afraid of the United States...that it was the United States that landed a military expedition on Russian soil after their revolution...that it was the United States that had the Soviets ringed with missles and nuclear warheads from Turkey to Greece to within every square mile they could manage it...that the piddling few missles in Cuba were merely a response to broken American promises to remove all those warheads aimed at the Soviets.
That entire era saw an erosion of civil liberties and freedom in this country...saw J Edgar Hoover, a man who couldn't see the Mafia through his thick eyelashes and couldn't run after them in high heels...not cause they didn't exist but because they had pictures of him down on his knees in a public toilet and they held that over his and his boyfriends head all those years he went chasing after the dreaded Commies instead.
Let's not tell the story of every peasant boy and girl who rebelled against the succession of evil dictators this country supported in Latin America...calling them communists when all they wanted was to stop being raped and abused and worked to death...that once you label some kid a communist...or an Islamic Terrorist, you can do whatever you want with him and his little sister because he and she have been identified as enemies of Freedom and Goodness and are now Evil Incarnate.
Let's not admit that America has been hijacked by a succession of politicians bought and paid for by Global Hot shots who have no loyalty or understanding of what America means...what a precious document the Constitution is...men who lie and cheat and steal the very bread out of the mouths of the Developing World and call it "free Trade"...who have deserved the righteous anger of any number of people caught barely able to breathe in the face of this Globalism and Free Trade which brings Americans cheap gas after they've killed enough people to earn it..and shoes and stereos they could never pay for with their piddling wages kept low enough so that corporate dividends fatten the few...and leave the rest unable to get their own teeth fixed.
America's love of greed and its now unchecked status as the last Super Duper power will simply mean an even faster deterioration of what it once could have meant to be American...traded in now for more profits than one goon of a Tycoon could hope to spend in a hundred lifetimes...but that isn't the point anymore...America has gone mad...like lotto fever with everyone convinced that if they just cut back on milk and aspirin they stand a helluva good chance of winning big because they KNOW damn well they ain't never gonna earn a damn thing...no better off than the Egyptians who labored for Pharoah and crawled off through rush hour traffic down the Nile to their miserable huts, lit with that assinine screen that keeps them chasing phantoms while their bones are plucked dry from their souls.
Islamic terrorists are all the rage now, now that we milked communism for all it was worth. Don't let's say that from the day Raygun and Pappy Bush and his little shrub took office they haven't been working trielessly to create a new bugaboo for the American people...how else you gonna get 200 million people to accept that nerd as president...where we used to get footbal heroes we get cheerleaders instead...the guys who wiggled their asses in front of yesterday's quarterbacks. Since the day Shrub took office he has been goading Iraq and his client Sharon has been pushing the Palestinians...waiting, each of them waiting for someone somewhere to say ENOUGH!!! And they walked right into it again...took the bait and supplied the excuse these politician businessmen were waiting for and now even the religious Right can come out of hiding and together they can roll back the Constitution even more...these guys give a damn about a fetus...any more than they care about that criminal we are so "soft" on...or the starving children everywhere...in New York. These were their cloaks and daggers to get us to go along on what seemed like such a noble and Christian jihad when all along the entire point was to get those judges and ignorant politicians into office who could be counted upon to roll back product safety laws...banking regulations...insurance regulations...environmental protection and logging and chemical spills and arsenic in the water and legal rights and patient's rights and your ability to sue an HMO ...THAT'S what all those tears over the fetus were for...and the weepy eyed bellowing about God and the Ten Commandments and on and on.
The Public Feeding Trough that is the Tax bundle taken in by the government is eyed greedily by any number of corporate types. What better way to get a clear shot at all them bucks than by scaring the beejayzuz out of Mr and Mrs America who can't tell a map from their own backsides and know nothing about nothing. What better way than to scare them out of their wits that some "Evil" force is stalking them, than to MAKE someone stalk them?
With the Soviets gone people began timidly asking if the government might not fix a pothole on the road to Life, or re open that hospital or pay to have Johnny's teeth fixed. What produces an endless need like an endles succession of "enemies" we are more than happy to pay to be protected from...when the same bastards who "protect" us ALSO supply the enemies? The House of Krupp learned early on that just making bullets and canons wasn't enough for the bottom line...you had to "make" wars and then sell weapons to all sides.
Once you could lose your job and get jailed and even executed if you asked questions because you were a "traitor" to America...gave "comfort" to the enemy. And once again we dare not question because we will be seen as "soft" on Terrorism...as once people could be done away with if they were "soft" on Communism. Those who say that surely politicians would never set us up have forgotten the Vietnam War where 55,000 young Americans were killed, several thousands more injured and scarred and orphans and widows by the ton left over. A few years ago Robert McNamarra, Secretary of War during that "conflict" wrote a book cause he couldn't sleep at night, addmitting that he knew back then the "war" couldn't be won (He's still fooling us...they had no intention of "winning" that war in the first place, or rather they "won" plenty just as it stood)...in other words those men all died for nothing...but it wasn't for NOTHING. You have any idea how much money was made by a few and ten cents an hour paid out to millions??? The politicians all knew the war was a farce, but a profitable one, and they didn't mind too much watching 55 thousand die...like they don't much mind it when three thousand die today...it's the price we must pay, the "sacrifice" THEY don't make, to be Grat and secure. And who doesn't want to be "secure" these days...but the threat is being manufactured as surely as the threat of communism was an AMERICAN INVENTION.
It's a slow, long haul...but we'll get there or perish...the way every single empire has back to the dawn of history...this one will be no different.