- Remember the Red Menace, also known as the Communist
threat? Or how about the Third Reich, the creator of which became the chief
metaphor for evil in the 20th century?
-
- Most Americans, certainly those younger than 30, don't
remember either. Hell, they don't even remember Vietnam or Nixon or The
Beatles. The terms and their connotations are totally unfamiliar, unless
encountered in history texts. Millions of Americans simply do not remember
what America used to stand for - freedom, justice, equality - and as a
result, don't fully comprehend the appalling reality of what America has
become.
-
- Once upon a time, back in the days of Elvis and the hula
hoop, when I was a little shaver, I was taught in school that when Germany
took over France, Poland and other European countries, that was wrong,
and the United States sacrificed almost a half million of its own young
people to reverse those situations in the name of freedom. And that happened
twice, 1916-18 and 1941-45.
-
- In the same vein, I grew up being taught that the Soviet
Union's annexation of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and all of Eastern
Europe was an evil deed, and that for many years in a period called the
Cold War, the American military objective was aimed at overturning this
unjust oppression. Back in the 1950s when I was in elementary school, we
used to have routine Civil Defense drills where we used to have to hide
under our desks pretending we were about to be nuked by the Russians. Really!
-
- It's a new world now. For one thing, the population of
the planet has doubled in those mere 50 years. And for another, it is the
United States that is now sweeping the world, scooping up all these other
countries in the name of capitalist democracy, and telling lies about why
it has to go to war. And instead of railing against the powerful giant
stealing freedom from all these hapless victims, as it did in years past,
the American press is now cheering it, justifying it in the increasingly
ambivalent names of capitalism and democracy. Worse, the American people
are cheering it, too, something that's never really happened in U.S. history,
when the people support a war that they know is based on lies.
-
- Of course, the American press is cheering it because
it is the American military doing it. Even the German and Russian press
aren't really criticizing it in a serious way. Because there is no country
that can oppose America, which spends more on its military than all the
other countries in the world combined, yet still complains that it needs
to spend more, even as its bridges and schools are falling apart and its
manufacturing base has completely disappeared, precipitating its imminent
economic collapse. Still the military spending increases, and war plans
ooze out like an evil ink stain spreading across the globe.
-
- The evil empire, number one threat to peace in the world,
is now the United States. No more Red Menace. No more Third Reich. Now
it's a War on Terror executed by the biggest terrorist of all - America,
the nation that killed its own people by the thousands in order to trigger
World War III and capture all the world's oil fields.
-
- Now the shoe is obviously on the other foot. The United
States has now assumed the role of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia at their
worst and all rolled into one. It has troops poised and threatening in
127 other countries. By the diabolical mechanisms of the World Trade Organization
and the International Monetary Fund, it has already plundered most other
countries financially, stealing their utilities and impoverishing their
inhabitants. And those nations who resist this financial con game, like
Yugoslavia, are simply invaded and coerced into servitude. Those nations
who play the game, like Russia and Argentina, are reduced to abject poverty
with a few pro-Western billionaires owning everything.
-
- And woe to those nations who won't play the game, like
Iraq. They are obliterated and turned into permanent war zones. Their people
are murdered in their sleep by hopped-up American soldiers who are told
by their cynical leaders that they are spreading democracy, when really
what they are spreading are endless opportunities for plunder by politically
connected corporations.
-
- And America's leader lie about absolutely everything.
Never at any time in my personal history has there been a time when an
American president has not at least accidentally told the truth about something,
but that time is now.
-
- Once upon a time, Americans used to preach the cause
of freedom and justice for all. It's actually written in their Pledge of
Allegiance. But they don't adhere to that anymore. After all, Americans
have canceled their Bill of Rights, which once made them famous - made
them loved! - all over the world. Now they are feared all over the world.
Reviled. When Americans launched their worldwide war on terror - based
on a treasonous event in which they killed large numbers of their own people
- they betrayed the whole world. They betrayed every dream of freedom anybody
ever had anywhere.
-
- The people who did it did it for a few billion dollars.
Can you blame them? It's easy money blowing up countries and blaming it
on somebody else. Even you might do it if you had the chance. Americans
support such an idea. It's capitalism at its best, controlling the market,
make money on the destruction by selling the weapons, make money on the
reconstruction by involving your friends in the contracts, no public bids,
of course. So you lose a few dark-skinned lives. The world is overpopulated
anyway. Look at it as population control (although that it another, much
larger topic).
-
- Things have become so ugly in the United States that
the liberal opposition candidate for president tells peace activists to
"Get over it!" That there will be no peace no matter who is president.
That America is united to overrun and ravish the whole world, simply because
there is no one to stop it. This is the America that was venerated and
admired all over the world. This is what America became when there was
no other power to keep it honest. It became dishonest - and a killer nation.
-
- People overseas make a mistake when the say they have
nothing against the American people, that it is simply the American government
they loathe and fear. It is the American people who have permitted this
to happen, and they who bear the blame and will reap the whirlwind for
their inaction.
-
- Once, America set an example for the world to establish
representative government and take care of its less fortunate. Today, America
is still setting an example for the world, an example that democracy is
a hoax, and that all we can expect for our children's futures is a dark
abyss of endless war based on phony pretenses.
-
- The thing that made the episodes with Nazi Germany and
Soviet Union have happy endings was that there was somebody to fight for
freedom ready to rescue those oppressed by military tyranny from a foreign
power.
-
- But now, who is ready to defend the freedom of those
in Afghanistan, or in Iraq, or in Macedonia, Serbia, the Philippines, Colombia,
Venezuela, Argentina, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Pakistan, Nicaragua, Chile,
Bolivia, Ecuador, Guatemala ... or Palestine?
-
- Who is ready to defend freedom now that the Americans
have declared freedom incompatible with security?
-
- But these things tend to even out over time. Rome wasn't
built in a day and it took centuries to fall apart, but eventually it was
picked apart by jackals and sycophantic traitors from within.
-
- The world will yet have the last laugh on America, after
its own leaders have finished picking the bones of its financially depleted
carcass.
-
- Because Americans have given up defending true freedom
around the world, the day will soon arrive (sooner than they think) when
they will have to defend their own freedom against the very monster they
have created by their own selfish indifference. The corporate beast that
consumes freedom around the world will one day soon turn its gaping jaws
on America itself, and the Americans, who have decided to forget how to
defend true freedom around the world, will necessarily have forgotten how
to defend their own.
-
- Once upon a time, when I was a little shaver and the
president was some guy named Ike, I was told that America was the greatest
nation in the world because it was a champion of freedom and justice, and
rescued the oppressed whenever people were in trouble.
-
- So ... were they lying then and telling the truth now,
or telling the truth then and lying now?
-
- And when the rest of the world comes calling to rectify
this murderous tyranny and worldwide oppression that America now practices,
what will you say to them when they aim their guns at you? That you didn't
know?
-
-
-
-
- John Kaminski is the author of "America's Autopsy
Report," a collection of his Internet essays published by Dandelion
Books and featured on hundreds of websites around the world. For more information
on how to get this book or to financially support his work (seriously needed
now), go to http://www.johnkaminski.com/. Or, to read some more of his
recent essays for free, go to http://www.rudemacedon.ca/kaminski/kam-index.html
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