This is a piece I wrote a short while back because I get so tired of hearing "conservatives" bragging about America's victory over communism & the superiority/miracle of the "free market."
Did We Win the Cold War?
If you mean by ‘we,’ the elite .01% of Americans who are the war profiteers & who have milked the Congressional-Military-Industrial Complex nearly dry, then the answer is a resounding yes. But for the overwhelming majority of the American people, we have lost by every standard or measure one can think of.
And let me be clear from the start, I don’t believe the U.S. ‘won’ because of any so-called moral superiority or the triumph of capitalism over communism. I believe that the Soviets’ economy simply collapsed or imploded first. Our so-called ‘victory’ over Russia has changed us from once being the world’s largest creditor nation to the planet’s biggest debtor nation. And God help us if the Chinese or the Japanese ever decide to call in our debts to them.
The ‘Cold War’ drained the economies of both countries & the people bore all the burden while the rich grew ever more obscenely wealthy. War profiteering used to be considered a serious crime but our values have so deteriorated, that we now have a war profiteer as vice-president.
And to refer to the insane arms race as a ‘Cold War,’ seems a misnomer to me. As Gore Vidal & others have pointed out, we have been at war, in one form or another, ever since the end of WWII. And the millions who have died in the power struggle between communism & capitalism, didn’t become cold until after the hot bullets or bombs took their lives. In fact, I misspoke, as Noam Chomsky & Michael Parenti and others have shown, it’s a war between capitalism & democracy.
And here is the crux of the whole charade that keeps we, the people, in our subservient position; it is the rhetoric, the flag-waving appeals to our patriotism, the manipulation of the public’s opinion by the corporate media, & the propaganda of the public educational system which makes most of us dumber than if we’d never attended school. In brief, they keep us distracted & scared so we’ll continue to passively accept our ‘lot’ in life i.e. paying taxes which go into the pockets of the rich, & putting our lives in harm’s way in wars the elite start so they can plunder the poor & their resources in other countries.
Yes indeed, they tell us every single time they send our soldiers into battle, that we are fighting to free the oppressed and to bring democracy to totalitarian or oppressive societies. Yet again and again, our military has invaded countries that were democratic, because they interfered with the Robber Baron U.S. corporations’ raping, pillaging, & plundering of the local economy. For example, I was just reading Noam Chomsky & Edward Herman’s "The Manufacture of Consent," and was sickened to learn that one of the countries our media & our leaders tell us is a fledgling democracy i.e. Honduras, likes to torture its citizens & even pulled the fingernails out of a two year boy before killing him and his mother. And this is just one country among dozens which the politicians give millions of dollars in aid to, to support & train their torturers, their death squads, & etc. Capitalism vs. Democracy in practice!
Therefore, the lie we were spoon-fed on since I was born i.e. America stands for freedom & democracy and all the lofty principles & virtues of humanity, has been perhaps the biggest con job the world has ever known. The communists were a threat because they promised to share their nation’s wealth & resources and made it an integral part of their political system of governance.
Of course, the Soviets fell short of their promises & had an elite not unlike ours, who lived high & mighty. What scared our elite however, was the fact that the Russians did share or spread the resources of Russia & its satellite countries, much more so than the American elite did or do. Talk to anyone who lived under communist rule, and they’ll tell you that they were better off then. With the advent of capitalism and the ‘free market,’ homelessness has become rampant along with hunger, unemployment, lack of medical care, etc. What a Brave New World we inhabit. Globalization is Capitalism on steroids or the Robber Barons run amok. Now the Death Lords are forcing us all into the gutter and America is on its way to becoming one of those poor Third World nations we used to feel so superior to. And if things continue as the Globalists hope, we too will be ‘living’ on $2 per day like the two billion people currently doing so.
You see, in America, that bastion of freedom & democracy, the central myth that keeps us suckers in a rigged game is that with hard work & perseverance, you too, can become rich. But once you begin to become enlightened and see through the lies and discover the murderous true history of the U.S., you will realize that the elite tell us this to keep us in line and there isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell, of ‘success’ unless you sacrifice all your scruples, your conscience, & your values.
And this was the difference between Russia and the U.S., the American elite held out the hope or promise of equal opportunity or egalitarianism but the Russians put it into law. One could argue that our Bill of Rights guarantees us the freedom or opportunities I said we don’t in fact have, but I contend that the rich & powerful have de facto made a mockery of the Bill of Rights with their corporate lawyers, lobbyists, sell-out judges, etc. Furthermore, reflect on what has happened to our precious rights under King Georgie, the Wimp, Bush. We can be arrested by the secret police in the dead of night, held for as long as they want, never be told what crime we supposedly committed, not be allowed a lawyer, be tortured, our loved ones can’t even find out where we are being held, our homes can be invaded anytime the powers that be want & this can be done without a search warrant. They can rummage through our personal belongings, our computers, etc. and we won’t even know they have been in our homes, they can spy on what books we check out, what books we buy, they can and do spy on our e-mails, websites we visit, phone calls, snail mail, etc. without warrants, you can’t attend a George Bush political rally without first signing a loyalty oath, etc. etc. etc. This is freedom? This is democracy? Seems more like totalitarianism to me! Wasn’t this what Communist Russia looked like?
In conclusion, in case you’re still not satisfied or convinced that we, the real Americans, lost the ‘Cold War,’ here are a few more cheerful facts to mull over: Two of America’s top ‘growth industries,’ are temporary employment agencies & the building of more prisons which are privatized & managed by firms like Wackenhut. Moreover, we have more people locked-up per capita, than any other nation on earth.
And the top two industries in the world are weapons manufacturing and the drug industry. I believe the power elite will never listen to common sense and stop the absurd ‘War on Drugs’ because it provides a perfect cover for their locking up & killing of the more troublesome among us & it provides a steady stream of inmates for the prison industry. Equally important, it is the top eight countries in terms of economic & military might i.e. the G-8, who produce and sell (legally & illegally) the overwhelming majority of the world’s guns & bombs.
Furthermore, homelessness in America is growing exponentially. It really took off under that second-rate actor & dolt, Ronald Reagan. To put ever more money into the pockets of his rich benefactors, Reagan, like the current thief in residence i.e. Bush Jr., unofficially declared war on the poor and strove to eliminate as many ‘social welfare’ programs as possible. A good portion of the homeless are mentally ill because Reagan shut down a lot of our state mental institutions. And he even tried to have catsup classified as a vegetable to cut costs in lunch programs for poor schoolchildren!
Lest ye forget, it was Reagan, who in almost his first action as president, fired the air traffic controllers for LIFE! This sent a clear message to corporate America i.e. it’s open season on the American worker. Consider the fact that in the 1950s, unions made up something like 35% of the workforce but today, union jobs have been whittled-down to less than 9% of America’s workers.
Of course ‘outsourcing’ and ‘down-sizing,’ those inane euphemisms that are meant to gloss-over the dehumanizing effects of being fired, go hand-in-glove with the war against America’s working class as well as those in the middle class who once believed their futures were secure.
Naturally with the loss of jobs that once paid enough to enable workers to live the American dream of owning your own home, driving a decent car, taking care of your family’s medical needs, & maybe even sending your kids to a state college, came the erosion of that dream to where it now should more aptly be referred to as the American nightmare!
The poor & the working class have long understood they were being screwed by the rich and now the middle class is slowly waking from its long slumber. Americans are seeing their pensions, their life savings, their homes, their health insurance, etc., vanish and they are living in a perpetual state of worry and fear. Scared to death that they too may wind up living on the streets like those ghosts they are afraid to look at as they pass them in their daily lives.
Yes, America, that idea we were taught to revere as we passed through the ‘blackboard jungle’ we call public education, now won’t provide health insurance for 47 million of its citizens---many who fought in its wars. If you or a loved one get seriously ill, tough-shit! You can lose your home, your life savings, everything! Don’t forget it was under good old Ronnie Reagan, that the Savings & Loan industry wiped-out tens of thousands of Americans’ life savings, due to his deregulation of the industry.
Moreover, Georgie, the butt-boy of the rich & famous, ivy league East coast prep school who pretends to be a cowboy, just like Ronnie did, presided over one of the largest corporate crime-waves in modern history. And when the corporate house of cards started to fall, Bush claimed he didn’t know ‘Kenny-boy’ of Enron. Yeah, right! Ken Lay let Bush use Enron’s private jet to criss-cross the country dozens of times in his campaign for the presidency.
Well, I could go on but enough is enough. America didn’t win the ‘Cold War,’ the totalitarians, the fascists, & the theocrats won and the rest of us are the losers! The cold-blooded, reptile elite have taken over America and are zeroing in on taking over the world. They have no souls. They have no loyalty to America. They look upon us as bugs to be stepped on once we no longer are useful to them. And as they stick their daggers into our backs, they twist the blade & sneer ‘you suckers send your children to fight & die or be maimed in our wars of profit & we shit on you!’
Just think of that Cheshire Cat smile on Dick Cheney’s face, it says it all. We are indeed a nation of sheep & Cheney & Co. are ravenous wolves just licking their chops as we slowly die in shame, misery, & poverty! And I am gaining first-hand knowledge of what life is like on the lowest-rung of America’s social hierarchy i.e. the homeless, because for the past three weeks, I have stayed at a homeless shelter in Orange County, CA & in Boulder, CO. And I can tell you it’s not pretty or fun. It’s spooky and it’s humiliating!
–-Rob DeLoss, April 8th, 2007 (Easter Sunday)