I feel the need to explain some things regarding my last diary, in which I said this:
I was a little disappointed in Ed Shultz, who at the end of his talk said, "God bless the troops who are keeping us safe." And I thought, and Daniel later echoed, did he have to say that? Do we have to parrot rightwing memes to set the patriot heart-strings a quiver? With all the gut-wrenching problems that face us and the dire consequences of doing the same old nothing, must we resort to fairy tales and bullshit to inspire the masses? Do we have to create boogeymen who hate us for our freedoms before we get off our asses and do something about global warming, ocean acidification, resource depletion, planet-wide pollution, joblessness, homelessness, increased human suffering and all the rest?
Freedom Land - America Fighting For Its Life
I was somewhat careless in the construction of that paragraph and some took it that I objected to the appeal to God to bless our troops. But my only objection was to the fiction perpetuated by the Military Industrial Complex that our troops are keeping us safe. I usually avoid the question of God as I believe any thorough discussion of that topic would require an inordinate amount of time devoted to the definition of terms. I am only mystified by anyone's certainty about such profound matters, one way or the other. Whether ones conception is of Jehova, Buddha, the Tao, or the intelligent universe I believe the question of the true nature of the universe and all existence is one that dwarfs our meager imaginations - so I'd be the last to disrespect anyone's religion. Personally, I lean towards Einstein's conception, 'God is the mystery that lies at the heart of the universe.' And that mystery IMO is great and deep and quite possibly unknowable, so in the face of it I make every effort to remain humble. I try to bear in mind just how much I do not know. I also like Einstein's notion that there are two ways to live – as if nothing is a miracle or as if everything is a miracle. I lean heavily toward the latter. I get the idea that he did too. I also like the Native American concept that all things are connected and all things are sacred.
As for our troops keeping us safe, I believe that they have been so egregiously misused that the effect has been just the opposite.
Bush's "War on Terror" Tactics Make America Less Safe, Less Free
By William Fisher
t r u t h o u t | Report
Tuesday 28 August 2007
The constitutional scholars who represented extraordinary-rendition victim Maher Arar charge that America is losing the "war on terror" and the civil rights of its citizens because of Bush administration policies.
In a new book, "Less Safe, Less Free: Why America Is Losing the War on Terror," law professors David Cole and Jules Lobel argue that the problem lies in the aggressive "preventive paradigm" the Bush administration adopted in the wake of 9/11.
The authors note that the administration "is fond of reminding us that no terrorist attacks have occurred on domestic soil since 9/11," but they ask, "Has the administration's 'war on terror' actually made us safer?"
Their answer: "While the 'preventive paradigm' can point to few gains in our security, it has come at great cost to our ideals. In the name of preemptive security, the administration has undertaken torture, indefinite detention without trial, extraordinary renditions, disappearances into CIA 'black sites,' warrantless wiretapping of American citizens, and an illegal and disastrous war in Iraq."
These measures, they add, "constitute the core of the 'preventive paradigm,' and have compromised the most basic commitments of the rule of law. And by doing so they have actually impeded our efforts to bring known terrorists to trial, limited our long-term options for security, sparked anti-American resentment and terrorist recruitment, and undermined relations even with our closest allies."
t r u t h o u t
One of my self-appointed missions in life is to challenge the propaganda that perpetuates our militarism, and the misbegotten notions that underpin it. That is a tricky thing to do because we are all steeped in propaganda on a daily basis. We are the most highly propagandized culture to have ever existed, bar none. Much of what most people commonly believe is not even remotely true. The establishment, that is to say the Wall Street-Military-Industrial-Congressional-Media Conglomerate-Complex, has raised propaganda to a science, and television is the primary medium of transmission.
As the son of a 21-year Army Infantryman, I have been as blasted by the MIC propaganda as much or more than anyone. It seeps into your bones. It's a lot to overcome. The snappy uniforms, the shiny medals, the stirring parades, the marching music, the high-flying rhetoric, the glitzy war movies enshrining past glories – all designed to set those patriot heartstrings a quiver and cause us to march our sons and daughters off to kill or die at the altar of war for corporate profits. But the simple fact is there is nothing glorious about war. It is hideous, cruel, evil, wasteful and shameful...and nothing more. The fact that we allow the warmongers and profiteers among us to manipulate us so tragically is a profound and heartbreaking pity. The price to humanity is unbearable to contemplate.
"Propaganda, all is phony."
Bob Dylan
Modern warfare is a scam and has been for a very long time. I refer anyone who disagrees to the works of Smedley Darlington Butler, a rare and true American hero (IMHO), who knew war like few others.
"War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes."
War Is a Racket by U.S. Marine Major General Smedley Darlington Butler
That is war in a nutshell. It is a sad and sick game played by the greedy monsters among us purely for profit. We need to put these assholes out of the business of determining our policy, foreign or domestic. It's time for us to end the rule of madmen and monsters.
It's no wonder we are hated by someone in virtually every corner of the globe. We are the biggest bullies on the planet. To perpetuate that, the establishment must convince us that anyone who dares oppose us hates us for our freedoms, and not because we bombed their village, raped their mother, killed their father, kidnapped their cousin or tortured their sons and daughters.
I have opted not to include evidence of U.S. Military atrocities, past and ongoing, on the assumption that we all know about them. But the evidence abounds on the Internet, you can google it if you require proof. You will find video, pictures, transcripts and sworn testimony. There is everything short of an official admission of wrongdoing.
What we have done in our so-called 'war on terror' is create a new generation who will hate us their whole lives for what we have done to them, their family or their country. What a foolish and tragic response to the 9/11 attacks. We have only made things worse. Yes, let's stir up the hatred, fan the flames of war and violence, and expect that to have a good outcome. How foolish can we be? How many more times do we wish to be attacked?
'Terrorism' cannot be stomped out. It can only be co-opted. If we treated people better, there would be far fewer of them who wanted to kill us. The same logic applies to domestic issues. If you feed people they won't be hungry. If you house people they won't be homeless. If you provide jobs people won't be unemployed. It's simple and all it really requires of us is that we recognize our kinship with all other people and respond to their needs accordingly. We are all family, all descended from a single woman in Africa. All that is left is for us to acknowledge our kinship, our essential and profound connectedness and to treat our fellow family members with basic human decency. It seems so little to ask and yet is the answer to all of our biggest socioeconomic problems. It all comes down to compassion. Can we afford to have compassion for each other? The only sane response to that question is can we afford not to? The answer is clear. We must learn to love each other or we will surely kill each other, if by no other means than by destroying the biosphere in a dimwitted corporatist orgy of greed-blinded selfishness.
Compassion. It's what separates the American right from the American left. Karl Rove knew what he was doing when he tried to co-opt the left and claim compassion as a virtue of the right. Compassionate conservative. Orwell rolls in his grave.
There is of course no such thing as a compassionate conservative, but compassion is what drives most of us on the left. We see the hungry and want to feed them. We see the suffering and want to relieve it. We see the violence and want to stop it. We are all about compassion. We may differ in many ways but this one thing we have in common. We have compassion for humanity. The right has compassion only for themselves. They're as stingy with it as they are with everything else. Their clutching, grasping and fear-mongering will only lead us to our doom if we continue to tolerate it at the levers of power. Going forward compassion must reign. We must stop being afraid for ourselves and start being concerned for others. Guided by compassion and reason, humanity has a chance, slim though it may be, to meet the enormous and unprecedented challenges that we face in a future that is coming at us fast. Without compassion we won't make it very far.
We must nurture, grow and teach compassion. It's the one thing that could conceivably allow us to save ourselves from a bad end.
"Compassion is the new radicalism."
the Dalai Lama
"Don't let the greedheads win."
Hunter S. Thompson
"Love one another."
George Harrison
"An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity."
Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Mankind must put an end to war, or war will surely put an end to mankind."
John F. Kennedy
"God bless our troops, who I wish I could keep safe."
OPOL