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Iron Fisted America
By Charles Sullivan
11/14/05 "ICH
" -- -- Understanding the collective American psyche is
no easy task. To those living in other lands we Americans are an
enigma. Indeed, we are an enigma unto ourselves. To others we appear
foolish, dim-witted, cowardly and morally bankrupt. To allow the
rise of a fascist regime to take power is compelling evidence for
those views. Let me try to explain why.
Nothing in America is what we are told it is. Whenever the president
speaks—it matters little which president we are talking about—we can
be reasonably certain that they do not utter truth as we know it.
During the past fifty years America has not had a socially
progressive president. The Clinton presidency was under siege from
day one by the power hungry ideologues fueled by Christian
evangelicals. Bill Clinton certainly was no progressive, as his
detractors would have us believe. At his most liberal Clinton was
nothing more than Bush lite. He twice won the presidency by out
righting the right. Clearly, this was no victory for progressives.
No modern era American president represents the interest of the
people. They represent the rich and powerful. The same is true of
Congress.
Every branch of the American government is awash in corporate money
in sums so vast as to boggle the mind. Little wonder that the
American government does not serve the interest and needs of the
people. It serves the wants of soulless corporate entities whose
only concern is unbridled bottom line capitalism.
To further complicate matters, the vast majority of the media is
under the control of the same corporate oligarchy that direct the
government. The corporate media, as the name implies, serves the
corporate interest. Little that the corporate media tells us has any
relevance to truth as most of us know it. The corporate media are
purveyors of lies and distortions that are used to subdue and
control the public mind, often for sinister purposes. Seek
alternative channels of information that flow from non corporate
sources. There you will find what you need to know to be free.
Every branch of government and ninety nine percent of the media
operates in the corporate interest—not in the public interest, as we
all too willingly assume. America is not even close to resembling a
democracy, as the national myth proclaims—it is a corporate
oligarchy. It is a deeply class divided society in which the rich
prey upon the poor. Here it is the poor who do the bidding of the
rich. It is the poor who fight the wars for the economic gains
realized by the power elite. It is the antithesis of Robin Hood.
Here the rich routinely steal from the poor. They rob them senseless
and call it democracy!
America is a land of contradictions. Under the edicts of
unrestrained capitalism, the people serve primarily as drones and
producers of capital for the wealthy. The majority of the people are
mindless consumers of goods. They are automatons at the service of
the unscrupulous gods of finance and material power. Their needs do
not matter to those in power. They exist to cheer the captains of
commerce on in their joyful work of consuming the planet.
The world knows only too well that America is a violent nation. They
know, many of them first hand, that America preys upon the poor and
the defenseless. The manner in which the corporate oligarchy that
drives American politics treats its own down trodden is a microcosm
of how it treats the rest of the world. The extermination of the
indigenous people of North America by pious Anglo invaders is an
atrocity that makes the Nazi liquidation of the Jews pale in
comparison. America has yet to come to grips with its initial
episode of genocide and ethnic cleansing that may be at the root of
its pathological behavior. The annihilation of the American Indian
was just the beginning of what capitalism could do.
Multinational corporations view the earth as a vast aggregation of
commodities and markets to be exploited for profit. They do not
regard the world’s citizens as human beings. They are sources of
cheap labor and consumers, to be exploited by those in power.
Ecosystems and the biological systems that promote life are
summarily ignored by corporatism.
Global capitalism is a malignancy intent upon devouring the world.
It seeks to commodify everything and every one. It intends to
privatize the entire planet, effectively placing the world’s
resources into the smooth, grasping, white hands of a few wealthy
individuals. This explains the existence of the Bilderbergers, an
annual gathering of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful people
who meet to determine the course of global capitalism. Along with
the World Bank and the IMF it sets the world’s financial and
political agenda. It also represents the establishment of a world
government—George Herbert Walker Bush’s ‘New World Order.’
From cradle to grave the collective American mind is under the all
pervasive assault of corporatism. This is all we have ever known; it
is all most of us will ever know. It explains our combined failure
to see the world in terms that can only be described as Disneyesque.
Every day in America is an adventure in the implausible Land of Oz
As a people we have no conception of reality. We have been carefully
insulated from the pain and suffering we have inflicted and continue
to inflict upon the world. Quite literally, we not know not what we
do. But even more tellingly, we don’t want to know.
When we invade sovereign nations we are told that we are liberating
its oppressed people from the throes of tyranny. When we enslave and
torture Islamic people we are told that they are terrorists who mean
us harm. In true Machiavellian terms, the ends justify the means.
This also explains why we cannot come to grips through honest
reckoning with the horrors of the national tragedy we call history.
We have unelected leaders who lie, maim and murder and we call them
Christian. Isn’t that strange?
We target nations with left wing leaders like Venezuela’s popular
president Hugo Chavez and call them threats to democracy, when we
ourselves have no conception of what democracy looks like. The only
threat that Hugo Chavez poses to the United States is that he places
the needs of the people above the profits of multinational
corporations; and that is as un-American as it gets. Anti-capitalist
equates to un-American in the diseased mind of corporatism. This is
why the U.S. has deposed not only Chavez but Aristeed in Haiti, and
a whole litany of South American pro people, pro environment, pro
democracy, and pro labor leaders. That is why CIA operatives have
routinely instigated coups against the hemisphere’s most popular
democratically elected leaders. That is why so many of them have
been assassinated by bullets paid for by our tax dollars. Countless
others have been beaten, tortured, and disappeared, courtesy of U.S.
tax dollars.
The corporate oligarchy loathes democracy because democracy demands
the evenhanded distribution of wealth. It demands accountability. It
requires justice. It seeks to know truth. No matter what pretensions
we may make to the contrary, the U.S. has a long history of opposing
democracy throughout the world. The undeniable proof lies hidden in
our national history; a history that has been carefully thrust down
the memory hole of an Orwellian nightmare we have unwittingly helped
to forge through unfettered complacency.
From North Korea, Viet Nam, Guatemala, Panama, Columbia, Cuba,
Venezuela, Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq, the Philippines, Cambodia,
the former Soviet Union, Iran, Syria, Eastern Europe, Haiti, and
Jamaica—I could go on indefinitely—America’s military might has
always opposed and snuffed out fledgling democracies. Every U.S.
military intervention during the past fifty years and longer acted
to put down insurrections of popular movements of the people. A
thoughtful examination of the evidence makes it clear that the
obvious and only possible conclusion is that our military might is
used not to promote liberation, democracy, and freedom. It serves as
the iron fist of capitalism to smash the face of people’s movements
for social justice and autonomy. U.S. militarism is the arm of
corporatism that invades and plunders sovereign nations to rob them
of treasure and resources. Its purpose is to open new markets to
capitalism; to create pools of slave labor and a constant stream of
cheap goods for American consumption. It is Wal-Mart amplified a
hundred thousand times and projected across the globe.
None of this is news. We are simply witnessing the unrestrained
avarice of the rich and powerful running rough shod over the
principles of democracy and social justice. It is the continuation
of Manifest Destiny. It is the sound of the rich and powerful
preying upon the poor and the innocent. None of it is what we have
been told. We must open our eyes and our minds to see it for what it
really is. We must come to grips with our own sordid history and all
that it has wrought. Only then we can begin to do something about
the present and the future.
Charles Sullivan is a furniture maker, photographer, and free
lance writer living in the eastern panhandle of West Virginia. He
welcomes your comments at
earthdog@highstream.net
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