Although I do not quite feel like making the explicit kind of statement that Whiskeyfire and The Beast did today I can certainly see their point. Perhaps it is just the fact that I was one of those kids forty-seven years ago, who was convinced that I was going to protect our great country (which was not yet referred to as our Homeland, at least not outside of a small group of fascists here and there) from the red menace. Just as they are now convinced that they are protecting the Homeland from the Muslim menace today. Some of us got educated, most didn't.
Now I know that no American service person has died since 1945 to protect our precious freedoms. Hell I'd go so far as to say that no American service person has died to protect any body's freedoms in that period of time. In fact just the opposite; they have died to prevent those freedoms from being gained or exercised by the swarthy brown masses. And of course it seems that what we fight for and against overseas eventually we accept as good and right right here at Home[land].
So we fight a perpetual war as Gore Vidal calls it and what our Perpetual War is is a perpetual colonial war. Not it turns out a colonial war for the greater glory of our Homeland and for the riches for the state that those wars always promise, but a colonial war for various corporations many of which (I'm looking at you B.P.) are not even American corporations and the riches that those wars deliver to the power elite that rule us all.
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| Ok, so we've been doing it for quite a while. |
2 comments:
Yes, I don't go as far as those two links did, either. Not by a long ways. People join the military for lots of reasons, including some downright inspiring ones. It's their job to do what they're ordered to do, as long as those orders are legal. It's our job to make sure they don't get sent places where they're not protecting our freedoms. If anyone deserves to be told "fuck the ...", it's the rest of us.
Twenty years ago, though, I would have objected to calling America an imperial power. We had some imperialist tendencies back then, but I don't think we gave our inner imperialists really free rein until the Berlin Wall came down. We've been a country with few restraints since.
Well, I came to he conclusion that we were an imperial power some time between August of 1967 and August of 1968 in or close to U-Tapao Thailand. But then I had the advantage of seeing just what we were doing to the natives.
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