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What you are seeing is the predictable and desired result of use of the product known as "The War on Terror."
States which have purchased this product - incuding Australia, Great Britain and the United States - are engaged in the mobilzation of domestic racism against Islam, Muslims and Arabs. Like all products, the War on Terror has its designers, its marketers, its ad agencies and architects. It has a history which can be traced back to and through the Netanyahu administration in Israel, which - in conjunction with American Likudniks, neo-cons, and other ultra-right and formerly anti-communist groups - first fully marketed the product in the late 1990s.
The War On Terror is a product which conceives of israel quite precisely as israel has always concieved of itself: as the racial front line of Western civilization and security - a bulwark against barbarism. The War On Terror requires of its adherants an ideological identification with Israel, and a deliberate blurring of distinctions between properly national interests and Israeli interests. As such, Israel's problems (endless occupations, permanent insecurity, volatile racism and hysterica about immigration and demographics, green lines & border hysteria, suicide bombers, etc) become our problems, and Israel's desires become our needs. The war on Terror thus requires the subjugation or destruction of Israel's neighbors in the Middle East, and the violent demonization of all opposition to Zionism. This is a product which sits comfortably alongside other products - creating huge profits for corporations in the oil, military tech, and penal sectors, and misery for human being everywhere.
It is an expensive product. For Americans alone, it has cost more than $500 billion US Dollars so far in Iraq, and billions more in Afghanistan. It has cost thousands of American lives and hundreds of thousands of lives of those on the recieving end in the Middle East. Its real costs are far more serious: the unprecedented proliferation of terrorism worldwide (up 800% since the occupation of Iraq); loss of any kind of sense of hope, safety and security; a new global race to nuclear armament; evasion of truly pressing global issues such as rapidly growing poverty for most of the world's population, famine and epidemic disease, environmental degradation and global warming; the complete evaporation of funding for social programs from health care to education to housing and transportation and everything else, the militarization of civil society, the promotion of a state of constant racial anxiety, the loss of basic freedoms - freedom to protest, freedom to travel, freedom to speak, freedom to access news and information, freedom from government intrusion into our private lives, freedom to know basic facts about what our own government is doing. These are all part of the cost of The War on terror. It is similarly costly for Australians, for the British, and for Israelis as well, who have watched their social services disappear and their entire society transformed with particular brutality into a neo-liberal military fiefdom engaged in perpetual war.
The War on Terror is a product designed and tested by Israel for its principal imperial patron - the US. It envisions a global empire, a world subjugated under American military, cultural, political, economic hegemony, and permanent, global war. It is a war which benefits only the elites of each state, and the transnational elites which use states as their actors while occupying none. It is a war against the ideals of human rights, international law, and national sovereignty. Some describe it as a new stage of capitalism. As such it is also a war on humanism.
But this product has a human face as well. You can see it in the photo above. The War on terror is a war on you.
Who do you want to be? What kind of world do you want to live in?
I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints.
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Ah, yes, Smedley Butler, hand-picked by 1930s fat cats as part of their malodorous "Business Plot" to kick FDR out of the White House and take over the government.
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The Business Plot, The Plot Against FDR, or The White House Putsch, was a conspiracy involving several wealthy businessmen to overthrow the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933.
Purported details of the matter came to light when retired Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler testified before a Congressional committee that a group of men had attempted to recruit him to serve as the leader of a plot and to assume and wield power once the coup was successful. Butler testified before the McCormack-Dickstein Committee in 1934. In his testimony, Butler claimed that a group of several men had approached him as part of a plot to overthrow Roosevelt in a military coup. One of the alleged plotters, Gerald MacGuire, vehemently denied any such plot. In their final report, the Congressional committee supported Butler's allegations on the existence of the plot, but no prosecutions or further investigations followed, and the matter was mostly forgotten.
General Butler claimed that the American Liberty League was the primary means of funding the plot. The main backers were the Du Pont family, as well as leaders of U.S. Steel, General Motors, Standard Oil, Chase National Bank, and Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company. A BBC documentary claims Prescott Bush, father and grandfather to the 41st and 43rd US Presidents respectively, was also connected.
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American Liberty League: American Liberty League - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia League League
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So this was clearly not some fringe organization. It was wealthy and it was respectable—eminently respectable. At its height it claimed the allegiance of 124,856 members, and it sincerely believed that it could topple the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt. When the formation of the League was announced on August 23, 1934, its public goals of nonpartisanship and constitutionality were unveiled, without any mention of the New Deal. Yet everyone knew what its eventual goal must be, and the White House and its liberal allies launched a preemptive strike on the League. New Deal congressmen jumped to the attack, and the battle was on.
The League could in part be traced to Shouse’s old Association Against the Prohibition Amendment. Raskob and the DuPonts had also been active in it, and its emphasis on local self-government resembled later Liberty League doctrine. The antipathy of this group to Roosevelt was of long standing. Just a few days after Roosevelt’s nomination, Raskob wrote to Shouse, “When one thinks of the Democratic Party being headed by such radicals as Roosevelt, Huey Long, Hearst, McAdoo, and Senators Wheeler and Dill, as against the fine, conservative talent in the Party as represented by such men as you, Governor Byrd, Governor Smith, Carter Glass, John W. Davis, Governor Cox, Pierre S. Du Pont, Governor Ely, and others too numerous to mention, it takes all one’s courage and faith not to lose faith completely.”
The League, according to historian James Patterson, author of Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal, was partially the result of urging for a coalition of conservatives of both parties to defeat Roosevelt. It was reported that such conservative Democratic senators as Glass, Byrd, Gore, Bailey, and Clark were mildly in favor of such action; but partisan politics being what they are, little came of the idea for a formal coalition.
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Last edited by ParkTwain; 10-03-2007 at 04:07 PM..
America First: the Anti-War Movement, Charles Lindbergh and the Second World War, 1940 - 1941 (http://libraryautomation.com/nymas/americafirst.html - broken link)
America First: the Anti-War Movement, Charles Lindbergh and the Second World War, 1940 - 1941 (http://libraryautomation.com/nymas/americafirst.html - broken link)
Did you read this article? Lindbergh was a Germany-lover, if not actually a Nazi-sympathizer. He was against war with Germany, not against any foreign war per se. His respect for Germany was ethnic or racial in its basis.
Under that scenario I was a "hired thug" for the Michelin Tire and Rubber Company. Fighting your own Colonial Wars is stupid and immoral. Fighting for some other country’s colony is just crazy. Our country has, and still is, doing both. But we are doing it at great profit to the investors and the war profiteers.
Did you read this article? Lindbergh was a Germany-lover, if not actually a Nazi-sympathizer. He was against war with Germany, not against any foreign war per se. His respect for Germany was ethnic or racial in its basis.
Yes, not unlike the philosophic empathy of those "anti-war" folks on the left in America for the likes of Castro, Mao, and Ho Chi Minh.
Some folks just can't resist the allure of an authoritarian alpha male.
Under that scenario I was a "hired thug" for the Michelin Tire and Rubber Company. Fighting your own Colonial Wars is stupid and immoral. Fighting for some other country’s colony is just crazy. Our country has, and still is, doing both. But we are doing it at great profit to the investors and the war profiteers.
Well considering today that many American companies have placed their factories in poor developing nations to maximize profit by the utilization of cheap labor at the expense of their nation. The foreign multi-national companies have so convoluted the national boundaries, it is hard to tell exactly who or what one is fighting for.
I believe Ike warned us of one aspect of this but there will always be Americans and foreigners more concerned with their own greed than anything else.
...many American companies have placed their factories in poor developing nations to maximize profit by the utilization of cheap labor at the expense of their nation.
That's not exactly true. What about the American consumers who pay less for foreign-made goods? Aren't they part of the nation?
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