Viva La Nonviolent Revolution!

Posted on August 18, 2002 in Citizenship Peace Social Justice

How any person alive can continue to believe in the pronouncements from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is beyond me. Locust Eater rightly asks why we haven’t turned the false prophets of the so-called democratic marketplace out on their cans? And Karen, though she supports the idea of ousting Saddam Hussein, asks why we’ve given up on Bin Laden?

I published the following in Karen’s blog:

barcodeking: You are mistaking the leader of a terrorist organization for an American political hack. The skills needed to succeed in each respective field are quite different. Bin Laden has succeeded as a terrorist because he knows the fine art of hiding. Whenever he moves, it has taken us some time to find him again.

I think Karen has hit it dead on: Bush doesn’t want to find Bin Laden. Now his mouthpieces are saying that was never the goal in the first place, that what he really wants is this unending war on terrorism, perhaps to take the heat off his friends in the drug business.

As for stopping future attacks, if you want to help a terrorist, the best thing you can do in his book is install more draconian measures. They may stop terrorism in the short run, but in the long run they annoy the hell out of people. When governments attack terrorist operations with bombs and the like, they feed the terrorist rhetoric which is “See. They are violent. So we have to be violent in return.”

Bush, I think, understands this well. He has a credibility problem because he did not actually win the November 2000 election. “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel” as we often quote from Samuel Johnson and Bush has turned the WTC into his Reichstag fire.

Karen: I think you are right. The American public has had its consciousness dumbed down. They’ve been manipulated into putting faith in policies that have no effectiveness in solving problems than a bloody feather appearing in a shaman’s hand has in curing a disease. The purpose of Bush’s regular pronouncements and the feather is the same: to make it appear that the fakir has the blessing of the spirit world to keep sucking off the public dole.

I hope that we can replace this administration in 2004 with one that will have the guts to root out all the dirty business deals of the day and put all of those responsible, including the whole Bush clan, into prison.

Consecutive sentences, please.

Karen says one thing that shows to me that she isn’t entirely free of the jingoism that she attacks. “I am all for kicking Saddam’s ass,” she asserts, showing that she, too, has bought her options on the sacred cows of the age. The Middle East situation is complicated. Responsibility for the 1990 Gulf War does not lie firmly on Sadam’s shoulders. For all intents and purposes, the man is politically ineffective within his own country and the world community at large. But that is changing as Iraq now discusses political ties with the Soviet Union. The old cold war mentality appears to be building again –us against the Reds and the Muslims is the current version.

Frankly, I don’t feel it is necessary to kick Hussein’s ass. He’s rapidly turning into the Middle Eastern Castro thanks to our political shenanigans. We lose more than we gain by attacking him. It is doubtful, very doubtful, that any military action in the region will garner the support of Iraq’s neighbors. Furthermore, repeated UN inspections have revealed no signs of the weapons of destruction that were supposedly being manufactured. The anthrax scare of last Autumn proved to be the work of an American right winger. Some have suggested on IRC channels, in satire, that if we must bomb Iraq because of filmy pseudo ties to the WTC attack, then, the bombing must now begin on the studios where Rush Limbaugh and G. Gordon Liddy conduct their disinformative broadcasts.

My sole problem with Karen is that she accepts as doctrine the shibboleth that the military might of United States has been and will be used to further democracy. I contend, that rather, our foreign policy exists so that defense industries can sell us replacements for the weapons we must use up when we bomb Iraq. The Bushes have been especially adept at using American money to set up petty dictators like Hussein and Noriega and then spending more money to knock them down again. We must not overlook the advantages that accrue from creating oil shortages and securing regions for the operations of American run-away shops, banana plantations, and other industries. Karen, I must say to her, we haven’t just been dumbed down — we’ve been taught not to have a heart. If you hang around IRC channels like I do, you will repeatedly see people who earnestly believe that wealth and pride are the signs of a good Christian. They want to kill, kill, kill because they’ve had their sense of outrage surgically extracted by repeated viewings of video games like “Duke Nuke’Em”, “Tomb Raider”, and similar computer travesties. Muslims have been turned into objects that don’t think but just react, which strikes me as a classic case of projection. We have called them cowards and censors. When Adam Sandler pointed out that it takes a great deal more courage to ram yourself into a building than to sit on the deck of a ship shooting off cruise missiles, he was attacked. Sandler was dead on. We are the cowards and we are the bullies. When you dissect our views, you find that we are the ones running the Holy War.

I will say this: the terrorist attack on the WTC was dastardly and the perpetrators, especially Osama Bin Laden, must be caught and turned over to the International Criminal Court. I honestly don’t believe that any American court, military or civil, has the wisdom to judge them. While throwing everything we could into the technology war, we lost our the sense of compassion and pragmatism that makes for true justice. I can no more trust an American court to take steps that won’t feed into terrorist propaganda than I could trust one to oversee the fair counting of ballots in the state of Florida. Each day we lose our credibility because we show the rest of the world that we are wild in our reactions and far too cold and calculating in our justice. Karen and the rest of you, don’t give Bush hope by suggesting that you might be moved to allow an attack on Saddam Hussein. He will keep trying, making up the necessary stories to enrage you as it becomes necessary. You are primed to jump at the talk of soldiers dumping babies out of incubators. That story was false the last time. Its like will probably be false the next.

The bottom line is that we can’t trust George W. Bush or any other power in Washington or the media. Let’s use our heads. The date of the revolution is November 5, 2002. Be there with your ballot, ready to punch the holes that will hogtie this evil administration.