Iron Fisted America

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Mon, 14 Nov 2005 21:26:05 -0500

The TRUTH: Iron Fisted America

 

 

 

 

Iron Fisted America

 

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10983.htm

 

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