THEY CAN PROTEST ALL THEY WANT ~ SO LONG AS THEY PAY THEIR TAXES
~ Alexander Haig, Reagan Administration
Truthdig
By Chris Hedges
September 14, 2009
The right-wing accusations against Barack Obama are true. He is a socialist, although he practices socialism for corporations. He is squandering the country's future with deficits that can never be repaid. He has retained and even bolstered our surveillance state to spy on Americans.
President Obama is mobbed after delivering his major health care address to Congress. Obama has promised to deliver millions of new customers to insurance companies.
He is forcing us to buy into a health care system that will enrich corporations and expand the abuse of our for-profit medical care. He will not stanch unemployment. He will not end our wars. He will not rebuild the nation. He is a tool of the corporate state.
It is not the problem.
We are the problem.
If we do not tap into the justifiable anger
sweeping across the nation,
if we do not militantly push back
against corporate fraud and imperial wars
that we cannot win or afford,
the political vacuum we have created
will be filled with right-wing lunatics
and proto-fascists.
The goons will inherit power
not because they are astute,
Violence is a dark undercurrent of American history. It is exacerbated by war and economic decline. Violence is spreading outward from the killing fields in Iraq and Afghanistan to slowly tear apart individuals, families and communities. There is no immunity.
The longer the wars continue, the longer the members of our working class are transformed by corporate overlords into serfs, the more violence will dominate the landscape.
The slide into chaos and a police state will become inevitable.
The soldiers and Marines who return from Iraq and Afghanistan are often traumatized and then shipped back a few months later to be traumatized again. This was less frequent in Vietnam. Veterans, when they get out, search for the usual escape routes of alienation, addictions and medication. But there is also the escape route of violence.
She learned about peace the hard way.
Now she is arrested for speaking of it.
We risk creating a homegrown Freikorps, the demobilized German soldiers from World War I who violently tore down the edifice of the Weimar Republic and helped open the way to Nazism.
The Afghanistan and Iraq wars have unloaded hundreds of thousands of combat troops, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder or major depression, back into society. According to a joint Veterans Affairs Department-University of San Francisco study published in July, 418,000 of the roughly 1.9 million service members who have fought in or supported the wars suffer from PTSD.
As of August 2008, the latest data available, about a quarter-million military veterans were imprisoned on any given day ~ about 9.4 percent of the total daily imprisoned population, according to the National GAINS Center Forum on Combat Veterans, Trauma and the Justice System.
There are 223,000 veterans in jail or prison cells on an average day, and an unknown number among the 4 million Americans on probation. They don't have much to look forward to upon release. And if any of these incarcerated vets do not have PTSD when they are arrested, our corrections system will probably rectify the deficiency.
Throw in the cocktail of unemployment, powerlessness, depression, alienation, anger, alcohol and drugs and you create thousands, if not tens of thousands, who will seek out violence the way an addict seeks out a bag of heroin.
War and conflict have marked most of my adult life. I know what prolonged exposure to industrial slaughter does to you. I know what it is to confront memories, buried deep within the subconscious, which jerk you awake at night, your heart racing and your body covered in sweat.
I know what it is like to lie, unable to sleep, your heart pounding, trying to remember what it was that caused such terror. I know how it feels to be overcome by the vivid images of violence that make you wonder if the dream or the darkness around you is real. I know what it feels like to stumble through the day carrying a shock and horror, an awful cement-like despair, which you cannot shed.
One of many hundreds of thousands, remembering his tour of duty.
And I know how ~ after a few nights like this ~ you are left numb and exhausted, unable to connect with anyone around you, even those you love the most. I know how you drink or medicate yourself into a coma so you do not have to remember your dreams. And I know that great divide that opens between you and the rest of the world, especially the civilian world, which cannot imagine your pain and your hatred. I know how easily this hatred is directed toward those in that world.
There are minefields of stimulants for those who return from war. Smells, sounds, bridges, the whoosh of a helicopter, thrust you back to Iraq or another zone of slaughter, back to a time of terror and blood, back to the darkest regions of your heart, regions you wish did not exist.
This group of vets were egged and spit upon for many blocks by civilians, armchair generals, who knew nothing of what they were protesting. Not that politicians really give a toot about marches. To them it is merely the slaves burning off a little steam.
~ Alexander Haig, Reagan Administration
Life, on some days, is a simple battle to stay upright, to cope with memories and trauma that are unexplainable, probably unimaginable, to those seated across from you at the breakfast table.
Families will watch these veterans fall silent, see the thousand-yard stare, and know they have again lost these men and women. They hope somehow they will come back. Some won't. Those who cannot cope, even by using Zoloft or Paxil, blow their brains out with drugs, alcohol or a gun.
More Vietnam veterans died from suicide in the years after the war than during the conflict itself. But it would be a mistake to blame this on Vietnam. War does this to you. It destroys part of you. You live maimed. If you are not able to live maimed, you check out.
Soldiers return from war maimed in soul.But what happens in a society where everything conspires to check you out even when you make the herculean effort to integrate into the world of malls, celebrity gossip and too many brands of cereal on a supermarket shelf?
What happens when the corporate state says that you can die in its wars but at home you are human refuse, that there is no job, no way to pay your medical bills or your mortgage, no hope?
They come back maimed in the flesh.
Then you retreat into your private hell of rage, terror and alienation. You do not return from the world of war. You yearn for its sleek and powerful weapons, its speed and noise, its ability to abolish the lines between sanity and madness.
You long for the alluring, hallucinogenic landscapes of combat. You miss the psychedelic visions of carnage and suffering, the smells, sounds, shrieks, explosions and destruction that jolt you back to the present, which make you aware in ways you never were before.
The thrill of violence, the God-like power that comes when you can take a human lifewith impunity, is matched against the pathetic existence of waiting for an unemployment check. You look to rejoin the fraternity of killers. Here. There. It no longer matters.
There is a yawning indifference at home about what is happening in Iraq and Afghanistan. The hollow language of heroism and glory, used by the war makers and often aped by those in the media, allows the nation to feel good about war, about "service."
But it is also a way of muzzling the voices that attempt to tell us the truth about war. And when these men and women do find the moral courage to speak, they often find that many fellow Americans turn away in disgust or attack them for shattering the myth.
The myth of war is too enjoyable, and too profitable, to be punctured by reality. And so these veterans nurse their fantasies of power. They begin to hate those who sent them as much as they hate those they fought. Some cannot distinguish one from the other.
He dared to exercise the same freedom of speech
which he earned those medals defending.
As I stared into the faces of the men from A Gathering of Eagles on Saturday at a protest calling for the closure of the Army Experience Center in Philadelphia, I recognized these emotions.
These men had arrived on black motorcycles. They were wearing leather jackets. They had lined up, most holding large American flags, to greet the protesters, some of whom were also veterans. They chanted "Traitors!" at the seven people who were arrested for refusing the police order to leave the premises.
They sought vindication from a system that had, although they could not admit it, betrayed them. They yearned to be powerful, if only for a moment, if only by breaking through the police line and knocking some God-hating communist faggot to the ground. They wanted the war to come home.
Arrested for protesting the crime he was forced to participate in.It is we who are guilty, guilty for sending these young men and women to wars that did not have to be fought.
It is we who are guilty for turning away from the truth of war to wallow in a self-aggrandizing myth, guilty because we create and decorate killers and when they come home maimed and broken we discard them.
It is we who are guilty for failing to defy the Democratic and Republican Parties that since 1994 have betrayed the working class by destroying our manufacturing base, slashing funds to assist the poor and cravenly doing the bidding of corporations.
It is we who are guilty for refusing to mass on Washington and demand single-payer, not-for-profit health care for all Americans.
It is we who are guilty for supporting Republicans and Democrats while they funnel billions in taxpayer dollars to sustain speculative Wall Street interests. The rage of the confused and angry right-wing marchers, the ones fired up by trash-talking talk show hosts, the ones liberals belittle and maybe even laugh at, should be our rage.
If it is not our rage soon, if we continue to humiliate and debase ourselves by begging Obama to be Obama, we will see our open society dismantled not because of the shrewdness of the far right, but because of our moral cowardice.
~ Alexander Haig, Reagan Administration
We're indentured slaves and don't even know it.
ReplyDeleteHell, the serfs of the Middle Ages were better off, most of them had only to work for seven years before being freed, Americans work to pay taxes all their lives, then pay more after death thru the inheritance tax.
The 'Wars for Empire and Israel' machine doesn't care, it just wants a fresh supply of bodies and all of our money.
Wow. That was pretty powerful. I can't believe I still read my shitty local newspaper when there are writers like this on the blogs.
ReplyDeleteANONYMOUS, YOUR COMMENT JUST MADE MY DAY! THANK YOU SO MUCH. THIS IS WHY WE ARE HERE DOING WHAT WE DO. OFFERING THE REAL STUFF TO PEOPLE. WE ARE NOT PERFECT BY A LONG SHOT BUT I BELIEVE WE OFFER A BETTER ALTERNATIVE!
ReplyDeleteSENDING YOU A BIG HUG. IT IS SO GRATIFYING TO KNOW ANOTHER EYE IS OPENED!
ASA, sis. Thanks so much for being truthful. Obama is a perfect "White" "House Negro" who was chosen before the fact to keep the status quo, not end it. All true black leaders get killed in this nation-the negroes are allowed to live. I am a part black/part Cherokee blood pimp baby of a former black pimp turned writer in Oakland who was a war vet and a trick baby who's mother's mind is fried from her Nazi pimp through liberal social service organizations. I am also now a practicing Muslim and might get killed, worried beyond belief for my mother and brother and sister and her kids who also might be trick babies. There is a whole case on this right now and "white" Jews and white people hate me beyond belief these days as does the NOI which is kept going being fueled by the white pimps in this country with a black pimp named Farakhan. Jews hate their own black heritage and want to deny it and have a love hate relationship with the white race like many black people do too. This is a country of cowards and pranksters who think it's cool to hide behind women and children. No, I would like people to start acting like MEN instead of idiots. Stop the hypersensitivity, stop the hiding, stop all of it. This country is little but a penal colony for Europe's trash.
ReplyDeleteThat said, it's time to stop falling in Love with Europe when it oppresses us. HE WHO ACCEPTS BLACKNESS, IT WILL MAKE YOU, HE WHO DENIES IT; IT WILL DESTROY YOU....