Is the Bush Regime a Sponsor of State Terrorism? The Evil Within
Thaddeus Stevens
people. The US government murdered 500,000 Iraqi children prior to Bush's invasion.
When the US government murders people, whether Serbs, Branch Davidians at Waco, or
Iraqi women and children, it is "collateral damage." But we put Saddam Hussein on
trial for putting down rebellions.
Gentle reader, do you believe that the Bush Regime will not shoot you down in the
streets if you have a rebellion?
Weekend Edition May 27-29, 2006
Is the Bush Regime a Sponsor of State Terrorism?
The Evil Within By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
A powerful case can be made that it is.
In the past three years the Bush Regime has murdered tens of thousands of Iraqi
civilians and an unknown number of Afghan ones.
US Marines, our finest and proudest military force, are under criminal investigation
for breaking into Iraqi homes and murdering entire families. In an unprecedented
event, General Michael Hagee, the Marine Corps commandant, has found it necessary to
fly to Iraq to tell our best trained troops to stop murdering civilians.
General Hagee found it necessary to tell the U.S. Marines: "We do not employ force
just for the sake of employing force. We use lethal force only when justified,
proportional, and most importantly, lawful."
The war criminals in the Bush Regime have dismissed the murders as "collateral
damage," but they are in fact murders. Otherwise, there would be no criminal
investigations, and the Marine commandant would not be burdened with the embarrassment
of having to fly to Iraq to lecture US Marines on the lawful use of force.
The criminal Bush Regime has now murdered more Iraqis than Saddam Hussen. The Bush
Regime is also responsible for 20,000 US casualties (dead, maimed for life, and wounded).
Bush damns the "axis of evil." But who has the "axis of evil" attacked? Iran has
attacked no one. North Korea has attacked no country for more than a half century.
Iraq attacked Kuiwait a decade and a half ago, apparently after securing permission
from the US ambassador.
Isn't the real axis of evil Bush-Blair-Olmert? Bush and Blair have attacked two
countries, slaughtering their citizens. Olmert is urging them on to attack a third
country--Iran.
Where does the danger to the world reside? In Iran, a small religious country where
the family is intact and the government is constrained by religious authority and
ancient traditions, or in the US where propaganda rules and the powerful executive
branch has removed itself from accountability by breaking the constitutional
restraints on its power?
Why is the US superpower orchestrating fear of puny Iran?
The US government has spent the past half century interfering in the internal affairs
of other countries, overthrowing or assassinating their chosen leaders and imposing
its puppets on foreign peoples. To what country has Iran done this, or Iraq, or North
Korea?
Americans think that they are the salt of the earth. The hubris that comes from this
self-righteous belief makes Americans blind to the evil of their leaders. How can
American leaders be evil when Americans are so good and so wonderful?
How many Serbs were slaughtered by American bombs released from high above the clouds,
and for what reason? Who even remembers the propagandistic lies that the Clinton
administration told us about why we absolutely had to drop bombs on the Serbs?
Wasn't it evil for the US to bomb Iraq for a decade and to embargo medicines for
children? When US Secretary of State M. Albright was asked if she thought an embargo
that resulted in the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children was justified, she replied, "yes."
The former terrible tyrant ruler of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, is on trial for killing 150
people. The US government murdered 500,000 Iraqi children prior to Bush's invasion.
When the US government murders people, whether Serbs, Branch Davidians at Waco, or
Iraqi women and children, it is "collateral damage." But we put Saddam Hussein on
trial for putting down rebellions.
Gentle reader, do you believe that the Bush Regime will not shoot you down in the
streets if you have a rebellion?
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan
administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and
Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good
Intentions.He can be reached at: paulcrai...@yahoo.com
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The idea that there is any sense in which the American public could be said not
to know what we do is finally not credible. Are we dupes of propaganda? It’s not as
if the network news folks are eager to help us put together a diagnosis of our
imperial objectives and methods. But the weightier answer is that we operate under a
New Censorship which functions by making everything known and naked to a paralyzing
degree. Is there anyone who doesn’t understand that the Sudanese pharmaceutical lab
that Clinton blew up with eighty cruise missiles was producing . . . pharmaceuticals?
Is there anyone who doesn’t understand that this was an act of state terrorism and a
violation of every principle of international law? . . Clinton emerged unscathed from
this crime against the people of the Sudan because of a) racism (the unspoken
assumption being that it’s okay to bomb little brown people-it happens so often they
ought to be use to it by now; it’s rather like the weather for them), b) the
unacknowledged understanding that American military activities really do support our
privileges stateside, such as those privileges are, and c) the stupefying effects of
the New Censorship.
The New Censorship does not work by keeping things secret. Are our leaders liars
and criminals: is the government run by wealthy corporations and political elites? Are
we all being slowly poisoned? The answer is yes to all of the above, and there’s
hardly a soul on these shores who doesn’t know it. The reign of George II practically
revels in this perverse transparency. Oil policy created in backrooms with lobbyists
from Enron and Exxon-Mobil. Naked pandering to the electricity industry in rolling
back clean-air mandates. Accounting firms like Arthur Andersen buying even “watchdog”
liberal senators such as Christopher Dodd. Elections rigged with brother Jeb’s
connivance in Florida. All of these details are utterly public, reported in
newspapers, television newscasts, and books, yet it’s perfectly safe for this stuff to
be known. The genius of the New Censorship is that it works through the obscenity of
absolute openness. Iraq-gate wasn’t a secret. The real secret is that it wasn’t a
secret, and certainly wasn’t a scandal. It was business as usual. The betrayal of
public trust is a daily story manipulated by the media within the narrative confines
of “scandal,’ when in fact it’s all a part of the daily routine and everyone knows it.
The media makes pornography of the collective guilt of our politicians and business
leaders. They make a yummy fetish of betrayed trust. We then consume it, mostly
passively, because it is indistinguishable from our ‘entertainment’ and because we
suspect in some dim way that, bad as it surely is, it is working in our interests in
the long run. What genius to have a system that allows you to behave badly, be exposed
for it, and then have the sin recouped by the system as sellable commodity! I mean,
you have to admire the sheer, recuperative balls of it!
~ from “The Middle Mind, Why Americans don’t Think for Themselves” by Curtis White
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"Fearful people are more dependent, more easily manipulated and controlled, more
susceptible to deceptively simple, strong, tough measures and hard-line postures. ...
They may accept and even welcome repression if it promises to relieve their
insecurities." ~ George Gerbner ~ Annenberg School for Communication
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| ~ Thaddeus Stevens ~ |
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--- In some ways she was far more acute than Winston, and far less susceptible to
Party propaganda. Once when he happened in some connection to mention the war against
Eurasia, she startled him by saying casually that in her opinion the war was not
happening. The rocket bombs which fell daily on London were probably fired by the
Government of Oceania itself, "Just to keep the People frightened."
-- George Orwell, 1984, 127
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"Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress
of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims, have been
born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing,
and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it
does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor
freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the
ground, they want rain without thunder and lightening.They want the ocean without the
awful roar of its many waters."
"This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both
moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a
demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly
submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will
be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words
or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those
whom they oppress."
~ Frederick Douglass, 1857
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A reasonably just and well-ordered democratic society might be possible,
and . . . justice as fairness should have a special place among the political
conceptions in its political and social world. . . [M]any are prepared to accept the
conclusion that a just and well-ordered democratic society is not possible, and even
regard it as obvious. Isn't admitting it part of growing up, part of the inevitable
loss of innocence? But is this conclusion one we can so easily accept?
The answer we give to the question of whether a just democratic society is
possible and can be stable for the right reasons affects our background thoughts and
attitudes about the world as a whole. And it affects these thoughts and attitudes
before we come to actual politics, and limits or inspires how we take part in it. . .
If we take for granted as common knowledge that a just and well-ordered democratic
society is impossible, then the quality and tone of those attitudes will reflect that
knowledge. A cause of the fall of Weimar's constitutional regime was that none of the
traditional elites of Germany supported its constitution or were willing to cooperate
to make it work. They no longer believed a decent liberal parliamentary regime was
possible. Its time had past.
The regime fell first to a series of authoritarian cabinet governments from 1930 to
1932. When these were increasingly weakened by their lack of popular support,
President Hindenburg was finally persuaded to turn to Hitler, who had such support and
whom conservatives thought they could control.
~ John Rawls "Political Liberalism" pg. lx
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