Sunday, May 15, 2016

The Great Leap Backward: America’s Illegal Wars on the World, by Luciana Bohne


I'm much in tune with the recent article written by Luciana Bohne in Counterpunch: link given below. The US tears the world apart telling everyone that they are setting them free from terror. The US will bring in a faux democracy where its bribed leaders will know the rules to make a packet and them some.

Once the ruling class feared democracy believing that ordinary people would raise taxes on them and question why they owned all of the land. And so the West should have become real social democracies by now, and so should have the Middle East which would have lived in peace, but the Right managed to steer things back to their way. Where now democracy, women’s rights, gay rights, etc, those hard fought for liberal ideals, have become the best propaganda tools the aristocracy could ever have of dream of. And now the very people who fought the ruling class in the past have become the ‘liberal hawks’, who now fight the imperialists wars for them, in places where our ruling class destroyed any real chance of there being a genuine democracy.

If you live in an oil rich country the ruling class will own all the oil wells. And the capitalists and libertarians would call this ‘property rights’, but who gave them the oil wells, God? In many oil rich countries the people are very poor and the rich are mega rich, but eventually the poor may rise up and demand a democracy finally voting in a socialist government which might then nationalizes the oil fields. What happens now is that every toe rag, mercenary, crook, good-for-nothing, in the world will be after that oil, and the US and the Europeans will be behind them. As a result any new socialist leader and his family’s life is under under threat, as well as all the other parties leaders and their families. Fearing death they then come down hard on any dissidents and democracy may even get suspended. The West will then call these new leaders tyrants, running a brutal oppressive regime. Cuba comes to mind.

If China went democratic today, US style, the Western corporations would go straight in there and sabotage the country. The US, with its enormous wealth, would be able to steer the elections their way getting who they want in power, and after that China would be a vassal state. All wealth would then pour out of the country into the Western banking system, and the self perpetuating Western rich would continue for eternity getting rich while they sleep. Because of this, China cannot go fully democratic yet, Western style, and neither can Russia. (Although Russia is said to be more democratic that the West, but you won't read this is western media, because it is not democratic in the way we want, where our corporations can loot the place).

But the West puts its propaganda machine into top gear and blasts other countries for not being fully democratic, and for coming down too hard on dissidents, despite all the mass wars in the world triggered by the US government, despite all its torture camps all over Iraq, and elsewhere.

When people can’t make sense of something the mind will seek out a pattern. Some people in the past would even look at tea leaves at the bottom of a cup and see a pattern. Conspiracy theories are a way in which people try to make sense of the senseless. The book, Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences, by Professor John Allen Paulos, showed how people can put unlikely events together and find a pattern. You might dream that a certain very old relative in your family came to you one night and told you that they were going to heaven the next day and then the next day they die. But the chances of this happening to some people some where in the world are not as slim as you would think. Then it might run in as a story in small community for generations, or even around the world if it happens to a very famous person. This is folklore.

I can only make sense of the continuous Western wars against the third world, including dropping nuclear weapons, by thinking that maybe behind the scenes organised crime is running the place, i.e. the Mafia, linked up with other organised crime gangs. This would explain to me the shear evil and blatant brutality. The world is up-side-down, where black is white, where our bad is said to be good, where perpetual war is peace; where meanness is fairness, because greed is good, you know; where it is the poor’s fault for being poor, where the meritocracy has become yet another propaganda tool that the One Percent can use. Where Christianity is turned on its head and love thy neighbor comes loaded with a gun, or lots of them.

In this world the winner can fake democracy and fain fairness. It has the money to bribe who it wants, and pay journalists to lie. It can set up think tanks to push right wing capitalist BS, and it can pull its weight at the universities to come up with non scientific crap which they then call economics, or neoclassical economics to be precise, or mainstream economics, designed to keep the One Percent in their opulence. The cost of all this is pittance, because the $millions spent is an investment which turns into $trillions of profit. The Western One Percent has become the perpetual rich who own nearly all the world, and if they don’t get the rest of it, they threaten to blow it apart, while blaming it onto everyone else.

From Counterpunch :
Can we face it in this election season? America is a weapons factory, the White House a war room, and the president the manager of the neoliberal conspiracy to recolonize the planet. It exports war and mass poverty. On the economic front, usurious neoliberalism; on the military front, illegal wars. These are the trenches of America’s battle for world domination in the 21st century. 
If not stopped, it will be a short century. 
Since 1945, America’s Manifest Destiny, posing as the Free World’s Crusade against the Red Menace, has claimed 20 to 30 million lives worldwide and bombed one-third of the earth’s people. In the 19th century, America exterminated another kind of “red menace,” writing and shredding treaties, stealing lands, massacring, and herding Native populations into concentration camps (“Indian reservations”), in the name of civilizing the “savages.” By 1890, with the massacre of Lakota at Wounded Knee, the frontier land grab—internal imperialism– was over. There was a world to conquer, and America trained its exceptionally covetous eye on Cuba and the Philippines.
American external imperialism was born.
The Great Leap Backward: America’s Illegal Wars on the World, by Luciana Bohne 

Also from Counterpunch:
Southeast Asian elites “forgot” about those tens of millions of Asian people murdered by the Western imperialism at the end of and after the WWII. They “forgot” about what took place in the North – about the Tokyo and Osaka firebombing, about the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs, about the barbaric liquidation of Korean civilians by the US forces. But they also forgot about their own victims – about those hundreds of thousands, in fact about the millions, of those who were blown to pieces, burned by chemicals or directly liquidated – men, women and children of Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, the Philippines and East Timor.
All is forgiven and all is forgotten.
And once again the Empire is proudly “pivoting” into Asia; it is even bragging about it.
It goes without saying that the Empire has no shame and no decency left. It boasts about democracy and freedom, while it does not even bother to wash the blood of tens of millions off its hands.
Southeast Asia “Forgets” About Western Terror, by Andre Vltchek 

Video:

Laos Deadly Legacy - The Forgotten Secret War UXOs Bombies Part 1-4
A documentary on the problem of unexploded bombs in the landlocked Southeast Asian country of Laos. Unexploded bombs or UXOs are killing more people today in Laos than that it did at the height of the Indo-China/Vietnam conflict when Laos was used as a secret base for the American military during the 1970s. The film looks at how this deadly legacy from the Vietnam war is depriving rural Laotians a livelihood and other opportunities as the land is too dangerous to farm or develop. The documentary also covers the work of the Mines Advsiory Group and reports on how its deminers are trying to decontaiminate the land of UXOs, landmines and even experimental bombs that were found to be used during the Vietnam War.Lastly, the film covers the public awareness campaign about UXOs so that the Lao people know how to identify UXO and what to do when they come across unexploded bombs.


5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yes. Domestic violence against humanity. These people are not leaders. They are something else - but not leaders.

It is the heart in a human being, that invites people to dig deeper, appreciate, feel gratitude, and explore their human potential - mind on its own, crystallised as ego, takes people out into the desert. History is very explicit about that: - empires and emperors lying silent everywhere, the pomp and ceremony vapourised, and bleached bones sticking out in the sand.

MRW said...

Much clearer assessment by a brilliant man: Chas Freeman, the guy the rabid Pro-Israeli faction in DC wouldn’t allow Obama to put on his National Security Council. One of the smartest men in DC. Translator for Nixon on opening China trip 1973, US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia. Speaks Chinese and Arabic and three other languages that I don’t remember.

America’s Continuing Misadventures in the Middle East
http://chasfreeman.net/americas-continuing-misadventures-in-the-middle-east/

GREAT article.

Andrew Anderson said...

And the capitalists and libertarians would call this ‘property rights’, but who gave them the oil wells, God?

Not if ancient Israel is the guide. The land there was equally divided to all citizens except the priestly class and could not be permanently lost (Leviticus 25).

There's a limit to property rights, Biblically speaking, so the Right had better wise up if it claims to be godly.

Andrew said...

Any chance this can be posted as a link or with a reasonably-sized font?

Tom Hickey said...

Done, Andrew.