Author: mopress

Great to hear a voice of compassion and honesty. I am a Canadian of Pakistani origin. As you are aware, we the peoples of the third world suffered centuries of humiliation at the hands of the colonialists. I thought that the African Americans could relate to our situation, in view of their own experience with the practitioners of the ‘white man’s burden’ philosophy; it is really incomprehensible to me how someone like Colin Powell and Condi Rice, could join hands with the same people in their effort to dominate the world.

The word ‘stockpile’ has been frequently used with reference to WMD’s. Now, if America were to put all of its WMD’s in a stockpile, it would easily exceed the height of Mt. Everest; and if Israel were to put its WMD’s in a stockpile, they would most definitely dwarf the Pyramids of Egypt. In my quest to explore certain defintions, why I wonder are nations like Iraq, which were only SUSPECTED of having WMD’s referred to as a ROGUE NATION?

Many thanks and God Bless

Shahid

Nicely said, Greg. We have been down the road with this kind of nuttiness before, and some of us who’ve lived in out of the way places like Fairbanks, Las Cruces, Bend, Lodi, Phoenixville, Oneonta, Clewiston, we know the “Amurrikins” are always busting our chops. They just get louder every once in awhile, and need a good ass whumping. So let’s get about the business of making sure they receive that which they are so desperately asking for. I’m tired of listening to the whining. The hard, cold truth is that the reelection of Bush is just another turd in the shit sandwich that a lot of people in this country have been eating for a long time. Let’s roll, as the bastards say. The workers will win.—M. H. Perez, Seattle

This New American Barbarism Will End

By Greg Moses

Counterpunch / Austin IndyMedia / ILCA Online

If, at the break of this century, you feel like an abolitionist, who 200 years ago hissed at bloody murder, then you have but three-score years and one Civil War to go.

If, in 2004, your outrage feels like W.E.B. Du Bois in 1904, censuring American pornographies of lynch, then you have only six decades, two World Wars, exile, and death between you and The Dream.

If, today, you would share the choice fates of abolitionists and anti-lynchers who wrestled America down, then, on or about Juneteenth of the year 2063, you shall carry your story, finally, beyond the killing zone. But, Lord, don’t be foolish about the costs these journeys take.

In the moral history of America, presidents have always fed public appetite for turf, guns, and frontier contracts. In the case of Jefferson, who got re-elected in 1804, land-grabbing and Indian genocide went right along with slavery.

Teddy Roosevelt, by the time he got re-elected in 1904, had already stolen Guantanamo Bay from the Spanish and leased it to the Marines. Meanwhile on the domestic front, reported Mary Church Terrell, “Before 1904 was three months old, thirty-one negroes had been lynched.”

And how have the press helped out, as presidents helped themselves? Let’s see what Terrell says about that: “The facts are often suppressed, intentionally or unintentionally, or distorted by the press.” Because pornographers of violence love a good, bloody fight, lynching news, like war news, could be instigated, and according to Terrell, it was.

So let’s keep a few wits sharpened as we read about gunpoint executions in the City of Mosques or trash bags filled with voting records in Florida. This is not a beast we have never known before. Nor is it a power that we have not tamed.

As the slave whip of 1804 and the lynching rope of 1904 were both finally taken out of popular hands, so will the black bags of 2004 eventually be lifted from the heads of prisoners, and the terror of US foreign policy will be brought to law. But the popular will that supports these technologies will require the moral equivalent of civil war to defeat.

“And in each nation,” scolded Thrasymachus in Republic Book I, “whoever rules passes the laws that are to their own advantage. After they pass these laws, they say that justice is obeying the law.” Thrasymachus was a hothead patriot, whose heirs today pound their steering wheels to the rhythms of kick-ass country music.

“Whoever fails to keep the law is punished as unjust and a lawbreaker. So that, my good man, is what I say justice is.” Although the loudmouth opinion of Thrasymachus echoes down our halls of power today, endorsed by a Texas attorney who would become Attorney General, we don’t forget how Socrates could make that man blush.

So these are old, old struggles and we’re walking in well worn shoes. We’re gonna fight these war crimes that seek to globalize the whips and ropes that we once put down, and we’re gonna resist these attorneys who never got as far as Republic Book II. And as for all this lately talk about the downright popularity of homophobic core values, please pass the earplugs. That kind of noise only keeps us from our work.

Ironically, Khomeni could not get anyone to see America as “the great satan,” but it took George W. Bush and his minions only a few years to do exactly that, to show America is now the great satan in Muslim eyes.

Counterpunch