I Am Sick to Death of War and Madness

(10 pm – promoted by ek hornbeck)

My generation thought Vietnam was an aberration, but it wasn’t, it was the game plan.  Lie your way into a nasty little war and let other people’s children do the killing and dying while the fat cats at the top of the capitalist pile rake in the dough.  It’s all for the benefit of those so bloated with greed that they just don’t care that their profits come soaked in the blood of innocents and patriots.

I was raised the son of a soldier, 21 years Army Infantry.  I have great affection and regard for our service men and women, which is all the more reason to be furious at their cruel mistreatment and shoddy utilization.  

Nearly 4,000 American service men and women have died for no good reason in Iraq since our wrongheaded and distinctly criminal invasion in 2003 (not to mention a million Iraqis).  How hard must it be to face the fact that your loved one didn’t die to protect the world from anything, that they died for no noble purpose, not to preserve freedom or democracy, not for any righteous cause – but for nothing…nothing worth dying for at any rate?  How hard must that be?

They died for the sole purpose of making already wealthy men even wealthier.  It is evil.  It is pure evil.

And yes, the swastikas fit.

We’ve Seen This All Before

Our government may not yet be as bad as, but they are certainly no better than – the Nazis.  It’s time to overcome our sensitivities about the comparison and face the fact that we have seen all of this before.

Our government has blatantly practiced aggressive war, kidnapping, torture, and murder…and you could probably add genocide to that list if you were to ask the Iraqis – or the Afghans.  Genocide is so often in the eye of the beholder after all.

They have so closely patterned the ‘homeland’ after the fatherland, so faithfully mimicked the tactics and strategy of the Reich, imposed a strikingly similar police state complete with loyalty pledges, free-speech zones, extraordinary renditions and secret prisons where torture and cruelty are the norm and prisoners are held incommunicado without rights or access to legal redress, that one might be forgiven for speculating that they planned it just that way.

Tell me Karl Rove didn’t study Goebbles.

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

Joseph Goebbels

Of course the Bush/Nazi connection goes back quite a ways.

How Bush’s grandfather helped Hitler’s rise to power

Rumours of a link between the US first family and the Nazi war machine have circulated for decades. Now the Guardian can reveal how repercussions of events that culminated in action under the Trading with the Enemy Act are still being felt by today’s president

Ben Aris in Berlin and Duncan Campbell in Washington

Saturday September 25, 2004

The Guardian

George Bush’s grandfather, the late US senator Prescott Bush, was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from their involvement with the financial backers of Nazi Germany.

The Guardian has obtained confirmation from newly discovered files in the US National Archives that a firm of which Prescott Bush was a director was involved with the financial architects of Nazism.

His business dealings, which continued until his company’s assets were seized in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act, has led more than 60 years later to a civil action for damages being brought in Germany against the Bush family by two former slave labourers at Auschwitz and to a hum of pre-election controversy.

(continued at the Guardian)

I know this comes as no news but it is often dismissed too lightly.  No one is eager to acknowledge that our situation is as perilous as that of the good Germans as the Nazis came marching in…but it is.  

It is tempting to hold out hope that things are really not that bad…but they are.

Would having a Democrat in office make it better?  Not necessarily.  I find it painful to point out that the Democrats have surrendered the moral high ground without a fight.  Theories as to why abound, but it is clear that they have done just that.  We should not be fooled.  Our government is against us, and it is no longer fair to make distinctions between Republicans and Democrats except in rare individual cases.  The vast majority of all our politicians of both parties are corrupt or otherwise compromised and are now in thrall to the corporatist military-industrial-congressional-media complex.  They are no longer on our side…if they ever were.

What we are headed for is a brutal fascistic rule of the super rich enforced on the impoverished masses by heavily armed thugs operating under color of law…though there are those here who will tell you that it can’t happen here.  If we believe that, it will be our epitaph.

This has all happened on our watch people.  I know we’ve been lied to, manipulated and betrayed – but it still falls on us to do something about it.

The Democrats are not going to be our salvation.  I wish that weren’t true – but it is.  It is strictly up to us.  Put your faith in the American people – they, we, are our last and only hope.  We must stand up to the monsters who have done this to our country, and we must take it back from them.  We are the only true owners of this nation.  It’s time to act up America.

Soldiers are taught that when caught in a deadly ambush with nowhere to run or hide, you must charge the ambush.  It is a case of the best defense being a good offense.  We need to rise up, not stand down.  We need to resist the fascism.  We need to charge the ambush.

Our choices have come down to two:  we can knuckle under, or we can stand up.  And EVERYTHING depends on our standing up.  

Get ready for the biggest anti-Bush demonstration yet.  Get ready for March 19 in Washington DC!  We need numbers people.  We need feet in the street.  We need you to put your money where your mouth is.  We don’t need any more false patriots.  We don’t need any more blatherers and bloviators.  We don’t need any more keyboard commandos.  We don’t need any more rightwingers posing as progressives.