Deja Screwed
There is truth in the cliche, “fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me”, but it’s a victim’s truth.
Victims come in all shapes and sizes, from individuals to whole peoples, as tricksters do, from street hustlers to governments. We’ve all been fooled and come out fine, but the ways American people have been fooled has been incontestably devastating.
An enduring element of representative government is that the will of the ruling elite prevails with unbroken continuity, while each new generation of voters strives, or doesn’t, to deal with it.
Adults who have learned what their government is, and is doing, are followed by new generations that cannot understand their predecessors experience, and can only grasp fragments of what occurs in their time, with little sense of all that went before.
In other words, the state can always act with impunity because so great a portion of the electorate knows so little of the truth of what it has done, and the effect that has had in the near past.
This flaw in “democracies” has no remedy. Apart from political systems, each generation must relearn, modify, and apply in life what the previous one pioneered, as children do with parents.
As little use as it may be—and it is not entirely futile—it is the obligation of elders to offer what counsel they have from their perspective, as parents do, to those in the rising generations.
The abysmally stupid, psychopathic CEO of this sorry country, enmeshed as he is in futile, insane funding of military murder in Gaza and Ukraine, is now threatening to attack Venezuela.
He may be dissuaded by rare rational elements among his war chiefs who will ask what exactly he intends to accomplish, and how, but that’s not certain. Exit strategies have not been The Empire’s long suit. The rash clown may not heed their advice.
One has to prepare for, but not assume, the worst. Since he may launch—completely illegally—an attack or even an invasion, it is essential for younger generations to get a solid sense of the acts of murderous insanity America instigated and inflicted, and their cost to us all, before they were old enough to even register them.
After destruction of the Twin Towers on 9/11/01, our government, instead of treating it as the crime it was—and there is still doubt about its own role in it—used it as justification for making full-scale war on Afghanistan which had no part in that attack.
The government of rightwing Exceptionalist zealots, running the world’s richest, most powerful nation, and certain it could work its will by force, schemed to conquer and control all major Arab nations that menaced Israel, the outpost of American Empire.
Its masters of mendacity made what they knew for certain was a dishonest case that Afghanistan’s Taliban had planned and executed the hit on the Towers, and invaded their country.
It was pitched as an act of retributive justice, “a cakewalk” that would pay for itself in stolen oil and resources. Invasion of Iraq—“Shock and Awe”—began as the Taliban fought on undefeated, based on the bald lie that Saddam Hussein was allied with them, when the whole world knew they were mortal enemies. The true motive was to take Iraq’s oil field, second largest in the world.
The Empire could devote full military power to these imperialist adventures because it had our entire nation, goaded by media, politicians, and the vast power of the War Machine, behind it.
They were colossal disasters. The Empire’s hubristic “War on Terror” dragged on in both disgraceful humiliations until, having been defeated militarily, and leaving 7,000 dead, it was forced out with its tail between its legs, and called it quits in 2021.
Ah, but surely much was gained? American style democratic governments were installed? Loyal, stable countries emerged from our “nation building”? Benevolent, lasting peace resulted from our altruistic involvement?
None of that. Well, but those “wars” made us “safer”, and our loss of blood and money kept us secure at home. That was the line when all other claims were dead. In fact, there had never been any threat to our national safety, or any menace whatever.
The War Machine won big as The Empire lost. In 20 years, “The Indispensable Nation”, saw its vaunted hegemony broken, and lost the esteem of the world. American stupidity burned through 2.3 trillion dollars in Afghanistan and 1.9 trillion in Iraq for nothing.
Most of the 4$ TRILLION was simply wasted, but hundreds of billions went to arms industries, the Cartel of Murder for Money.
Think—you who are young—how different your lives would be now had all that money been invested in you and your future.
Under our present bloody Capitalist monster and his brood—as evil as the ghouls who created those stupid orgies of killing—sunk in bloodbaths in Ukraine and Gaza that squandered billions, we are at the brink of another psychotic nightmare war for the enrichment of the despicable War Machine and nothing else!
As serfs and subjects of our Capitalist Tyranny, there is nothing you can do to stop your master tanking your future, but knowing how deeply, constantly evil our system is, you can withdraw your personal loyalty and let your life be a friction to stop the machine. One day, joining others who have come to the same awareness, you may rise together to bring this horror down for good.