Sunday, April 15, 2007 Please God, deliver us from the banality of evil
(Photo: Adolf Eichmann during his trial in Jerusalem, Israel, May 29, 1961)
By Jason Miller
4/15/07
I do not hesitate one second to state clearly and unmistakably: I belong to
the American resistance movement which fights against American imperialism,
just as the resistance movement fought against Hitler.
---Paul Robeson
Virtually every day our mendacious corporate media publicizes the farcical
debate between officials of the Bush Regime and Congress. While numerous
polls have indicated that over 2/3 of US Americans want an end to the war in
Iraq, and voters positioned the Democrats to exercise the will of the people,
the war rages on.
Between the Gulf War, the subsequent US-driven draconian UN economic
sanctions, and the seemingly endless US invasion and occupation of Iraq, well
over a million Iraqis are dead. Infrastructure essential to vital human needs,
including transportation, health, utilities, water, and sanitation has been
decimated. Depleted uranium will continue to visit misery and death upon the
Iraqi population long after the imperial invaders have been sent packing, as we
were in Vietnam.
Machiavellian plutocrats, whose moral development has not progressed beyond
that of an earthworm, scheme incessantly to convince the American public that
we can win or succeed in Iraq. How much murder and mayhem must we inflict
before we achieve the victory the cynical bourgeoisie covets?
Yet despite the overwhelming concentration of wealth and power in the hands
of a relative few individuals and corporate entities, each of us in the United
States is complicit in the crimes of our nation to some degree. Obviously, some
bear much more responsibility than others, but we have each had a hand in the
obliteration of the Iraqi nation.
While a majority of US Americans now vehemently oppose the Bush
administration and its abominable war, too many of us still believe that both
are anomalies which will be corrected once we elect a new cast of
characters to take the political reins in 2008. Sadly, little could be further
from the truth. As with most putrescence, ours runs deep beneath the surface.
Fed a steady diet of carefully crafted agitprop from cradle to grave, many of
us zealously pursue the American Dream of suburban utopias bordered by white
picket fences. Utterly oblivious and indifferent to the staggering cost we
impose upon the rest of the world, we ignore the stack of bloodied corpses on
which we climb as we reach for the sacred brass ring. Ready-made delusions
eagerly provided by our corporate masters assure us that we are entitled to all
that we desire, convince us that we are morally superior to those we bleed dry
to gratify ourselves, and shield us from the grim reality that we are the
monsters on Maple Street.
Beneath the gilded façade of truth, justice, and the American Way lurks a
corrosive and rapacious socioeconomic system which is inimical to democracy, a
relative handful of opulent overlords ruling a constitutional republic, and
hundreds of millions of poor and working class individuals who are all too
willing to participate in crimes against humanity in exchange for the good
life, which as Hurricane Katrina so clearly demonstrated, is not nearly as
good as we have been programmed to believe.
Since it is unlikely that conscience will impel us to muster the collective
will necessary to dismantle this abhorrence, lets pray that resistance
movements in Iraq and other nations that we oppress and occupy serve us a
healthy portion of humility by sending us home with our tails between our legs.
In the event readers need a summary of the case for divine intervention on
behalf of humanity against the detestable monstrosity we have become, here it
is:
We are a gluttonous herd of swine devouring resources at a rate well beyond
the Earths capacity to renew them. Metaphorically speaking, we are one of
twenty people populating the globe. Yet we greedily gobble a quarter of the
pie, leaving our nineteen neighbors to divvy up the remaining 75%.
Our socioeconomic system, in which our de facto aristocracy, myriad think
tanks, textbook authors, and mainstream media whores have inculcated us to
place an unwavering faith of cult-like proportions, is only several generations
removed from feudalism, mercantilism, chattel slavery, and the early industrial
capitalism which fostered the abject human misery about which Dickens wrote.
Concentration of wealth into the hands of a few, exploitation of the working
class and the poor, various forms of servitude, profits and property over
people, unbridled consumption of resources, and an insatiable need for growth
and expansion are inherent malignant aspects of our much vaunted American
Capitalism. Encouraging and rewarding greed, narcissism,
hyper-competitiveness, selfishness, and ruthlessness, the best system there
is has propelled shamelessly decadent pigs to obscene opulence while leaving
over half of the worlds population to wallow in extreme poverty.
Rather than dismantling the military leviathan we created to facilitate our
involvement in World War II, we chose to embrace a perpetual Military
Keynesianism under which a mere 5% of the worlds population spends more on war
than the rest of the world combined. We have no problem tainting our
capitalism with a little socialism as long as it enables the continued
existence of the parasitic defense industry, allows us to maintain over 700
military bases in at least 130 different countries, and empowers us to wage the
covert and overt imperialist wars necessary to advance the interests of
capital.
We have a long history of spouting off about our devotion to freedom and
democracy, decrying (and sometimes lynching) authoritarian rulers who refuse
to surrender their nations sovereignty to our empire, and installing and
supporting brutal tyrants who serve the needs of our beloved plutocrats. Iran,
bad. Saudi Arabia, good. Venezuela, evil. Colombia, righteous. You get the
picture.
In the course of our "infinitely benevolent" quest to democratize and free
the world, we have left a bloody wake of annihilated human beings
euphemistically labeled as collateral damage. Millions of Native Americans
sacrificed their lives so that we could found and expand the United States.
At least 600,000 Filipinos were felled as we toiled under the crushing
responsibility of our white mans burden. A half million Japanese died so we
could display our power to Russia, a significant threat to capitalisms
hegemony. Factor in the 135,000 at Dresden, over two million Koreans, three
million Vietnamese, the aforementioned million plus in Iraq, and millions more
(counting those murdered via covert operations, smaller military interventions,
and by proxies like the Shah, Pinochet, and Israel
not to mention the blacks
who died as a result of the slave trade and Jim Crow lynchings), and the
malevolence of the Third Reich pales in comparison to the criminal enterprise
known as the United States of America.
Aside from having developed and deployed nuclear weapons (in spite of the
rest of the world being years away from attaining them and Japans loss of will
to continue the war), we possess and continue to develop the largest nuclear
arsenal on the planet. Friendly regional hegemons, like India and Israel,
receive our blessing and assistance in nurturing their nuclear capabilities,
sans signing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Meanwhile, we relentlessly
beat the drums of war against Iran for exercising their right (as a signatory
of the NNPT) to develop a program to produce nuclear energy. How much longer
can the chicken-hawks in DC refrain from unleashing atomic hell, again? How
much blatant hypocrisy can the world endure?
Given our love affair, no scratch that, our obsession, with shopping,
acquiring, owning, and consuming, we keep the Once-lers fat, happy, and
running at full throttle. As the Truffula trees, Humming-fish, Bar-ba-loots,
and Swomee- Swans disappear at an alarming rate, were too busy lovin it at
McDonalds and cashing in on Wal-Marts always low prices to notice or care.
Global temperatures rise, ice shelves plunge into the sea, glaciers recede at
alarming rates, violent storms rage, species become extinct, and bees disappear
en masse as we intrepidly continue filling our two lives per gallon Hummers
with inane consumer goods that we dont need. Keeping the economy strong is
indeed a noble calling.
As crafty as we are, we are not solely reliant upon military means to impose
our cultural imperialism. As Milton Friedman and the Chicago Boys
demonstrated with their experiment in Chile, neoliberalism is a powerful
economic tool with which we can integrate weaker nations into our empire.
Astoundingly, nation after developing nation accepted our Trojan horse of
generous loan packages which in turn forced them to crush organized labor,
privatize, deregulate, and cut or eliminate humanitarian expenditures. For many
years, Fidel Castro was one of the few hold-outs in the face of our economic
tyranny. With the recent emergence of leaders like Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales,
hope looms on the horizon. Yet predictably, we continue to rain misery upon the
people of Cuba and are desperately attempting to sell the world on the idea of
pouring our food supply into our gas tanks so we can eliminate our dependence
on Chavezs oil and give him the Fidel treatment.
To spare ourselves the guilt of our undeniable abetment in crimes against the
Earth and nearly all its sentient inhabitants, we desperately cling to the
Disneyesque illusion that the United States is a benevolent policeman to the
world that preserves and advances noble ideals like human rights and freedom.
Sorry, ladies and gentlemen, but the analyses of Hannah Arendt and Ward
Churchill define our reality much more accurately. No matter how closely an
individual US American might adhere to humane principles, we are all Little
Eichmanns. We can minimize our roles, but there is no escaping participation
in our nations virtuoso performance of The Banality of Evil.
God bless America?
How about God bless humanity by cursing the American Empire?
We desperately need the heavy doses of reality, constraint, and humility that
the loss of our military and economic supremacy would bring
.
Jason Miller is a wage slave of the American Empire who has freed himself
intellectually and spiritually. His essays have been widely published, he is
Cyrano's Journal Online's associate editor, and he volunteers at homeless
shelters. He welcomes constructive correspondence at [EMAIL PROTECTED] or via
his blog, Thomas Paine's Corner, at http://civillibertarian.blogspot.com/
---------------------------------
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[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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