Iron Fisted America

By Charles Sullivan

11/14/05 "ICH " -- -- Understanding the collective American psyche is no easy task. To those living in other lands we Americans are an enigma. Indeed, we are an enigma unto ourselves. To others we appear foolish, dim-witted, cowardly and morally bankrupt. To allow the rise of a fascist regime to take power is compelling evidence for those views. Let me try to explain why.

Nothing in America is what we are told it is. Whenever the president speaks—it matters little which president we are talking about—we can be reasonably certain that they do not utter truth as we know it. During the past fifty years America has not had a socially progressive president. The Clinton presidency was under siege from day one by the power hungry ideologues fueled by Christian evangelicals. Bill Clinton certainly was no progressive, as his detractors would have us believe. At his most liberal Clinton was nothing more than Bush lite. He twice won the presidency by out righting the right. Clearly, this was no victory for progressives. No modern era American president represents the interest of the people. They represent the rich and powerful. The same is true of Congress.

Every branch of the American government is awash in corporate money in sums so vast as to boggle the mind. Little wonder that the American government does not serve the interest and needs of the people. It serves the wants of soulless corporate entities whose only concern is unbridled bottom line capitalism.

To further complicate matters, the vast majority of the media is under the control of the same corporate oligarchy that direct the government. The corporate media, as the name implies, serves the corporate interest. Little that the corporate media tells us has any relevance to truth as most of us know it. The corporate media are purveyors of lies and distortions that are used to subdue and control the public mind, often for sinister purposes. Seek alternative channels of information that flow from non corporate sources. There you will find what you need to know to be free.

Every branch of government and ninety nine percent of the media operates in the corporate interest—not in the public interest, as we all too willingly assume. America is not even close to resembling a democracy, as the national myth proclaims—it is a corporate oligarchy. It is a deeply class divided society in which the rich prey upon the poor. Here it is the poor who do the bidding of the rich. It is the poor who fight the wars for the economic gains realized by the power elite. It is the antithesis of Robin Hood. Here the rich routinely steal from the poor. They rob them senseless and call it democracy!

America is a land of contradictions. Under the edicts of unrestrained capitalism, the people serve primarily as drones and producers of capital for the wealthy. The majority of the people are mindless consumers of goods. They are automatons at the service of the unscrupulous gods of finance and material power. Their needs do not matter to those in power. They exist to cheer the captains of commerce on in their joyful work of consuming the planet.

The world knows only too well that America is a violent nation. They know, many of them first hand, that America preys upon the poor and the defenseless. The manner in which the corporate oligarchy that drives American politics treats its own down trodden is a microcosm of how it treats the rest of the world. The extermination of the indigenous people of North America by pious Anglo invaders is an atrocity that makes the Nazi liquidation of the Jews pale in comparison. America has yet to come to grips with its initial episode of genocide and ethnic cleansing that may be at the root of its pathological behavior. The annihilation of the American Indian was just the beginning of what capitalism could do.

Multinational corporations view the earth as a vast aggregation of commodities and markets to be exploited for profit. They do not regard the world’s citizens as human beings. They are sources of cheap labor and consumers, to be exploited by those in power. Ecosystems and the biological systems that promote life are summarily ignored by corporatism.

Global capitalism is a malignancy intent upon devouring the world. It seeks to commodify everything and every one. It intends to privatize the entire planet, effectively placing the world’s resources into the smooth, grasping, white hands of a few wealthy individuals. This explains the existence of the Bilderbergers, an annual gathering of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful people who meet to determine the course of global capitalism. Along with the World Bank and the IMF it sets the world’s financial and political agenda. It also represents the establishment of a world government—George Herbert Walker Bush’s ‘New World Order.’

From cradle to grave the collective American mind is under the all pervasive assault of corporatism. This is all we have ever known; it is all most of us will ever know. It explains our combined failure to see the world in terms that can only be described as Disneyesque. Every day in America is an adventure in the implausible Land of Oz As a people we have no conception of reality. We have been carefully insulated from the pain and suffering we have inflicted and continue to inflict upon the world. Quite literally, we not know not what we do. But even more tellingly, we don’t want to know.

When we invade sovereign nations we are told that we are liberating its oppressed people from the throes of tyranny. When we enslave and torture Islamic people we are told that they are terrorists who mean us harm. In true Machiavellian terms, the ends justify the means. This also explains why we cannot come to grips through honest reckoning with the horrors of the national tragedy we call history. We have unelected leaders who lie, maim and murder and we call them Christian. Isn’t that strange?

We target nations with left wing leaders like Venezuela’s popular president Hugo Chavez and call them threats to democracy, when we ourselves have no conception of what democracy looks like. The only threat that Hugo Chavez poses to the United States is that he places the needs of the people above the profits of multinational corporations; and that is as un-American as it gets. Anti-capitalist equates to un-American in the diseased mind of corporatism. This is why the U.S. has deposed not only Chavez but Aristeed in Haiti, and a whole litany of South American pro people, pro environment, pro democracy, and pro labor leaders. That is why CIA operatives have routinely instigated coups against the hemisphere’s most popular democratically elected leaders. That is why so many of them have been assassinated by bullets paid for by our tax dollars. Countless others have been beaten, tortured, and disappeared, courtesy of U.S. tax dollars.

The corporate oligarchy loathes democracy because democracy demands the evenhanded distribution of wealth. It demands accountability. It requires justice. It seeks to know truth. No matter what pretensions we may make to the contrary, the U.S. has a long history of opposing democracy throughout the world. The undeniable proof lies hidden in our national history; a history that has been carefully thrust down the memory hole of an Orwellian nightmare we have unwittingly helped to forge through unfettered complacency.

From North Korea, Viet Nam, Guatemala, Panama, Columbia, Cuba, Venezuela, Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq, the Philippines, Cambodia, the former Soviet Union, Iran, Syria, Eastern Europe, Haiti, and Jamaica—I could go on indefinitely—America’s military might has always opposed and snuffed out fledgling democracies. Every U.S. military intervention during the past fifty years and longer acted to put down insurrections of popular movements of the people. A thoughtful examination of the evidence makes it clear that the obvious and only possible conclusion is that our military might is used not to promote liberation, democracy, and freedom. It serves as the iron fist of capitalism to smash the face of people’s movements for social justice and autonomy. U.S. militarism is the arm of corporatism that invades and plunders sovereign nations to rob them of treasure and resources. Its purpose is to open new markets to capitalism; to create pools of slave labor and a constant stream of cheap goods for American consumption. It is Wal-Mart amplified a hundred thousand times and projected across the globe.

None of this is news. We are simply witnessing the unrestrained avarice of the rich and powerful running rough shod over the principles of democracy and social justice. It is the continuation of Manifest Destiny. It is the sound of the rich and powerful preying upon the poor and the innocent. None of it is what we have been told. We must open our eyes and our minds to see it for what it really is. We must come to grips with our own sordid history and all that it has wrought. Only then we can begin to do something about the present and the future.

Charles Sullivan is a furniture maker, photographer, and free lance writer living in the eastern panhandle of West Virginia. He welcomes your comments at earthdog@highstream.net