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House Slave Syndrome
A recent article declares, "Tired of war, thousands of Iraqis want to go to U.S." What it fails to mention is who triggered all the bloodshed. Who made conditions in Iraq so intolerable that these people must flee?
You know who. Over and over again, the U.S. has instigated mayhem or carnage overseas, generating thousands if not millions of refugees, many of whom longing to escape, paradoxically, it seems, to the source of their suffering. You beat and humiliate me, so can I move in?
But there is no paradox here, really. Let's call this phenomenon the House Slave Syndrome. With its vast military, petrodollar racket and control of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, the U.S. dominates every single life on earth. It is a truly a full spectrum master. There is not a Panamanian, Nigerian, Georgian or Japanese, etc, whose life goes unmolested by American military or, more importantly, financial decisions. Each U.S. sneeze distorts the entire world. When its attention to your land includes a coup or a preemptive strike, then the plot just gets bloodier (and often oilier). No use hiding. Unless you're Bin Laden, Uncle Sam can always reach you!
The fact that many Iraqis want to come here means that our way of life is superior to theirs, many Americans will conclude, and what we're doing over there is entirely justified, if a bit costly on our end, but we're such good people, we give so much. Ignored is the fact that we've sold their oil and gas and kept 98% of the gross receipt. Our occupation is also not called We Will Bomb You, Strip You Naked and Smear Shit On Your Face, but Operation Iraqi Freedom. We're teaching them about civilization, even if they did start it five thousand years ago. A refresher course can't hurt. Between waterboarding lessons, we'll teach them about Angelina Jolie, and, for the more serious and advanced students, Megan Fox and Whoopie Goldberg. We'll throw in easy to understand parables about Jesus. Turn the other cheek, you Satanist Terrorists!
There is nothing new here. We've been messing with Iraq for half a century. In 1963, we orchestrated a coup there. We supported Saddam Hussein even before he became president. Before we turned against him, Saddam was our boy, just like Ngo Dinh Diem, Ferdinand Marco, Mohammad Pahlavi, Manuel Noriega and so many others. It's good that Uncle Sam is not a baseball executive, because his picks are always terrible, but just ask yourself, What sort of character, for cash or career advancement, collaborates with the C.I.A.?
Washington ditches foreign dictators when they no longer serve its needs, but even the most loyal servants of our ruling class are just disposable tools, if not collateral damages. It has come out that General John D. Lavelle, who died in disgrace 30 years ago, was unjustly blamed for a military decision authorized by Richard Nixon. As his career was destroyed, both White House and Pentagon said nothing. Consider also what happened to Old Blood and Guts. Sixty-three years after the death of General Patton, evidences emerged that he was killed by the O.S.S., precursors to the C.I.A., in a staged car crash.
So even the highest ranked house slaves are not safe. Still, it's better to be inside than out. In fact, it's best to be as close to the man as possible. Here's a basic rule of survival: When shots ring out, run to the gang with the biggest guns, the one with the most tanks, planes and ships, and you'll less likely to become kabob. If they're smart bombing your neighborhood, you can save your own ass by moving into theirs, for even their least desirable real estate, even Detroit, for example, is safer than Baghdad, if not by much. In short, the closer you are to the baddest mofo, the less likely you are to be zapped by one of his drones or military contractors. If you sit next to the pilot, he'll have a harder time bombing your ass. Sniffing the man's deodorant, you will also have better access to his table scraps, preowned clothing and maybe even a bit of hand me down culture.
As long as we engage in wars on foreign soils, refugees will try to come here, but we simply can't stop because war is our primary industry, what we export to the rest of the world. War is our way of life. We are a war servicing nation. War nourishes our military industrial complex, cheers up stock holders of Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and General Electrics, etc. Without wars, our stock market would disappear. College-aged children of the investment class may hold up cute signs protesting this or that conflict, but daddies and mommies need systematic and routine mass murders to maintain healthy stock portfolios.
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War is our way of life. We are a war servicing nation. War nourishes our military industrial complex, cheers up stock holders of Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and General Electrics, etc. Without wars, our stock market would disappear. College-aged children of the investment class may hold up cute signs protesting this or that conflict, but daddies and mommies need systematic and routine mass murders to maintain healthy stock portfolios.
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$22.00 bucks an hour on the line building hellfire missles. Nice work if you can get it. Go home after the shift, sip a few beers and turn on Fox News. It's the American Dream, Baby!
That last paragraph about sums it all up. And those parents are mainly of the Baby Boomer (BB) age some of whom supposedly helped stop the Vietnam disaster/carnage. I guess that many BB's decided it was better to be the house slave. I am ashamed of many "my generation" for not standing up against the current carnages. Yesterday, I sent the following to my friends (BB's all of us), the vast majority of whom I've known since grade school (we a tight knit group for some reason even with one of us being a commie pinko faggot for his emails like below) and I probably won't here anything back. I just hope that I am enlightening them and perhaps tweaking their conscience. To paraphrase the Rev. Wright "Goddamn my generation."
OYE
Folks,
I need someone to explain how the actions of the USA in the last decade of so can be considered moral and/or ethical. For the life of me I can't figure it out. My and your tax monies have been used to fund what has been going on and what we have done/are doing bothers me to no end--on a daily basis it creeps in to my mind. And since I seem to be the one out of our crew who questions what we have done/are doing perhaps you all could help.
Please read article below to see if you can glean any information that might help you help me.
OYE
Published on Thursday, August 5, 2010 by TomDispatch.com
Whose Hands? Whose Blood?: Killing Civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq
by Tom Engelhardt
My sympathies, oye el pensador; I've tried sending similar articles to some of my BB friends from the past and have never heard from them again. Others sent me an email to never darken their inbox with such 'anti-American crap' again or they'd consign my messages to the spam folder. One good intelligent progressive friend asked me not to send any more material regarding the easily-hacked, no-paper-trail electronic voting equipment manufactured by ES&S and the former Diebold used in many parts of the country. He simply didn't want to believe that our elections could be stolen in that manner.
Meanwhile, one of the biggest hellraisers that I knew in the '60s has become a born-again Christian and insisted on forwarding me endless prayers for our troops that they find victory in the Middle-East and defeat evil terrorism, accompanied by photos of our soldiers piously praying and giving candy bars to Iraqi children. One of these forwarded emails even had the tagline: "It's the best thing you can do to support our troops!" When I pointed out to him and the others on his 'prayer' list that the best thing we could do for our troops is to get them the hell out of there and that Jesus would hardly endorse violence, even against 'evil terrorists,' I never heard from him again, although I did get some 'pungent' messages from his list telling me in the spirit of Christian fellowship to go f**k myself, get right with God or go to hell, and move to Iran if I didn't like it here. At least they didn't threaten to kill me. I was amused that the Dick Cheney wannabe ended his advice with a big smiley face and a jovial "Have a wonderful day!" I don't know, maybe he was being ironic, but I doubt it.
Just for once, I'd like to know what the mission is, you can't win if don't have a goal. If I just throw my chess pices in your eye, and declare my self the winner it'd make more sence than what our MIC/Government is up to.
>^^<
The anti-war movement will never get that big with Afghanistan.
Theres no draft, and even for the men that go to war, the causalities have fortunately been very low in comparison to Vietnam( or Korea, but then again who remembers that war) . The Vietnam War lasted about 10 years( if you include the Vietnamization part from 1973-1975 then 12 years .) 53,000+ deaths , Afghanistan's lasted 10 almost ten years, 1000+ deaths. The body count isn't at a shock level for most Americans, and since Obama is pulling a good number of troops out of Iraq the populace is more or less content with the Afghan war. I see this war ending like Iraq is "ending" right now, a significant amount of troops will remain indefinitely to protect American interest while major combat operations become less common.
i must disagree with Linh Dinh's comment.
he keeps using the collective third person when placing blame. "we" invaded this country; it is "our" fault. what's this we stuff, Linh?
Who made conditions in Iraq so intolerable that these people must flee?
that, Linh, is a very good question. i think George W. Bush, his corporate-fascist supporters and masters, and quite a few brain-numbed Americans did. but, no. according to Linh, "the U.S." did. not the U.S. government or the U.S. military or the U.S. foreign service or even influential companies from the U.S. but the entire nation, every single constituent part of "the U.S."
and that's where he gets things wrong: the second paragraph.
I didn't invade Iraq or Afghanistan. I didn't profit from those wars. In fact, judging from the tremendous deficit this country is running, and the huge profits multinational corporations are making from the oil and gas sales kindly arranged by the U.S. military; I am losing money.
but that is the nature of this state. it is run by a few people, in the name of many who have no power and garner very little of the rewards.
instead of pointing a thousand fingers as 300 million Americans, perhaps Linh should narrow down his blaming to those who really are responsible for the horrid conditions in Iraq.
Good point, because the "we" that I'm part of vociferously protested the Iraq war.
Did you pay for any of the weapons? Or accept money from anyone who profited from war?
There are degrees of responsibility in large scale societies. Saying that someone who pays taxes is equally responsible as the leader that uses taxes of millions to start and fight wars, takes away from the true evil of that leader.
It is kind of ironic, and even funny to some extent that the greatest war empire the planet has ever seen is being taken down by the very ruling class that it exists to serve. The idiots at the top don't want to pay the very taxes that are needed to protect their sorry asses and assets. Add to that, they have off shored/outsourced so many working class jobs that many average Americans, (me included) didn't pay any federal war taxes last year. How long do you think that can go on! ROTFLMAO!
So the empire that was built on mindless greed, may end up being taken down by that same mindless greed. A fitting epitaph, IMHO.
Oh and may I add that though the luck of the draw, I happened to come of military age when the selective service had been temporality disbanded after Vietnam. So luckily I never had to kill for the empire, and never even had to register for the "privilege" to do it.
The US Government: For the People; By the People.
Obviously you didn't do enought....did you continue to pay your taxes? Did you stop going to work to protest? A hunger stike maybe? Civil disobedience even?
Or is life in "Fat City, USA" just too damn grand to risk?
Tell the hundreds of thousand of dead men, women and children that you did all you could to stop your country's evil....that you're not just another "Good German"
Yes, I can't help but think of the Lone Ranger joke; What do you mean we, Kemosabe?
There is no business like America's war business. When I first read the headline I thought it was about Obama being a house slave to the MIC; in the White House! " They have a new gimmick every year. They are going to take one of their boys,black boys put him in the cabinet so he can walk around with a cigar. Fire on one end and fool on the other end ". Malcolm X.
Excellent quote, P.Revere.
I thought the same thing, when i saw the title.
No, but everything I've read here and elsewhere, this line sure screamed Obama:
"What sort of character, for cash or career advancement, collaborates with the C.I.A.?"
And I'm sure you can add Clinton in there. Surely, impeccable men of high intelligence, right?
If you are calling out "character" perhaps you can ruminate on this; At the exact moment that Iraq invaded Kuwait (BTW,while Cheney was Secretary of Defense) the USA was conducting war games which General Norman Schwarzkopf described as a test of our ability to deal with this particular scenario. Of course this was almost directly after April Gillespie, ambassador to Iraq, on 7/25/1990 reassured dictator Saddam Hussein that the United States "has no treaty commitment with Kuwait," implying that if he invades Kuwait, the U.S. government will do nothing.
I believe it was Chomsky who said that Capitalism dominates and controls a country and its people more thoroughly and on a wider scale than the domination by the military. The US has become a monster with no mind, no morals, and no master.
Linh Dinh-Love ya!!!!!!!!!
"Ignored is the fact that we've sold their oil and gas and kept 98% of the gross receipt." I'd like see a link. Anybody know where that's from?
I do believe he refers to the 98 percent of Iraqi Oil revenues (some 9 billion) which the DOD recently acknowledged was unaccounted for.
http://thinkprogress.org/2010/07/27/defense-department-96-iraq/
T>>he account used Iraqi oil money to fund the reconstruction of Iraq. SIGIR concluded that 96 percent of the $9.1 billion the reconstruction program cannot be accounted for by the DOD:
As even CBS News reported a few years back, unmetered, untraced oil was being shipped out of Iraq on tankers, right under the noses of the Americans and British. Hilariously, some on the right-wing tried to blame Al-Qaeda for 'stealing' that oil. Yes, we're all familiar with that fleet of terrorist-owned oil tankers -- I believe the flagship was named the 'Condoleezza Rice'.
Thanks. I'm totally not surprised. I've always wondered whether Kuwait went back to diagonal drilling during the chaos after the invasion.
There is, or at least may be, a lot more to the slant drilling story than most Americans ever heard.
http://voluntarysociety.org/conditioning/conspiracy/kuwait.html
Thank-you. Hard to catch everything.
'Without wars, our stock market would disappear. College-aged children of the investment class may hold up cute signs protesting this or that conflict, but daddies and mommies need systematic and routine mass murders to maintain healthy stock portfolios. "
My parents never invested in the stock market and I'm proud of them for being brave. I may have finished education a few years late but at least I took a part time job and my parents went through their trouble of working 16 hours a day in each of their jobs to help raise enough money to help me finish patching up my education. It would be nice if progressives could organize in protesting for lowering the costs of college education.
The rest of the article? Four words: OUT OF IRAQ NOW !
peacekeepertwo:The Pentagon is discredited. The more Admiral Mullen and Defense secretary Gates try to intimidate Wiki leaks, the more they encourage future leaks. The Pentagon has become a very impotent organization. The US is unable to use its Military to force the world to reshape itself, according to US specifications. The US must go with the Flow, if we want exert any influence on the World Stage. It is becoming increasingly clear, how much our Cheap Oil really costs. The US Government gives the Oil Companies Tax Breaks, to keep production costs down. What about the money we spend on Fuel to import products, from Countries half way around the World we could produce locally? We must rethink Globalization. We need to Build a Cities that allow us to live closer to where we Work. If you lived in a place where you could walk or ride a bike, were ever you needed to go, think how much money you could save? You don’t need a Car. Renewable energy becomes less costly, when the demand for energy drops. We must reduce Consumption. Reshape our Economy so when we work, we do what needs to be done. Now we work because the job pays us well enough to live. We must ask; what is my job worth to my Community? A teacher would probably earn more than CEO.
peacekeepertwo, the purpose of our wars since WWII, or so the evidence would suggest, is not to win any wars but simply use them as a vehicle to 1.) keep the Pentagon and intelligence agencies in power and well-funded with 'black' budgets; 2.) keep using up all of the equipment produced by the MIC so that it must be replaced at an over-budget cost; 3.) provide jobs in Congressional districts; 4.) line the pockets of politicians, corporatists, lobbyists, Brass Hats and other well-heeled loafers; 5.) provide lucrative employment to retired military officers; 6.) keep society in fear of each new 'threat' to our existence that doesn't really exist (i.e.: Saddam Hussein, the Taliban); 7.) give politicians a nice distraction from addressing our real problems here at home. Endless wars mean endless profits; that's the ugly 'bottom line' from which you can't go any lower. If young men and women die or are impaired for life from this grisly exercise in profitable futility, well, as Republican Sen. Jim Bunning recently said to those suffering from the loss of unemployment benefits he was filibustering, "Tough sh*t!"
Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler (USMC), who was awarded two Congressional Medals of Honor for his courage in battle, said it best in his 1933 speech "War is a Racket":
"War is a racket. It always has been
"It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.
"A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.
"In the World War [I] a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns no one knows.
"How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dug-out? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many of them parried a bayonet thrust of an enemy? How many of them were wounded or killed in battle?
"Out of war nations acquire additional territory, if they are victorious. They just take it. This newly acquired territory promptly is exploited by the few – the selfsame few who wrung dollars out of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill.
"And what is this bill?
"This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations."
Obviously, things haven't changed much since.
Read the rest of Butler's "War is a Racket" speech here: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4377.htm
I liked this article a lot.
Reminds me of some of the Gonzo Journalism during the late Viet Nam era, when heart and head came together and so many saw through the bullshit and could tell it like it was.
I'm not sure why, but I especially liked the sentence:
"If they're smart bombing your neighborhood, you can save your own ass by moving into theirs, for even their least desirable real estate, even Detroit, for example, is safer than Baghdad, if not by much."
Makes me wonder how all those Vietnamese fishermen in Louisiana are feeling about whose side they took way back then.
As for sitting close to the pilot and smelling his deodorant, I take issue. He hasn't been wearing any for years and he smells like Death. In fact maggots have been sucking the salt from his armpits, causing his right thumb to hit the red Fire button.
Oops! Just killed another two reporters on the ground. Oh well. (The others were "insurgents" so their killings don't matter.)
Apologies for the late post.
-30-
Linh Dinh opens a discussion beyond the House Slave syndrome of immigration from countries we have devastated. As the comments show, those who share his view of contemporary US history risk total alienation from friends and family. One grandchild, brainwashed into pride in "being a Republican" totally dropped communication. Friends blocked e-mails critical of the War Criminals in the Bush eara. But understanding the moral, ethical and economic reasons why U.S. policy has criminal effects does not come with absolution. Just because we acknowledge the errors, we are not relieved of responsibility. The House Slave immigrants will find that they are not all welcomed, by either the Good Germans or the Bad Nazis, to use a simile, as we are as guilty as the Good Germans of the crimes carried out by our government. Trials of War Criminals are not to purify a people, but to help them acknowledge their guilt. We are a long way from doing that.