America, are YOU the problem?

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America, are YOU the problem?

Crimes of the State Blog
crimesofthestate.blogspot.com

So many volumes have been written about the need to look in the mirror, self reflection, self assessment, and change. They even get read occasionally, but the American juggernaut rolls on.

Unlike many of my "liberal" or "progressive" counterparts, I have no grand illusions about the nature of the American experiment, nor of our blood soaked history. Tens of millions of exterminated Native Americans, men, women and children, and how many African slaves ground into the earth on our shores?

That is where we came from, the initial "investment" that produced our infrastructure, a stolen continent and a blood thirsty system that thrives on conquest and war profiteering.

They called this Manifest Destiny, and they even told you about it in school, not that you were paying attention. I don't recall any moral debate about it, not in history class in America. There is never a debate permitted there.

"The American way of life is not negotiable." --Unelected Vice President of the United States of America, Dick Cheney

Well, is he right?

Has Dick Cheney, loathed by most Americans as a hideous reflection of their own basest ambitions, hit the nail on the proverbial head?

Restated: the American way of life is inflexible, unalterable, intransigent, and we will kill or even commit genocidal crimes against humanity in order to maintain our favorable position in the world. Stop me, please, if you disagree. And, if so, are you in the majority?

Recall George Kennan's Policy Planning Study 23, written for the Harry Truman (D) State Department in 1948:

"We have about 50 percent of the world’s wealth but only 6.3 percent of its population.... In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy…. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity... we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; we should cease to talk about vague and unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living standards, and democratization.”

That view -- and worse -- has been the US foreign policy more or less since World War Two up to the present day. It has not been opposed by any sizeable bloc of Americans in all that time.

I have yet to find a "moral" majority in America. In 2003, when it mattered:

"A Gallup poll made on behalf of CNN and the newspaper USA Today concluded that 79% of Americans thought the Iraq War was justified, with or without the conclusive evidence of illegal weapons," --Washington Post, No Political Fallout for Bush on Weapons, Dana Milbank and Jim VandeHei, May 17, 2003

Later that year:

"In December 2003, 64 percent of Americans said the United States did the right thing in taking military action in Iraq..." --NY Times, Poll Shows View of Iraq War Is Most Negative Since Start, DALIA SUSSMAN, May 25, 2007

Could four out of five Americans be blatant war criminals at heart? The Iraq War Crime was illegal from day one, with no legal justification at all, neither under international law nor under our own Constitution. That's why they tried so hard to fabricate evidence, and they were caught repeatedly lying.

Iraq is the "supreme international crime" and "contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole," as defined by judge Robert H. Jackson an American judge at Nuremberg.

Nazi leaders and Japanese officers were tried and executed for these exact same offenses. Some dared call it "victor's justice."

Now, with a population who could recognize a "supreme pizza" far more readily than the "supreme international crime," we have to assess our own culpability in the deaths of what is approaching 2.5 million Iraqi civilians over a 17 year onslaught. There are also more than 4 million refugees who have fled for their lives, as a result of the illegal war of aggression initiated in Washington DC with the full support of a majority of Americans.

So, it isn't Mr. Bush's war after all. It's your war too. It's a Democrat war crime, and it's a Republican war crime, and a lot of independents are guilty as well. This is a crime against humanity, one of many.

So how to take responsibility?

I'm not at all sure the American people can or will take responsibility for their crimes. They never have before. There were no reparations for the "freed" slaves, if you recall.

After 50 years, a meaningless "apology" was given by Bill Clinton to the Japanese AMERICANS who were rounded up and placed in US concentration camps during World War Two simply because of their ancestry.

Poppy Bush was famous for declaring that:

"I will never apologize for the United States — I don't care what the facts are..." --Vice President George H. W. Bush, Aug. 2, 1988

That quote was in response to a US Navy ship shooting down a commercial airliner from Iran, and murdering all 290 civilians on board.

Suppose the situation was reversed, and an Iranian war ship shot down an American airliner? Would apologies be not only expected, but required to avoid all out war?

Reciprocity is something the imperialists are incapable of considering. Suppose the occupying army was in the streets of the USA, and we were subject to foreign armies, constant aerial bombardment, humiliating torture, mass detentions, and mercenaries who can murder common citizens with impunity?

The crime, in that case, becomes pretty obvious, pretty fast.

So, how to take responsibility?

That's the unanswered question of our time. In our name, the American empire grinds on and fuels itself with the charred burned flesh of babies, women, children, young men, old men, old women. It doesn't matter the age, the political views, or the guilt or innocence of its victims. The American public turns away, and collectively changes the channel.

In a purported "democracy," such callous apathy and willful ignorance approaches complicity in war crimes. They do it in your name, with your tax money. You are supposed to exercise due diligence as a "citizen."

Then you have the Barack Obama types who delude themselves into believing that we are militarily subjugating people half a world away so that we can "help" them, and that we will assist them in cleaning up "Bush's mess." Such a ridiculous fantasy notion would be laughable, if not so tragic. See above.###