Recently, as reported by Mediaite, CNN anchor Erin Burnett describes the US intelligence and military capabilities as those of an "evil eye". Of course, this is blatantly obvious to someone who knows anything about the world apart from the corporate media spin.
Take for example, Saddam Hussein. Saddam Hussein was a dictator (or at least, he was, according to the United States posthumously) who murdered hundreds of thousands of Shi'ites and Kurds in his own country. He utilized chemical weapons supplied to him by the United States government to carry out this atrocity. When the United States no longer had any use for Saddam, since he invaded their oil interests in Kuwait, they decided to paint him as "enemy #1" and to terminate all opposition to their full-spectrum dominance. George H.W. Bush famously declared, when pressed on his terroristic foreign policy "I will never apologize for the United States — I don't care what the facts are."
This maxim holds true today. Despite the US toppling of their own former ally, and subsequent instillation of a puppet regime loyal to their imperial interests, they still insist today on continuing to bomb and murder civilians and poor third-worlders in order to protect their oil interests. The evil eye of the American Empire cannot be stopped. ISIS does not have thousands of nuclear bombs, ISIS does not have a trained military industrial slaughter machine, ISIS does not have naval and air support, and ISIS does not have the international community at their whim. No matter how bad ISIS is, which they are indeed brutal like the Khmer Rouge in the olden days, US cruise missiles and cluster bombs will only make children's heads blow up by B52 bombers, instead of being hacked off by ISIS savages.
Savagery doesn't have a color, a race, a creed, a religion, a sexual identity. Savagery is savagery. Dropping carpet bombs on entire populations is no different than rounding up thousands and shooting them with holes until they resemble slaughtered cattle.
It's time to stop war. War kills more than a thousand 9/11s. It destroys homes, lives and it destroys souls. Creating war creates enemies, domestic and international poverty, exploitation and a deep hatred and yearning for vengeance. Humanity cannot progress unless war itself is annihilated and power is wrested from the elites who promote it. "I am not only a pacifist but a militant pacifist. I am willing to
fight for peace. Nothing will end war unless the people themselves
refuse to go to war." said Einstein. Indeed, it is only through militant refusal to participate in systematic mass murder that it will end. The Nazis were only doing their jobs, what's our excuse?
As Socialist leader Eugene Debs once said: "The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has
always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and all to lose—especially their lives. They have always taught and trained you to believe it to be your patriotic duty to go to war and to
have yourselves slaughtered at their command. But in all the history of the world you, the people,
have never had a voice in declaring war, and strange as it certainly appears, no war by any nation
in any age has ever been declared by the people. And here let me emphasize the fact—and it cannot be repeated too
often—that the working
class who fight all the battles, the working class who make the supreme
sacrifices, the working class who freely shed their blood and furnish
the corpses, have never yet had a voice in either declaring
war or making peace. It is the ruling class that invariably does both.
They alone declare war and they
alone make peace."
In order to destroy war, we must confront Empire. We must confront, in Chris Hedges' lexicon "the corporate state", the government given over to corporate interests which make them wage wars for profit and economic assimilation. I end with the words of Arundhati Roy, detailing how to remain steadfast against encroaching imperial power.
"...the people of the world do not need to choose between a Malevolent Mickey Mouse and the Mad Mullahs. Our strategy should be not only to confront
empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To
mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our
joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell
our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being
brainwashed to believe. The corporate revolution will collapse
if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version
of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability. Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them. Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing." (Arundhati Roy, World Social Forum w/ Transcript c.f., An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire, 2003 pp. 85-86)
Update: Bill Maher had his own take on this issue watch it here.
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