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Saturday, February 03, 2007

Who Are We?

Writer Charles Bear assesses his America - as published at www.ichblog.eu:


Who Are We?"

Saturday, 03 February 2007

By Charles Bear

"There is no escaping the fact that the U.S. is an imperialist nation conceived in genocide and racism that has continued through the ages, and worsened with the rise of modern technology and weaponry. With the advent of smart bombs came stupid and immoral leaders. Our litany of crimes against earth and humanity are concealed under layers of moral language, but the actual deeds belie the intent behind what is being done in our name. Ignorance, however, does not absolve anyone from culpability - Charles Sullivan

The Chinese leaders and intellectuals with whom I was meeting were incredulous. How could a majority of the population in an allegedly free country with an allegedly free press be so totally misinformed? The only answer I could give the Chinese is that Americans would have been the perfect population for Mao and the Gang of Four, because Americans believe anything their government tells them. - Paul Craig Roberts




02/03/07 "ICHBlog' -- The United States is the land of insidious intent and self-induced amnesia. I am no longer a young man full of hope for himself and his fellow kind. Being born in 1943 brings with it a special responsibility. I have a letter my father wrote from the war - “the horror, the horror of it all.” It went way beyond his ability to give words to it, but I was with him when he died. The horror, the horror of it all still plagued him to his death. With his dying breath he referred to himself as a murderer - the results of mayhem in Europe and Africa while I lay in my crib or at my mother’s breast. But this is 2006, my father now two years gone.

But now my own horrors plague me, I live in the greatest Empire of all time - the elite of this country controls or tries to control the world. Neither the war to end all wars or the continuation called WW II has stopped the horror. Americans of the twentieth century have much blood on their hands - my hands and your hands - our hands. Way too much blood. And it continues to be let - in your name, in my name it continues: torture, destructions and death on a global scale.

At this time of another great war, it must be asked, again and again until we can become the question and live the answer: how do we find our way of being human. If any kind of redemption is possible, if any kind of forgiveness comes to us it will only be when we - you and I stand up together and say to men like Bush and Cheney and their cohorts that this must stop and stop now. Because if it does not we will bring redemption with their blood and our own blood if necessary.

We have failed, we have not only not found the answer, but we do not even dare ask the question. Who are we? We make great machines but I submit that we know very little about being human.

We are the people who have lost their grip on life; we live in a world modeled after Disneyland. Safe for all ages; and all, an illusion. We feel our being most as we shop the malls and Wal-Marts of America, as we seek those bargains with dollars that have no home. Homeless dollars for homeless minds and homeless bodies, for we have never truly made the Earth our home. We’re the people always going somewhere, never anywhere and always on the move.

We have lost all sense of morality, the value of life for us is in the Super Bowl, played without too many commercials and having our team prevail. Who are we; we are the empty men and women of a society trying to remake the world in our own image. Who are we; we’re US Citizens without any sense of citizenship.

If only “they” would behave and listen to “us”. They should, we say, because our TV commercials are the best in the world, we know how to package so that no matter what the product, it is wrapped in sex. We act as if the world belongs to us, we are the Gods of war, and know we have the right to demand and command. Just take a gander at the man we call President, a war mongering sociopath. He is a true demander and commander, but with no experience of the horror of war.

But if we had any sense of life and freedom we would have rebelled in 2000 as the freedom loving people of Oaxaca, Mexico are doing. Is it not strange that after 500 years of oppression Native people still know how to stand and fight for life, while we and our 200 years of democracy have no idea of what life or freedom is? We think we’re free because we can’t see the bars of containment—the incarceration society we’ve become, because the bars live inside of us.

For us life is just what we have as long as we do not exercise it, being human and free is just what we are as long as no crisis confronts us. Who are we, the empty men and women of America, the cowards who deny we are imperialist and deny we’re trying to remake the world in our image. We have become the New Fascists, the Americans who demand security as we gut the world and take it as we can and are willing to exterminate to get it.

In a society where being has lost all meaning we have replaced it by a mythology of life. I ask you: where do you live? Where are you free? To be human and live you must first be able to think, and thinking was ruled out by the third grade. We were taught the importance of the fuehrer, pardon me, the teacher. We created a school run for and by the bosses—based upon cue-response training. Yes, it is not the place to learn to be human - just to pee, one must first gain permission. To speak one must say the right words in the right order and to the right person. Is this the way of being human or the way of a robot?

Corporations run on fascist rules. Spend some time looking into what happens to whistle blowers: seekers of truth coupled with freedom of speech. We make freedom an after work activity, something we participate in when we go shopping or at home in the privacy of our own television. Work is submission - them that got, rules them that don’t.


Our police, including agencies like the FBI, functions as an enforcer for them that got and protects the booty and the institutions of power. Open your eyes if you can- –fifty shots fired into whom? Yes, yes I know they were wealthy white men just out for a good time before the shackles of marriage - sounds absurd. When did a white man with money ever get shot by the cops? Ask Leonard Peltier or Mumia Abu-Jamal about justice and life in America. Justice is something expected except by those who need it most.

Yes, we are the hollow men and women, we demand our rights as Gods. So why are we thought evil - because we are evil. We are the pretend people. We pretend freedom and we pretend justice. We just will not allow it to be practiced - here or any where else.

What are the essential elements of freedom and life? Right of self-defense, right of speech, right to land and justice. In this country we have none of these, we have empty words expressing our rights but the words are like vapor in a strong wind. And for me the most amazing realization is that as a culture and as a society we simply do not care. We simply accept our own lack of freedom by proclaiming ourselves free and then we go shopping.

Who are we? We are the people of great self-deception. We are the people who prefer the lie to the truth. If you doubt any of what I say here, think back to the war against Vietnam, those of you who are old enough remember - “never again”, and here we are back killing colonial peoples of color over resources again. Not only are we not free here but we do not want people anywhere to be free, especially if it interferes with our entertainment, our shopping or our car.

So who are we, we’re the people that put freedom down in …. name your place. So who are we? We are the New Fascists. Don’t you dare to use the word freedom again with out the word hypocrite conjoined.


RTYU

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