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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jim Willie CB who wrote (5946)	9/9/2002 12:27:24 PM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

''Ugly Americans: What is wrong with us?'' By C. Bryan Lavigne YellowTimes.org Guest Columnist (United States) Printed on Thursday, September 05, 2002 @ 12:16:25 EDT yellowtimes.org (YellowTimes.org) – There is something seriously wrong with Americans. Something that was inherent in the Europeans who first came and were able to live and breed here. Those first colonists had to be made of steel, they had to be hard and emotionless or they wouldn't have made it through the first winter. Hell, the ones who weren't solid didn't make it past the first winter. Americans love war. No, it goes beyond that; we love violence and explosions and big fucking guns, and we love to watch other people suffer in pain and misery. Deprived of our own struggle for survival, we find comfort in watching the desperation of others. Anywhere you look in our culture you see it: violent lyrics in music, action movies and TV shows with explosions and gun fights every five minutes, the ever present war dramas and documentaries, video games, professional wrestling and sports, kidnapped children and murdered parents and a thousand desperate faces vying for time on the network news. We don't get any happier than when there is a real war to gawk at. Who isn't glued to the TV in this country any time our military machine goes to work (when the corporate media deems it worthy to show) against some impoverished country? We can't get enough of smart bombs and carpet bombs and cluster bombs and bunker buster bombs. I bet your pulse is up just reading this. We love it so much that in our oafish gape we don't even bother to ask ourselves important questions. Questions like: "Why are we really bombing these people?" and "Isn't there a better way to settle disputes than this?" or how about "When will we go too far, if we have not already?" Not only do we fail to ask these important questions, but we also make up the most absurd arguments to justify killing people. Take the conversation I had today with my brother-in-law in which he gave me these zingers: "Saddam has weapons of mass destruction, Saddam is trying to build weapons of mass destruction, Saddam won't let weapons inspectors in, and Saddam is a danger to the United States." I won't go into my responses; I'm sure you've all heard the arguments before. I argued with him for half an hour on this subject, and when I proved all his arguments to be faulty, he still maintained that we needed to bomb Saddam. The same thing happened over and over again when we were bombing Afghanistan, no matter how well I argue, no matter what I say, people just will not open their eyes and see the truth that is slapping them in the face. They just don't want to admit that the only reason they support any war is because they just like to watch people getting bombed for no good reason. I think the real problem here may be that Americans don't have the proper faculties to distinguish between fiction and reality anymore. We don't understand that those are real people being torn to pieces by our daisy cutters. Those are real people suffering under the wheel of our military machine. We've been conditioned to disassociate ourselves. Programmed not to care. Movies and television have brainwashed us into believing that our government's intentions in the world are utterly and irrefutably noble; that we're the good guys and they're the bad guys and that everything is black and white, good and evil, us and them. The world does not work like this. Our government's intentions are anything but noble; they fight (or rather, they make us fight) for power, money and influence, nothing more, nothing less. History proves this. But we don't believe it. Not our government! Not my elected officials! We can't accept that our government is the terrorist force in the world because then we wouldn't have any reason to cheer on the troops. We'd have no reason to hoop and holler when we see the smart bombs fall on the evening news. We'd have no reason to enjoy other people's misery. We will not face that reality. Well, maybe some of us do. After all, you can never get the whole population to agree on any one thing, so maybe some of us can get past this ingrained inability to believe our government incapable of foul play. Maybe some of us won't look at other people's hardship as entertainment. Maybe some of us can feel. Maybe… _______________________________________________ [C. Bryan Lavigne is a starving artist and political activist who may or may not be completely insane. He lives in the United States.] C. Bryan Lavigne encourages your comments: cbryanlavigne@yahoo.com

To: Jim Willie CB who wrote (5946)	9/9/2002 3:04:17 PM
From: Sidney Reilly	Respond to of 89467

No news or canned news, either way we wouldn't get the truth. The news media is controlled and we hear only what is approved for our ears.

To: Jim Willie CB who wrote (5946)	9/9/2002 8:52:28 PM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

THE WAR ON WHAT? The White House and the debate about whom to fight next. by NICHOLAS LEMANN The New Yorker Issue of 2002-09-16 newyorker.com <<...Over the summer, foreign-policy elder statesmen like Brent Scowcroft, James Baker, and Zbigniew Brzezinski got a lot of attention for publicly expressing realist doubts about the prospective American invasion of Iraq, and Vice-President Cheney responded with a speech making the case for war, but the broader realist argument about the war on terror has been absent from the national discussion. I went to see some of the leading realists recently, with the idea of giving their opinions a public airing. The people I interviewed are well-known figures in international relations, professors at major universities—John Mearsheimer, of the University of Chicago; Stephen Van Evera and Barry Posen, of M.I.T.; and Stephen Walt, of Harvard—but they reported that they haven't been seriously in touch with anybody in government over the past year. Evidently, their point of view isn't being considered in Washington. The consensus among the realists is that the United States should have declared war on Al Qaeda, not on terrorism. If it had, then all foreign-policy projects would be evaluated on the basis of how well they served the worldwide struggle against Al Qaeda. The realists are minimalists. They often say things like "do less" and "reduce the American footprint." Using the September 11th attacks as the occasion to remake America's role in the world is exactly what they don't want. They revere tough-minded diplomacy and suspect military adventurism—another of their favorite formulations is that it's better to display the velvet glove than the mailed fist. In the nineteen-nineties, they opposed United States military involvement in the Balkans, and today they oppose the idea of invading Iraq and of seeking "regime change" in other countries. The hawks believe that anti-Americanism springs from pure irrational hatred and can best be dealt with through shows of force; the realists believe anti-Americanism varies with the extent of visible, bellicose American behavior, and that is why they want to reduce the footprint. "I think the Al Qaeda threat is very serious," Stephen Van Evera told me. We were a long, long way from the corridors of power—sitting on a park bench in Lexington, Massachusetts. "We used to believe there was no such thing as Al Qaeda"—a terrorist organization capable of inflicting mass casualties. "They're very skillful. They combine high patience and training capacity and motivation. I was very shocked by 9/11. We're in a struggle to the death with these people. They'd bring in nuclear weapons here, if they could. I think this could be the highest threat to our national security ever: a non-deterrable enemy that may acquire weapons of mass destruction." He went on, "Defining it as a broad war on terror was a tremendous mistake. It should have been a war on Al Qaeda. Don't take your eye off the ball. Subordinate every other policy to it, including the policies toward Russia, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and Iraq. Instead, the Administration defined it as a broad war on terror, including groups that have never taken a swing at the United States and never will. It leads to a loss of focus. Al Qaeda escapes through the cracks. And you make enemies of the people you need against Al Qaeda. There are large risks in a war against Iraq. There could be a lengthy, televised public slaughter of Muslims by Americans. A wide imperial rampage through the Middle East—what do you do after you win? We're not out of Bosnia and Kosovo yet, and Iraq is much bigger. It's a huge occupation and reconstruction. We aren't good at this."...>> <<...The realists are right when they say that Bush's talk and his actions have been out of synch. The President and his people may be praying that their sabre rattling will bring about a coup or a revolution in Iraq that will obviate the need for an invasion. That Bush so far has said more than he's done doesn't necessarily mean, however, that the really consequential decisions following from September 11th still lie before him. It's important to Bush to be a man of his word—that's the essence of his non-Clintonism. He has rhetorically committed the Presidency to a series of ideas that in turn commit the United States to a course of action. It seems as if the big decisions have already been made...>>