In case you didn’t hear President Obama’s historic speech at the Hiroshima Peace Park this past May 27th, let me sum it up for you. Paraphrasing . . .
“It’s very sad. War is nasty. Shit happens.”
There is broad consensus among reputable historians — who don’t filter everything through the brainwashing lens of American exceptionalism — that dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was entirely unnecessary.
There is concrete evidence — I’ve seen the U.S. government documents on display at the Hiroshima Peace Museum myself — that dropping the bombs was an experiment. These two Japanese cities, both of relatively marginal importance in terms of the war effort, were the petri dishes, the Japanese were the bacteria. The nuclear scientists who had developed a deployable nuclear weapon wanted to see how people and dwellings would hold up in the 10,830º fireball. You think I’m exaggerating about any of this? The bombs didn’t target factories or military installations. The epicenter of the Hiroshima explosion was directly over a medical clinic, for chrissakes!
With those two heinous war crimes, of course, America was just getting warmed up.
Next came Korea, or more specifically North Korea. In what was considered a savage and one-sided genocidal attack, over 20% of the population — by some estimates close to 1.4 million people, mostly civilians — were killed by the U.S. campaign. North Korea was reduced to rubble. At the end of the carpet bombing, planes were returning with all of their bombs, with the pilots complaining there was nothing left to bomb. Why did North Korea deserve this genocide? They were demanding that as promised at the end of World War II, when they were finally liberated from the oppressive rule of the Japanese, that the country be unified and free democratic elections be held. You think I’m making this up? If you can go beyond the facile fairy tales of our high school history texts and do some reading, you’ll find it in the historical record.
After taking a little breather, the U.S. moved on to Vietnam. What was the problem there? These misguided gooks might go communist and we couldn’t let that happen! Of course, Vietnam is now a communist country. I’ve been there. It’s a pretty decent place. No one tried to shoot me. I practically never saw any police. The food is spicy. Amazingly, I was treated with courtesy and kindness. Why was I amazed? Because I’m an American and we slaughtered up to 3.9 million Vietnamese in that war, again mostly civilians. We sprayed them and their farmland with lethal chemicals that are still causing horrible birth defects. In fact, America dropped twice as many bombs on this tiny country as was unleashed by all sides in every theater of World War II!
Try to wrap your head around that.
Of course, just because we were at war with Vietnam didn’t mean we would confine our destruction and carnage to that country, in losing the war. We also mercilessly bombed Cambodia and Laos. In Cambodia — a country we weren’t at war with — America dropped a half million tons of bombs killing 100,000 innocent people.
But that was child’s play compared to Laos, again a neutral country which was not in any way taking sides in the Vietnam conflict. Laos has the chilling distinction of being per capita the most bombed country in the history of the world! Yes, we really cut loose on this tiny, impoverished nation by dropping 2,000,000 TONS OF EXPLOSIVES on them!
And how bad does America feel about the death and destruction it inflicted on tiny Laos? Never one to let an opportunity for cynical irony go ignored, Obama in his public relations swing through Southeast Asia stopped by to do some glad-handing. While when it comes to countries we’ve abused Obama prefers to leave the past behind, to look ahead toward a bright, harmonious future — in particular one controlled by the corporate totalitarian regime of TPP — he did give a slight nod to a problem that 2,000,000 tons of explosives had left scattered across the landscape of Laos: that of unexploded ordnance. He was in such a generous mood that he committed $90 million to help clean up the mess before more children lost their arms and legs. $90 million for 2 million tons of explosives only four-and-a-half decades late. What a guy!
I could go on but we’d be looking at a book. A very depressing one at that.
The point is the bombing and the wars just keep on going and in parallel we are treated to a never-ending barrage of self-righteous deceptions and exceptionalist demagoguery.
The only difference now is that the rhetoric is more vitriolic and audaciously deceitful.
Since hopefully many of you like myself may not be amused by Obama’s infinite capacity for expectorating America-first drivel, let me spare you from listening to this narcissistic ideologue and sum up his recent speech before the United Nations. I read between the lines a bit, and here’s the gist of this remarkable gust of self-congratulatory hot air:
“We know if you repeat a lie often enough, it will stick. We are also firmly committed to never admitting a mistake, and no matter how implausible, always finding someone else to blame for what goes wrong. Finally, the United States of America never apologizes.”
For the final UN speech of his celebrated 8 years as president, I think Obama has done an excellent job of clarifying exactly where the U.S. stands, and sealing his place in the history books after the U.S. inevitably implodes, as one of the most myopic of our chief executives.
Having said that, I’m still for offering a balanced view. Though we often get caught up in quibbling about the details, let’s look at the big picture and give credit where credit is due.
Do you think keeping track of the torrent of destructive but spellbinding lies dumped on the American public and the rest of the world is easy?
Can you fathom how thoroughly exhausting it must be to relentlessly embrace and nurture such intemperate arrogance, such malignant hubris, such shameless moral insensitivity, how draining it is to keep feeding the rhetorical river of buttery self-congratulations and slimy bombast?
What about having to unrelentingly deny facts, obfuscate and hide the truth? What about the colossal task of constructing an alternative and patently false reality to keep American citizens from waking up to the horror their leaders are visiting on the rest of the world? You’re going to tell me this is not incredibly grueling work?
In a nutshell . . .
Do you think it’s easy being infallible?
Maybe we should ask President Obama at his next news conference.
A Look At Some Other Numbers
On July 20th, I
created The “I’ll vote for Jill if you will” Pledge Campaign. This included setting up petitions at four reputable petition campaign sites to keep track of the number of participants. Off to an encouraging start, I got signatures on the very first day.
This whole effort addresses what I consider to be the primary obstacle to Jill Stein getting elected. That is, it offers a mechanism to work around the predictable fears that most voters have that if they vote third-party, they will “throw their vote away” and even worse, end up electing one of the major party candidates who they abhor. Those who voted for Ralph Nader — I was one of them — were wrongly accused of throwing the election to George W. Bush. Though this is easily established as false, the idea of the “spoiler vote” continues to persist and serve the agenda of the two-party monopoly, preventing any real challenge from either the progressive left, the libertarian right, or any party for that matter functioning outside the narrow, tightly choreographed corporate mainstream.
The success of my campaign to unite potential Jill Stein voters into a bloc, essentially by “pre-polling” the voting public, was predicated on ascertaining in advance that there were sufficient voters to elect her. Ascertaining that meant voters could comfortably vote for her without fear of wasting their votes, perhaps inadvertently electing Donald or Hillary, whichever might be judged worse — though in my book it’s a toss-up.
The target was 50 million or more voter signatures, which I determined would be enough, if distributed appropriately in important swing states, to put her in the White House.
The key to getting that many signatures was the power of an exponential multiplier, or as I euphemistically dubbed it, the power of numbers. If each person who signed the petition — and in doing so agreed to participate in the program — told only two others, instructing them to each likewise tell two others, in less than 30 days we could have over 67 million people signed up, more than enough to eradicate all anxiety about voting for Jill Stein.
So how did we do?
On September 9th, we finally hit 5,000 signatures across all four petition sites.
That is, we managed to get 5,000 well-meaning folks — and judging from the comments very passionate supporters of Jill Stein — to jump on board, and it only took 52 days.
Mind you, I didn’t just sit back and twiddle my thumbs. In fact from the day I started the campaign till now, I’ve sent out over a thousand tweets, posted it on over ninety Facebook pages, posted it as comments on some fifty plus political media sites, posted it on Google+, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Stumbleupon, Reddit, Blogger, Delicious, and Live Journal.
Which suggests that assuming I don’t suffer from dwindling returns for my effort — highly doubtful since the “low-hanging fruit” gets used up quickly — in order to get to 50 million signature, I would only need to keep doing what I’ve been doing for the next 1,424 years.
What do you think? Should I keep going?
Alright . . . what happened?
That is perhaps the easiest question in the world.
People didn’t recruit anyone else. Despite their personal enthusiasm for Jill Stein, despite many of them — judging from the enthusiastic praise I got for the idea — thinking it was a highly ingenious way to make her a viable candidate in the eyes of a fearful voting public, despite them making a firm pledge when they signed the petition which committed them to the action which was the critical core of the strategy . . .
“I will now contact two other people who I respect and trust, let them know there is a real alternative to the Clinton vs. Trump political spectacle, explain that if we frustrated voters join together, we don’t have to throw our votes away, we can elect a great president, America’s first female president no less.”
. . . they just couldn’t bring themselves to talk to and convince others that this was a necessary and worthwhile project.
Am I surprised? Of course not. Disappointed but not surprised.
As citizens we have become paralyzed by our own timidity and fear of failure, intimidated and rendered dysfunctional by the dysfunction all around us. We’ve become disengaged and numb from the constant trumpeting of counter-productive memes, false narratives, the insultingly banal media coverage of politics, the disinformation and propaganda that bombards us 24/7/365. We have been made cynical and immersed in despair by endless violations of the public trust by our leaders, by the condescending and cavalier lies we are constantly told by our politicians and other puppet-masters in the pulpits of power. Most tragically, we have become afraid, afraid of the police, afraid of the government, afraid of one another, afraid to act. We’re just too afraid to turn to a couple other people and say: “Hey, look at this. I think it’s a great idea!”
But here is the problem . . .
No matter how hopeless and difficult it seems, we must act. We must get involved. Time is running out on democracy. There still remains some small hope that we as citizens can make a difference. But that hope is shrinking fast.
What probably the majority of citizens apparently fail to understand — or if possible avoid thinking about — is that in our current social and political environment, under the “rules of the game”, we have no choice but to participate. Just being a citizen means you are intrinsically a functional “activist” in a system which determines everything that is happening now and will happen in the future.
There is widespread reluctance to recognize and embrace a simple fact: The future is still ours for the taking.
The numbers are with us across the board — on many key issues, on outrage and contempt for Congress, on collective revulsion for the choice we are being waterboarded with via the two major party presidential candidates.
What is lacking?
Courage. The courage to just reach out to others and say:
“I’ve had it! I’m not playing this game anymore.”
Yes, many are saying this but only to themselves. Until the American public hears a loud roar and a thunderous chant, and each and all realize they are not alone, they individually will again buckle to their fear, and be afraid of a simple act like reaching out to just two others — even two others of like mind and thinking — and talking, just being open and honest about issues that confront all of us but from which we retreat like cowards.
Recognize this . . .
Being paralyzed by fear and hopelessness is a form of “citizen participation”.
As is surrender or any other form of capitulation or acknowledging defeat.
It’s self-sabotaging but participation no less.
To not act is counter-intuitively an act.
Because to not act is a choice.
And all choices have their consequences.
We will live or die by what those consequences look like.