The death of democracy in America and the worldThe mass media plays military cheerleader
By GLEN T. MARTIN
Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies
Radford University - Radford, VirginiaIN A MEMO not considered important enough to publicize in the mainstream press, Attorney General John Ashcroft recently commanded the Justice Department to resist all requests under the Freedom of Information Act. And President George Bush has ordered the records of recent U.S. presidents sealed from the public.
Our government must operate beyond the purview of the people entirely. It is already mostly there. Meanwhile revelations continue to surface about U.S. pressure on the Taliban over the past several years to allow an oil pipeline through Afghanistan.
The Taliban refused even under threat of U.S. bombing. Then Sept. 11 gave the government the perfect excuse to bomb that already poverty-stricken country even further into the Stone Age. Several sources cite 3,600 civilian casualties and millions starving and displaced into hell-hole refugee camps. Now the United States is installing a new government friendly to its interests, that is, to building an oil pipeline through their country.
Of course, the function of the mass media is to provide a cheering section for our military destruction of other peoples and to hide the truth. But just in case the propaganda system is not effective enough, government secrecy must be increased.
Under the anti-terrorism act, the millions of noncitizens in the United States can be detained on “secret evidence.” The government is not required to operate in public. Whatever democracy we may have had is in shambles. But don’t think that the “watchdog” press will scream at the destruction of democracy. Their job is to be cheerleaders for government policy and the big corporations that control our government.
In 1993, the press gave great hype to the U.S. Marines landing in Somalia on a humanitarian mission to a starving country in chaos. There was no mention of the fact that the United States had for the previous two decades supported a brutal dictator who destroyed the country while selling off the rights to nearly two-thirds of the country to U.S. oil corporations . After the people revolted and chaos ensued, the Marines were sent in as “saviors.”
Similarly, the mainstream press has ignored revelations of a whistle-blower working for DynCorp in Bosnia, a giant corporation that provides maintenance support for the U.S. military . The whistle blower provided evidence of massive fraud involving military money. What reportedly led him to speak out was DynCorp executives buying 12- to 15-year-old girls from neighboring countries as sex slaves . Researchers have documented that sex slavery and prostitution for executives of U.S. corporations is a worldwide, multibillion-dollar business.
Money is power and that is why the U.S. military (with much of our national budget to use in secret ways we will never know about) and U.S. corporations rule the world, devouring everything, raping the globe of its precious resources, destroying the environment and paying off the mass media to be their cheerleaders and pimps.
It is the same for poor countries around the world - from Somalia to Afghanistan to Yugoslavia (destroyed by the U.S. military in 1998) to Iraq (destroyed by the U.S. military in 1991) to East Timor (whose invasion by Indonesia had U.S. approval) to Nicaragua (whose revolution against a U.S.-installed dictator was destroyed by a U.S.-created terrorist army during the 1980s). Any government that cares about its people, the U.S. propaganda machine calls a “communist dictatorship.”
The United States destroyed the Nicaraguan government by 1990 and instituted a new government that cared for our multinational corporations more than the people. We call this “free trade.” Today, sweatshops operate in “free trade zones” in Managua exploiting a starving people at misery-level wages so you and I can buy cheap clothing in superstores.
I recently returned from India where I toured huge slums . Even I was shocked at the level of misery of the tens of thousands of people living there. Jammed into tiny rooms, entire families work day after day making the products that you and I buy so inexpensively. They get pennies per day for their endless work. They sell to middlemen who sell to the big corporations that are taking over India . Hundreds of thousands exist in a living hell of hunger, disease and insecurity.
This is why democracy is being destroyed in the United States and around the world. The goal of the U.S. ruling class and its puppet U.S. government is military and economic domination and exploitation of the entire world. It has nothing to do with terrorism or standing for justice or any such nonsense. But democracy could not be destroyed without the help of their cheerleaders, the U.S. mass media. That is why it is important that none of the things I have mentioned ever gets reported.
The people must be convinced to voluntarily give up democracy and the future of our planet.
Then Sept. 11 gave the government the perfect excuse to bomb that already poverty-stricken country even further into the Stone Age. Several sources cite 3,600 civilian casualties and millions starving and displaced into hell-hole refugee camps.
Once again, he's not about to let facts get in the way of his rants. Ousting the Taliban has let the relief convoys roll into Afghanistan, saving hundreds of thousands from starvation and allowing displaced Afghanis to return to their homes and start rebuilding.
Yep, this is yet another hate-America leftist, and some folks here just lap up what he says because he shades the facts to make this seem like a totalitarian state. And he's not alone - I hear the same crap from some talk-radio hosts. Folks nowadays really aren't interested in reporting the truth, they're only interested in senasationalism that makes things seem a lot worse than they actually are.
Similar policies were endured by Americans during World War II, with no lasting ill effect. And we didn't have hundreds of thousands of enemy (outside of POW camps) inside the country then. NOW we do.
Interestingly, the same policies were undertaken, publicly and secretly, during the "golden age" of the klintons, with the approval of this fascist nutcase. Anybody remember the Clipper Chip and Carnivore? The IRS and FBI investigations of political opponents? When these programs finally made it into public discussion, kneepadders like Glen T. Martin cheered, swallowing the explanation that it was needed to protect us from "gun runners, militia, tax cheats, and pornographers". As long as liberal turds like this still cheer the memory of Waco and the lesbo-fascist attorney general of that era, they have no right to complain now.
Good find. It wouldn't - doesn't - surprise me that this Amercia-despising leftist POS professor thinks Mexico is entitled to "reclaim" a large chunk of the U.S. After all, and in his mind, it was our "imperialism" that stole this land away from the Mexican children to begin with.
It's nothing short of amazing how some supposedly conservative Freepers could defend this uneducated, irrational, leftist liar.