By Andrew Thomas Harrison
Americans, as a whole, are a very easy group of people to control. This is because the large majority of them think exactly alike. Americans eat the same general food, wear the same clothes, attend the same schools, and, most importantly, they watch television twenty four seven. The vast majority of Americans are often unaware of what is really going on in the outside world. They are very wealthy people, especially compared to the many nations that have nothing. America has a great control over these nations through world trade and its "foreign policy." As time goes by, this huge problem only becomes worse and worse. Everyday they give the world a new reason to hate them. America, in my opinion, is becoming a target, or a reason for others suffering. Cleary when one country soaks in wealth, while another starves to death, it is unfair.
I hope to explain my theory on why America has become such an ignorant and hated nation. Our politicians like to see America thrive, even if it means death for others. I don't think the general public is this evil, although they do play a big role in keeping the world this way. Instead I feel the general public is controlled, or fooled by the government. There are many tools they use to deceive us, the biggest being that mindless box in your living room. Television! It crawls deep into your sub-conscience, as it wraps its razor sharp thorns around your brain and squeezes, destroying your creative being and individualism. It is riddled with hidden messages and stereo-types. It has become a downfall in our children, who are becoming increasingly overweight and losing their already short attention spans.
There are other aspects which also distort the truth. Our wealth and comfort make it easy to not worry about people outside our country. I feel our policies concerning world trade need much revision, as well as our quick reaction to start wars. American people need to be woken up. If they aren't, they will suffer when the world pushes back, and even worse, they will not understand why. Life works in a circle, and to paraphrase a great band called "311..," everything you do comes back to you in one way or another, good or bad, the favor returns itself somehow.
the above was the intro for my creative writing final paper about television, bush, and 911. figured it'd be good intro for this page too... television sucks. read Noam Chomsky's "media control"
some good quotes:
Howard Zinn:
Since it is September 11th we're talking about, perhaps it's in the fitness of things that we remember what that date means, not only to those who lost their loved ones in America last, but to those in other parts of the world to whom that date has long held significance. This historical dredging is not offered as an accusation or a provocation. But just to share the grief of history. To thin the mists a little. To say to the citizens of America, in the gentlest, most human way: "Welcome to the World."
To call someone "anti-American" is not just racist, it's a failure of the imagination. An inability to see the world in terms other than those the establishment has set out for you. If you're not a Bushie you're a Taliban. If you don't love us, you hate us. If you're not Good, you're Evil. If you're not with us, you're with the terrorists.
The U.S. government says that Saddam Hussein is a war criminal, a cruel military despot who has committed genocide against his own people. That's a fairly accurate description of the man. In 1988, Saddam Hussein razed hundreds of villages in northern Iraq, used chemical weapons and machine guns to kill thousands of Kurdish people. Today we know that that same year the U.S. government provided him with $500 million in subsidies to buy American farm products. The next year, after he had successfully completed his genocidal campaign, the U.S. government doubled its subsidy to $1 billion. It also provided him with high quality germ seed for anthrax, and helicopters and dual-use material that could be used to manufacture chemical and biological weapons. So it turns out that while Saddam Hussein was carrying out his worst atrocities, the U.S. and the U.K. governments were his close allies. So what changed? In 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. His sin was not so much that he had committed an act of war, but that he had acted independently, without orders from his master. This display of independence was enough to upset the power equation in the Gulf. So it was decided that Saddam Hussein be exterminated, like a pet that has outlived its owner's affection.
As for nuclear weapons, it would take until the second half of the decade at the very least, according to the CIA, before Iraq could produce enough fissile material to develop a single nuclear bomb. The United States meanwhile has the world's most massive nuclear arsenal. It is the only country to have used them and the only one that continues to threaten their use throughout the world.
The truth is that the closer one looks at the question of suspected Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, in the context of the existence of such weapons in other countries, the more the Iraqi threat to world peace diminishes by comparison, while the threat represented by the United States looms ever larger. Under these circumstances a war by the greater perpetrator to "disarm" the lesser perpetrator seems hardly the answer.
If seeing a "Terror Alert: High" sign on your TV screen makes you feel edgy, imagine what it's like to be living in Baghdad or Basra
Ever since the terrible crime against humanity known as 9/11, the White House has exploited the specter of terrorism to move the GOP's doctrinaire agenda. Boosting the military budget, cutting social programs and shredding civil liberties are well underway. Like the overwhelming majority of politicians on Capitol Hill, most journalists in Washington are too timid to do anything other than quibble about fine-tuning and get out of the way of rampaging elephants
Noam Chomsky:
The whole world is supposed to be covered with--probably is--with sophisticated surveillance devices and the whole range of complex, lethal, destructive weaponry designed to be able to attack anything from space. This means nuclear weapons in space--nuclear energy sources in space--which can get out of control and blow up and who knows what will happen. When the Bush administration took over they just made it more extreme. They moved from the Clinton doctrine of control of space to what they call ownership of space, meaning--their words--"instant engagement anywhere" or unannounced destruction of any place on earth.
REPORTER:
Don't you even think that the people of Iraq are better off having got rid of a dictator?
NOAM CHOMSKY:
They got rid of two brutal regimes, one that we are supposed to talk about, the other one we are not suppose to talk about. The two brutal regimes were Saddam Hussein's and the US-British sanctions, which were devastating society, had killed hundreds of thousands of people, were forcing people to be reliant on Saddam Hussein. Now the sanctions could obviously have been turned to weapons rather than destroying society without an invasion. If that had happened it is not at all impossible that the people of Iraq would have sent Saddam Hussein the same way to the same fate as other monsters supported by the US and Britain. Ceausescu, Suharto, Duvalier, Marcos, there's a long list of them. In fact the westerners who know Iraq best were predicting this all along.
A short reaction to the insanity as andrew understands it
Its is becoming increasingly clear to me as I read the works of Zinn and Chomsky, the independent news sources liking Democracy Now, the AK press, and No-U-Turn Radio, that the current war on Iraq goes deeper then I ever imagined. I'll start by saying I was always against it, war is always wrong and in its essence is terrorism. Connecting Iraq to 9/11 was obviously propaganda to me. However there were things I was completely clueless to.
Saddam Hussein I understood to be a ruthless dictator. I also understand that dictators like this exist in countries all over the world, and we are not attacking them. Secondly Saddam Hussein has not attacked nor threatened to attack. What I did not realize was that Saddam Hussein, if you look at the past 20 years of Iraq-American history, seemed to be a friend or ally of America. His horrible acts of genocide on his own people? Completely true, however he used chemicals and weapons that we supplied him with, that we funded. Secondly, his ability to remain in office when Iraq has overthrown so many dictators in the past. The fact is that US-British sanctions had forced these people to rely on Saddam, and had been responsible for countless deaths. However I didn't just go on the spoken word of Howard Zinn, I like to do my own research. Although I have found plenty of proof, here are to notable pieces of information I will show you to support these facts.
Several United States Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) documents clearly and thoroughly prove, in the words of one author, "beyond a doubt that, contrary to the Geneva Convention, the U.S. government intentionally used sanctions against Iraq to degrade the country's water supply after the Gulf War. The United States knew the cost that civilian Iraqis, mostly children, would pay, and it went ahead anyway" (The Progressive, August 2001).
One document entitled "Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerabilities," dated January 22, 1991, is quite straightforward in how sanctions will prevent Iraq from supplying clean water to its citizens. It explains Iraq's heavy dependence on the importation of specialized equipment and some chemicals to purify its water. Failing to secure these items (which is nearly impossible to do under the sanctions), the documents adds, will result in a shortage of drinking water and could lead to increased incidences, if not epidemics, of disease (U.S. Department of Defense, January 1991).
The more research you do, the more the disturbing reality sets in. The war in Iraq has been long awaited, I'd like to compare it to recipe for cake, and these sanctions, and terrorist acts, ect., have been ingredients in this recipe for war. Actually I'd like to compare it to a bunch of crooked, money worshiping, greedy, war hungry, evil men controling a large group of mostly unaware citizens... It seems to me Iraq has been a target of our super rich elite military officials for quite some time. Each law, all the money that was give to Saddam for his chemicals, the germs that our own US government sent to Iraq (germs which were key in the making of anthrax), and every sanction, all just small moves towards the greater cause in the occupation of Iraq. Perhaps it was best put by noam chomsky as "Establishing the first secure military base in a dependant client state at the heart of the energy producing region of the world."
WAKE UP.
