When We Do It, It's Okay.

[Steve Gardner]

If you can tolerate what for me is a rambling, rather senseless first paragraph, you're in for a treat.

Unless, of course, you agree that it's okay for us (by which I mean the West) to go blowing up innocent Iraqis, but when we're attacked by, say, those trying to prevent themselves getting blown up, that's... well that's terrorism.

Source: Smoking Mirrors

Monday, December 3

Switched on CNN for two minutes to see the headline ticker and they were having the headlines update before going to Amanpour’s hatchet job on Vladimir Putin; commercial in constant play… Putin evil... yack …yack… yack. What did I see? - …timing is everything. Hugo Chavez is claiming that CNN was calling for his assassination based on ‘mistakes’ made by CNN in their broadcasting. They actually said that, “mistakes” but no explanation. I’ll just bet whatever it was, was an accident; no way did the alien life forms over at Time Warner send down a memo to make a mistake. I don’t know what the mistake was but it must have been one. These kinds of people don’t admit to mistakes unless someone has Polaroids and DNA and not then either.

The gangsters in charge don’t like Chavez the same way they didn’t like Castro. They don’t like Ahmanedijad and they didn’t like Saddam or Bin Laden; after liking them both a whole lot… Now they’re both gone… None of these men are the same as any of these other men except in one respect; they didn’t knuckle under for our corporate dime. They didn’t play the game. It’s the same as the democracy thing. We don’t like it when people don’t have democracies. Right now we are spreading it around the globe- our way. Even if you have a democracy we don’t like it unless it’s done our way, just ask the Palestinians what happened to their democratically elected leaders.

Putin has an 80% favorability rating. What’s Bush’s favorability rating? Putin and Chavez were legally elected; Bush has yet to be legally elected except in Texas. Chavez also has wide support among his people. On and on the news hammers at them, throwing up waves of innuendo and lies. Who controls these airwaves and why don’t they like Putin and Chavez? It couldn’t be because of Putin’s position on Iran and Russia’s new economic ascendance could it? It couldn’t be because of Chavez’s opposition to US control and exploitation of the southern Americas could it? Cui Bono… What were we up to in the Ukraine and Georgia? What are we up to in Columbia as regards Venezuela?

Chavez is asking his people on Sunday if they would like him to be their leader for a longer period. This may sound like democracy in action but it’s not, even if it is, because it’s not our kind of democracy. Besides… the poor like him and the rich hate him. Now it appears that the referendum has been defeated. The comment from Chavez was that democracy in Venezuela is “maturing”; positively dictatorial.

In America you have free speech- unless we don’t like it. You have the freedom of assembly, as long as it’s a mile away behind a chain link fence. You can vote for your president and he will be the president unless we don’t like it and then we’ll rig the votes and send the decision to our homeboys in the court; if it’s closer than we wanted.

It’s a funny thing about how the land of the free has more people in prison than anywhere else. It’s a funny thing how the land of opportunity has more homeless people than anywhere else except in the countries where we are making people homeless while we bring them democracy. It’s a funny thing about how we have so much crime.

We hated Castro. We had people working over time on ways to kill him; poison his cigars and other things. Castro was stirring up trouble all through Latin America and getting in the way of United Fruit, Anaconda, AT&T and Coca Cola and all our democratically protected corporations that had the unalienable right to hire workers for two bananas and a Coke a day. So we had to go down to Central America and other places and kill tens of thousands of poor people so that we could make them safe for democracy. We cooked up a ‘drugs for arms’ cartel and all kinds of neat little solutions for their own good.

I don’t see where Castro killed nearly as many people as we did but I’m sure we can tell you that we have proof that he did but you can’t see it.

Saudi Arabia is a good friend of ours but they don’t have anything like a democracy, which is okay because it is our kind of a democracy. I like how democracy rhymes with hypocrisy. It doesn’t rhyme with irony but it does sleep in the same bed.

When you’ve got the power you can make anything be anything you want. England practiced brutality on the Irish for hundreds of years and when the IRA came along to resist that then they became terrorists. They objected to the treatment they were getting and that wasn’t acceptable. They are still called terrorists today… but not by me.

Then it turned out that a lot of those IRA bombing were done by British intelligence; just like the bombings in Iraq; why they caught a couple of boyz in the hood in Basra, red-handed in the act and the Brits had to send tanks in to get them away from the people whose country they had invaded to protect them from something or other. The British are our friends.

I’m reading The History of Rome by Titus Livius at the moment. I see a lot of parallels and I’m learning again the things I learned a long time ago and that is that nations can get along or not get along depending on what any nation has and what any other nation wants and who is running that country. Leaders can do the right thing or the wrong thing according to who they actually serve.

We’ve killed over a million Iraqis and made another four million homeless. We look the other way when children are murdered in Palestine and the people starved into submission. We slander countries that don’t go along with our desire to attack sovereign nations under false pretenses. We threaten and blackmail and twist arms. If someone else were doing this it would be wrong. When we do it, it is okay.

Our friends in England murdered a whole lot of Chinese (of course, there’s plenty of them) so that they could sell them opium. Imagine that. They went into India and a lot of other places to rape and pillage and they made the world understand the meaning of ‘British Justice’. Of course, a few hundred years ago they used to hang nine year old boys for stealing a loaf of bread. They distinguished themselves in Africa and continue to. Whatever they do, its okay when they do it. Australia and Canada are supposed to be sovereign nations so why do they build their governments around the celebration of the English queen? Sometimes it looks like royalty is right where it always was only now its called democracy. And I guess it is a coincidence that Bush is related to the royal family.

You can’t piss in my ear and make me think it’s rain. You can’t make me believe you instead of my lying eyes. I realize it’s a fault I have and a problem for those who insist I be otherwise. There are more people like me than one might suspect, given what goes on every day. I don’t know when the populations of the world will get a clue. You’d think they would make the connection between their hardships and the people responsible. You’d think they would know who was in their corner but they don’t. I don’t see any more of that news about Chavez this morning. Maybe there won’t be any more mention.

As long as people are determined to put their interests above the interests of their fellows there will always be a waiting line to serve in the Court of the Conqueror Worm. As long as you are with us it will be okay whatever you do. The media will say so and history will record it as so. There are a lot more Oliver North’s at work today than there were before.

You’re going to have to decide for yourself where you are about the way things are. Every single day you make decisions that are a matter between you and your conscience. The strangest thing is that ‘we’ are collectively stronger than ‘they’ will ever be. As we have seen, a single person can change the dynamics of an entire nation. Nelson Mandela comes to mind as an obvious example. There are others. I often wonder why there are so few. You would think there would be more.

Sometimes I lie in bed and I can hear people crying far away. It’s almost like the music that the wind makes at my window. I can hear laughter too. There isn’t anyone close enough to me to make any of these sounds but I can hear them. You have to wonder how people can be so far away from the voice of their own heart when it is so close to them.