Forum Post: The Most Pro-War Organizations on the Planet: Republicans and Democrats
Posted 11 years ago on Feb. 15, 2013, 10:42 a.m. EST by TrevorMnemonic
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"If you believe the president (or the CIA) has the power to order US citizens executed far from any battlefield with no charges or trial, then it's truly hard to conceive of any asserted power you would find objectionable." -Glenn Greenwald
"The nation embraces the dangerous delusion that we are on a providential mission to save the rest of the world from itself, to impose our virtues, which we see as superior to all other virtues - on others and that we have a right to do that by force. This belief has corrupted both democrats and republicans." -Chris Hedges
Bombs should not be confused for solutions.
No, Lindsey Graham, the world is not a battlefield. No, Barack Obama, this is not legal.
The corporate takeover of government has the cogs in motion for war profiteers.
"Drones, Kill Lists and Machiavelli"
by DESMOND M. TUTU
February 14, 2013 "NY Times" [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/13/opinion/drones-kill-lists-and-machiavelli.html?_r=1& ]
I am deeply, deeply disturbed at the suggestion in “A Court to Vet Kill Lists” (news analysis, front page, Feb. 9) that possible judicial review of President Obama’s decisions to approve the targeted killing of suspected terrorists might be limited to the killings of American citizens.
Do the United States and its people really want to tell those of us who live in the rest of the world that our lives are not of the same value as yours? That President Obama can sign off on a decision to kill us with less worry about judicial scrutiny than if the target is an American? Would your Supreme Court really want to tell humankind that we, like the slave Dred Scott in the 19th century, are not as human as you are? I cannot believe it.
I used to say of apartheid that it dehumanized its perpetrators as much as, if not more than, its victims. Your response as a society to Osama bin Laden and his followers threatens to undermine your moral standards and your humanity.
DESMOND M. TUTU
Aboard MV Explorer, near Hong Kong Feb. 11, 2013.
[The writer, winner of the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize, is archbishop emeritus of Cape Town.]
Thanx for a very good forum-post TM & there's much food for thought and reason for reflection here and to follow the archbishop Valentine's Day missive to The NYT, I also append :
"Obama's Failed State", by Stephen Lendman" : http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article33945.htm ;
"'America Doesn't Torture' — It Kills", by Katha Pollitt : http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article33946.htm &
"What Does a Police State Look Like ?", by http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article33938.htm .
Answer : "Violence, arrests of Occupy protesters and stop-and-frisk. Plus : A worshipful media" !!!
veritas vos liberabit ...
what is it called when people ignore the truth again?
Thanks for the links.
“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” - (George Orwell) & "A truth that's told with bad intent - Beats all the lies you can invent.” (William Blake, from "Auguries of Innocence").
Also, re. OWS consider : "Lessons from Megabanks’ Megascandals", by Prof. Richard D Wolff :
And more pertinently to your post - "Julian Assange Speaks From Ecuador Embassy in London" :
"Our buildings can only be as tall as their bricks are strong. Our civilization is only as strong as its ideas are true. When our buildings are erected by the corrupt. When their cement is cut with dirt. When pristine steel is replaced by scrap - our buildings are not safe to live in. And when our media is corrupt. When our academics are timid. When our history is filled with half truths and lies - our civilization will never be just. It will never reach the sky. Our societies are intellectual shanty towns. Our beliefs about the world and each other have been created by same system that has lied us into repeated wars that have killed millions. You can't build a sky scraper out of plasticine. And you can't build a just civilization out of ignorance and lies."
respice, adspice, prospice ...
I like that quote from Assange. Very powerful.
When opinions cannot be distinguished from facts, when there is no universal standard to determine truth in law, in science, in scholarship, or in reporting the events of the day, when the most valued skill is the ability to entertain, the world becomes a place where lies become true, where people can believe what they want to believe.
A populace deprived of the ability to separate lies from truth, that has become hostage to the fictional semblance of reality put forth by pseudo-events, is no longer capable of sustaining a free society.
We are a culture that has been denied, or has passively given up, the linguistic and intellectual tools to cope with complexity, to separate illusion from reality. We have traded the printed word for the gleaming image. Public rhetoric is designed to be comprehensible to a ten-year-old child or an adult with a sixth-grade reading level. Most of us speak at this level, are entertained and think at this level. We have transformed our culture into a vast replica of Pinocchio’s Pleasure Island, where boys were lured with the promise of no school and endless fun. They were all, however, turned into a symbol of ignorance and stupidity.
As the centers of American power were seized and hijacked by corporations, the media continued to pay deference to systems of power that could no longer be considered honest or democratic. The media treat criminals on Wall Street as responsible members of the ruling class. They treat the criminals in the White House and the Pentagon as statesmen. The media never responded to the radical reconfiguration of American politics, the slow-motion coup d’etat that has turned phrases like the consent of the governed into a cruel joke. And because the media are not concerned with distinguishing truth from news, because they lack a moral compass, they have become nothing more than courtiers to the elite, shameless hedonists of power, and absurd court propagandists. At a moment when the country desperately needs vigorous media, it gets celebrities such as Katie Couric masquerading as journalists, who night after night “feel your pain.” The few journalists who do not, as Couric does, function as entertainers and celebrities are so timid and removed from the suffering of our dispossessed working classes that they are rightly despised. The media are hated for a reason. They deserve to be hated.
I keep my distance from the powerful. I distrust all sources of power regardless of their ideological orientation. I do not want to be their friend. I do not want to advise them or be part of their inner circle. The only benefit one gets from being a White House correspondent, as far as I can tell, is that the president knows your name. I made a conscious choice to report from the developing world and war zones during most of my career. What I witnessed rarely matched the version of events spun out for the media courtiers in Washington by the power elite. As a foreign correspondent I often fought my own Washington bureau, where reporters in suits were being fed a partial version of reality and had a vested interest in reporting it as fact. The longer reporters spent in Washington, the more they looked, sounded, and acted like the power brokers they covered.
Rebellion—which is different from revolution because it is perpetual alienation from power rather than the replacement of one power system with another—should be our natural state
Genuine intellectual inquiry explodes the self-indulgent myths and stereotypes we use to elevate ourselves and ignore our complicity in acts of violence and oppression.
I believe that the truth is the only force that will set us free. I have hope, not in the tangible or in what I can personally accomplish, but in the faith that battling evil, cruelty, and injustice allows us to retain our identity, a sense of meaning and ultimately our freedom. Perhaps in our lifetimes we will not succeed. Perhaps things will only get worse. But this does not invalidate our efforts.
Thanx Trev. Your excellent Hedge's quotes had a rather necessary calming effect on me & so I append :
"Why I Am a Socialist ?" by Chris Hedges : http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21586.htm & @ somewhat of a tangent ...
"Who Tells Us What To Think? Does The Mainstream Media = The Matrix ?", by Michael Snyder : http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article33958.htm .
pax et lux ...
http://thesaurus.com/browse/blinder
Over a decade of bombing countries. Pathetic.
A friend told me a couple weeks ago Lee Terry went on a radio show and said the war on terror is going to last forever. He's one of the people who continually votes for war.