Wonderful article explaining why we cannot effectively resist
http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/02/03/demobilized-usa-why-there-n...
But more than that, this blog entry reviews I.F. Stone's contributions and how pronouncements he made during the Vietnam War era echo precisely 21st century events.
then, of course, there was I.F. Stone’s Weekly (1953-1971): one dedicated journalist, 19 years, every word his own (except, of course, for the endless foolishness he mined from the reams of official documentation produced in Washington, Vietnam, and elsewhere).
Among the eeriest things about reading Stone’s Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia coverage, 14 years into the next century, is how resonantly familiar so much of what he wrote still seems, how twenty-first-century it all is. It turns out that the national security state hasn’t just been repeating things they’ve done unsuccessfully for the last 13 years, but for the last 60.
Read this. It will make you feel better AND worse.
We all know we need new modes of resistance.
Comments
Well spotted.
There really is no investment in the country by the population the US, either through sweat equity, as in national service, or for that matter paying federal taxes. For many people, payroll taxes purportedly go toward our own national pension. Our generation was brought up on stories of how previous generations sacrificed present comfort toward the greater good of all. While the country was being industrialised, this was through building the nation's infrastructure; during WWII, it was through serving in the military. However, people who invest in a country feel they should have some say in how it is run, something that is apparently very dangerous.
GWB expressed the expectations of our rulers toward the citizenry when he paraphrased the early conditioning of Teen Talk Barbie™: "Math is hard; let's go shopping."
Saw that one.
Another example of how we humans keep doing the same shit over and over. It's discouraging knowing that people before us talked and debated about the same damn things, the same problems, the same rich people, the same wars and killing.
Because it didn't do any good.
I think about that sometimes when people bring up examples of what we the people need to do to overturn the power. Protests in the streets, write your congressperson, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. etc. But in a way, nothing has worked yet. Nothing has changed the overriding fact that a small group of rich people continue to rule the world, while the rest of us are forced to live according to their dictates.
Nothing can change until we get rid of "them".
Excellent article!
The corporatists of both parties have systematically destroyed all faith in good governance, which has fostered the every person for himself mentality in this country. That mentality fuels such ideas as the anti-tax/anti-government regulation movement, the anti-vaxers, and the school choice and/or charter school movement, among others. Starting with Reagan, government has been portrayed as the enemy.
In reality, what most people fail to recognize is that government is we the people working together to accomplish things that benefit us all and benefit society as a whole. What we have been seeing is how people have distanced themselves from each other, both physically and socially. With all of our technological advances, we seem to be more isolated from our societal responsibilities than ever.
The parallels between what I. F. Stone wrote more than fifty years ago and what is happening with our foreign policy are not surprising. In order to build empire, the powers that be must create convenient enemies. The Taliban, Al Qaeda, ISIS are enemies of convenience, created by our own government agents for the purpose of expanding the American empire. However, all empires can never sustain themselves and eventually crumble under their own weight.
Excellent article that captures the interesting times we are living in and the frightening future before us.
Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy
interesting article...
i can remember in my lifetime when citizenship was something that was respected and encouraged. on the other hand, a cursory study of history shows that the american government has never been a government of the people, by the people and for the people. there has been a general movement towards accepting more and more of the government's subjects over the past couple of hundred years as "the people," which is a good thing, but they have never been truly enfranchised.
there was an anecdote in chris hedges' recent article malcolm x was right about america that really sums up the lack of enfranchisement of the people:
why do we as citizens have to fight to force our government to respect not only our civil rights and liberties, but also something as basic as making the government promote the general welfare, not engage in unpopular wasteful wars of choice, etc.?
And that's
"just the way it is".
Why indeed. I think a large part is because those of us that want to fight for those rights and those of us who realize losing those rights are important/critical are a such a minority compared to those who have been brainwashed/conditioned to agree or at least comply with what the government is doing, i.e., fighting terrorists in the Global War OF Terror, fractional reserve banking and debt, etc. The government gets their mandate from them.
Excellent, but a Draft would probably end military adventurism.
NT
Everyone thinks they have the best dog, and none of them are wrong.