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Zonie63 -> RE: Who do we think we are ? (7/6/2014 9:38:54 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: MrRodgers
As of Bush v Gore, W's assuming office and immediately after 9/11, I knew then and there...our country was no longer the country I grew up in.
With the passing of the Patriot Act, the ensuing unjustified wars, torture and Abu Garab, I knew then that those inalienable rights we possessed endowed by out creator and not by govt., the original American creed...was no more.
It is for us now, to deal with a wholly undemocratic power structure 'behind the throne' and do our level best to defeat it and inform our young they had better be ready for a new more violent and unjust America whose only distinction now...is a very powerful hidden govt. and ever-expanding Navy.
Here
I don't think America is that much different from when I was growing up. In the decade I was born, there were assassinations, wars, terrorism, unjust imprisonment, torture, racism, riots - just to name a few things that were going on. Ironically, one might say that it was even an improvement over what America used to be 50-100 years earlier.
If we were to compare periods of American history and judge each by the relative morality of our ruling class, I would suggest that the most unjust and violent period would be the time from Independence until the Civil War, when our history was dominated by naked aggression, expansionism, slavery, genocide (the same things for which we would later condemn Japan and Germany).
After the Civil War, things started to change a bit, as slavery ended, and expansionism morphed into imperialism. But it was still no picnic, as there was still child labor, racism, "Separate But Equal," breaking treaties/redrawing Reservation lines, union busting, corporate monopolies, etc. Industrialists and railroaders were running roughshod over the country from coast to coast, and since there was no exclusionary rule or Miranda rights back then, it's hard to imagine that there were very many "fair" trials back in the days of lynchings and "hanging judges." The government was likely more corrupt back then than it ever had been before or since. Considering how supporters of the budding labor and civil rights movements (along with others calling for reform) were treated back then, it makes the Patriot Act look rather tame by comparison.
The Spanish-American War, the occupation of the Philippines, and the takeover of Panama (to build the Canal) were just a few acts of aggression during this period. We also grabbed Hawaii, too. Teddy Roosevelt espoused a "New Nationalism," which meant continuing a somewhat aggressive foreign policy with his Great White Fleet, but also favoring domestic reforms to protect the environment and break the stranglehold of corporate monopolies. Our period of expansionism had come to an end. At that point, our foreign policy shifted to a course paralleling Britain's, where we wanted to keep what we had already gained while preventing any other power(s) from expanding and gaining the upper hand - which is where our mistrust of nations like Germany, Japan, and Russia started to become more of a factor.
This was where America was at a crossroads. We could have simply held on to what we had and let the other powers of the world fight over Europe, Asia, and Africa, while we maintained our neutrality and "isolationism," as many people call it today. The choices that we made back in the early 20th century were what set the tone for America's policies later on in the century and leading up to where we are today. As a nation, we started to suffer from delusions, as we whitewashed our own past and convinced ourselves that we were paragons of virtue whose only purpose was to spread good and decency - and to "make the world safe for democracy," as Woodrow Wilson said in 1917. It was around this time that all of our famous patriotic songs were written, as well as "America's Creed." The period between the Civil War and WW1 was when much of the current imagery and "traditions" associated with America and our own brand of patriotism were formulated. We were pretty full of ourselves around this time, and it should also be noted that this is when the "Greatest Generation," the ones who got us through WW2, were being born and going through their formative years.
At some point, we decided that since we were so "good" and "decent," we figured that everyone else in the world should be "good" and "decent," too. We, along with other "good" and "decent" nations like France and Britain, decided that all nations should be democratic and that no nation should ever seek to expand its territory by forcible means. A rather noble ideal on its face, but it seemed somewhat incongruous considering the recent histories of the major powers which were its principle advocates. Territorial expansionism in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries was good, but anyone who tried it in the 20th century was evil. This was the ideal that we tried to impose on the world between the World Wars, and much of the outside world scratched their heads and said "Wait, what?" But it all made sense to us.
Unlike the brazen contemptuousness and open arrogance of the 19th century, when we believed in "Manifest Destiny" (or the "Thousand-Year Reich" or whatever we called it back then), we adopted a certain way of hypocritical pretense and self-delusion. We arranged our minds in such a way that we could accept contradictory ideals and believe in them wholeheartedly, even though outsiders and those uninitiated in that process could not understand it at all. Likewise, the outside world seemed equally inexplicable to us, since we were undergoing severe nationwide hallucinations at that point. We never could understand Russia even when it was under the Tsar, but under the Bolsheviks, they were even more confusing to us. We didn't understand why Japan was so pissed off, nor could we understand why someone like Hitler could gain power in Germany. We really didn't know or understand much about the world at that time, and our State Department was riddled with incompetent idiots, so they were no help either.
This was also when much of the country had convinced themselves that communism was such a huge enemy that had to be crushed at all costs. The Red Scare was a pretty dismal page from our history, which (again) makes the Patriotic Act look rather tame by comparison. And then there were those who thought they could end the "scourge of alcoholism" by Prohibition, another delusional idea that caused more trouble than it solved. But we clearly didn't learn from that debacle, as it wasn't too long after Prohibition that people started jumping on the "Reefer Madness" bandwagon. You'd think that with all this national push towards sobriety, we'd have been a lot more clear-headed than we actually were. But instead, we just became more delusional.
Because of this, we were not really prepared for WW2, physically, emotionally, intellectually, or psychologically. We didn't really understand the rest of the world, yet somehow, we got caught up in a chaotic situation nonetheless. And again, national security was pretty tight - we learned quickly. Speaking of the Patriotic Act, this is the point when men like J. Edgar got extremely powerful, since FDR was keeping taps on a lot of people, both his friends and his enemies.
The FBI was nothing more than a few file clerks at one time, but later was turned into something more akin to a national secret police force. The OSS was also established by FDR, the forerunner to the CIA. J. Edgar also wanted to head up the CIA, but to his credit, Truman nixed that idea. This was America at the time my parents were growing up, and the media they grew up with appeared to be far more controlled than what I would grow up with in the 1960s and 70s, which was after McCarthyism and the time of blacklisting in the media.
The growing by leaps and bounds of the Civil Rights movement and the strengthening of labor unions to an established force in US politics were also new to the political culture, and they were coupled with the ostensibly righteous causes of ending war and Western imperialism/colonialism around the world. At that time (when I was growing up), it seemed that America was heading in a new direction and tearing down the old order and the malignant institutions which we now consider to be so repugnant.
But given our national propensity towards delusion and hallucination, we found ways of fooling ourselves again. The "reality" that we faced in the 1970s, highlighted by long gas lines, shortages, and runaway inflation, was not quite palatable to many people. Vietnam and Watergate made people very cynical about government, although the consensus of public opinion was still very much anti-communist. Still, the Cold War had somewhat stabilized during the Detente period, as both sides were going through their own versions of "thaw."
The FBI, CIA, and NSA (among other agencies) were still going strong, as the fall of Nixon gave the public its pound of flesh, and there was a feeling that the government was "under new management." The country was at another crossroads at this point, but because of our psychological unpreparedness which we faced at the time of WW2, the trauma of that war and the ensuing Cold War and all of it coming to a head in the 1960s - we may have been in kind of a post-hallucinatory stupor by the mid-1970s. The big-name politicians associated with the Washington establishment were not very popular at that time, so it's not surprising that a political unknown like Jimmy Carter would find his way to the Presidency.
I actually liked Jimmy Carter, but being an outsider to the political establishment left him somewhat crippled from the start. Although I myself had become somewhat cynical at an early age due to Nixon, I started to become even more disgusted by the way Carter was treated (even by other Democrats) and the type of political rhetoric which dominated the Reagan campaign.
At that early age, I already knew that we were doomed - even before I was old enough to vote. Since that time, I've seen it every election. People wonder what's gone wrong with the country and the direction we're taking, and each time, we have the choice to make things better. Yet each election cycle, we fail. We've made the wrong choices on a consistent basis, and we still listen to the same talking heads, the same columnists, the same political bullshit over and over. And then we wonder what's gone wrong with the country and the direction we're taking.
It's easy to blame the politicians, but they're only part of the problem. It's the shared delusion wound up in propaganda and sacred cows - that's where we've gone wrong, and it wrong long before 9/11 or the Patriot Act.
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