Neo-Empire: The Myth of Pax Americana.

Empires are built on crushed armies, destroyed cities, incinerated crops, slaughtered herds, raped women, enslaved prisoners of war, oppressively over-taxed population, and even genocide. To the contrary of what we've been told, the American empire also rose out of these ashes. But ours is more of a neo-empire, built on neo-imperialism and/or neo-colonialism, which, allows for the husk or shell of independence--the illusion of independence--but takes the substance-- control over that nation's industry,  imports and exports and relationships with other nations.  We allow conquered countries to fly their own flag, use their own currency, speak their own language, on the condition that our military can enter at any time to do whatever we want.

The empire builders of today tell us "we’re" fighting for the security and survival of our nation. They tell us "we’re" fighting for democracy...to spread democracy. They tell us "we’re" fighting for humanitarian reasons. They tell us "we're" fighting to oppose dictators that we put in power.  If this is true, then why, the larger the military industrial complex gets, and the larger the security industrial complex gets, are we, the people finding ourselves increasingly less secure, less free, less humanitarian, not to mention, exceedingly falling under the absolute or supreme power of government?  And why, since the implementation of the Patriot Act I and II, the NDAA, super-advanced technology, unprecedented military power, more than 1,000 global military bases, not to mention trillion-dollar undeclared  "wars", not to mention, our domestic wars:  "war on terror",  "war on drugs" etc., do they continue to tell us the world is even more dangerous than ever?  The bottom line is there is only one beneficiary of empire, and it's not us as the following chart clearly demonstrates.

Cui Bono? To whose benefit is the empire arranged?

So now  the global establishment war drums beat for Syria, the new face of the "war on terror", or, it could be said, indirectly beating for Iran. The U.S. claims that if evidence surfaces showing Syria used chemical weapons...well, it's a game changer. Despite the fact that within the last decade,  the U.S./Israel has used depleted uranium and white phosphorus against Iraqi civilians.  Nevertheless, the telescopic sight or scope is being adjusted until the cross-hairs are centered on the bullseye: Syria in an on-going regional escalation. Perhaps WWIII.

"...we’re going to attack and destroy the governments in 7 countries in five years – we’re going to start with Iraq, and then we’re going to move to Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran.” -- Gen. Wesley Clark

“The Romans have constantly had the same cause, a cause for making war upon all nations, peoples and kings. The insatiable desire for empire and wealth.” -- King Mithridates, one of the Roman Republic’s most formidable and successful enemies, who engaged three of the prominent generals from the late Roman Republic in the Mithridatic Wars

“You find in the Romans an arrogance which no reasonable submission can elude. Briggons of the world, they have exhausted the land by their indiscriminate plunder. They create a desolation and call it peace. Our goods and money are consumed by taxation. Our land is stripped of its harvest to fill their granaries.” -- Chief Calgacus, chieftain of the Caledonian Confederacy (present day Scotland)  who fought the Roman army of Gnaeus Julius Agricola at the Battle of Mons Graupius in northern Scotland in AD 83 or 84.

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The Power Principle

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Most Americans Have No Idea What Happens in War.

A must read for Memorial Day: Against Annihilation of the Spirit: Let Us All Become Cowards by Arthur Silber

An excerpt:

"In an essay written some time ago, I quoted Paul Fussell at length, on "The Culture of War, and the Culture of Chickenshit." Fussell has written at least two indispensable books: The Great War and Modern Memory, about World War I, and Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War. In Wartime, at the opening of the chapter, "'The Real War Will Never Get in the Books,'" Fussell writes (highlights added and footnotes omitted in all the following excerpts):

What was it about the war that moved the troops to constant verbal subversion and contempt? It was not just the danger and fear, the boredom and uncertainty and loneliness and deprivation. It was rather the conviction that optimistic publicity and euphemism had rendered their experience so falsely that it would never be readily communicable. They knew that in its representation to the laity what was happening to them was systematically sanitized and Norman Rockwellized, not to mention Disneyfied. They knew that despite the advertising and publicity, where it counted their arms and equipment were worse than the Germans'. They knew that their automatic rifles (World War One vintage) were slower and clumsier, and they knew that the Germans had a much better light machine gun. ... And they knew that the greatest single weapon of the war, the atomic bomb excepted, was the German 88-mm flat-trajectory gun, which brought down thousands of bombers and tens of thousands of soldiers. The Allies had nothing as good, despite one of them designating itself The World's Greatest Industrial Power. The troops' disillusion and their ironic response, in song and satire and sullen contempt, came from knowing that the home front then (and very likely historiography later) could be aware of none of these things.

The Great War brought forth the stark, depressing Journey's End; the Second, as John Ellis notes, the tuneful South Pacific. The real war was tragic and ironic, beyond the power of any literary or philosophic analysis to suggest, but in unbombed America especially, the meaning of the war seemed inaccessible. As experience, thus, the suffering was wasted. The same tricks of publicity and advertising might have succeeded in sweetening the actualities of Vietnam if television and a vigorous uncensored moral journalism hadn't been brought to bear. America has not yet understood what the Second World War was like and has thus been unable to use such understanding to re-interpret and re-define the national reality to arrive at something like public maturity.

The truth today is still worse, for we have significantly regressed. Even as our governing class remains absolute in its determination to avoid the central and most fundamental lessons from Vietnam, it has remembered and applied certain lessons very well indeed. The horrors of Iraq, including the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of entirely innocent Iraqis, never even enter the consciousness of most Americans. The dead and horrifically injured Americans are shuffled offstage without ceremony. The great majority of Americans continue in their preferred mode of existence: intellectually ignorant and lazy, spiritually fat and self-satisfied, and completely oblivious to the unimaginable suffering their government inflicts in other parts of the world.

Our national media remain cowed and intimidated, and they refuse, a few honorable exceptions aside, to provide details of the daily and hourly horrors in Iraq to the public. A single major newspaper could provide a noble and invaluable service: if they gave a damn at all about unnecessary death and suffering, they would select the most awful and horrifying picture they could find -- a body with its guts falling out, a bloody corpse shorn of arms and legs, a mutilated face made unrecognizable -- and fill up their entire front page with it, a new one every day. Perhaps after a month or two, enough Americans would demand that their government stop butchering people who never harmed us. [To achieve the sought-for effect, the pictures obviously should be of Iraqis, and only Iraqis. The Iraqis had no choice about our criminal war of aggression, and the endless destruction we have unleashed; the United States did -- and does, even today. We could leave, as we quickly would if we had any remaining decency and humanity, but we won't.]

Most Americans have no idea at all what happens in war. I certainly don't pretend that I do, either -- but I read a great deal on the subject, and I try to learn. From Fussell's Wartime again:

What annoyed the troops and augmented their sardonic, contemptuous attitude toward those who viewed them from afar was in large part this public innocence about the bizarre damage suffered by the human body in modern war. The troops could not contemplate without anger the lack of public knowledge of the Graves Registration form used by the U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps with its space for indicating: "Members Missing." You would expect front-line soldiers to be struck and hurt by bullets and shell fragments, but such is the popular insulation from the facts that you would not expect them to be hurt, sometimes killed, by being struck by parts of their friends' bodies violently detached. If you asked a wounded soldier or marine what hit him, you'd hardly be ready for the answer, "My buddy's head," or his sergeant's heel or his hand, or a Japanese leg, complete with shoe and puttees, or the West Point ring on his captain's severed hand. What drove the troops to fury was the complacent, unimaginative innocence of their home fronts and rear echelons about such experiences as the following, repeated in essence tens of thousands of times. Captain Peter Royle, a British artillery forward observer, was moving up a hill in a night attack in North Africa. "I was following about twenty paces behind," he says,

when there was a blinding flash a few yards in front of me. I had no idea what it was and fell flat on my face. I found out soon enough: a number of infantry were carrying mines strapped to the small of their backs, and either a rifle or machine gun bullet had struck one, which had exploded, blowing the man into three pieces -- two legs and head and chest. His inside was strewn on the hillside and I crawled into it in the darkness.

...

Sometimes damage to the body was well beyond endurance, for those perceiving as well as those damaged. Once in the Normandy battles a British major accompanied a stretcher party searching for a wounded man earlier parties had missed. "Sure enough," he says,

we found a poor little chap with both legs blown off above the knees, moaning softly and, I remember, he was saying, "Oh dear! Oh dear!" The stretcher-bearer shook his head and, I thought, looked pointedly at my revolver.

And there's an indication of what can be found on the ground after an air crash in one soldier's memories of a morning after an artillery exchange in North Africa. Neil McCallum and his friend "S." come upon the body of a man who had been lying on his back when a shell, landing at his feet, eviscerated him.

"Good God," said S., shocked, "here's one of his fingers." S. stubbed with his toe on the ground some feet from the corpse. There is more horror in a severed digit than in a man dying: it savors of mutilation. "Christ," went on S. in a very low voice, "look, it's not his finger."

Toward the end of the same chapter, Fussell writes about "Eugene B. Sledge's memoir of a boy's experience with 'the old breed,' the United States Marines," which Fussell describes as "one of the finest memoirs to emerge from any war." Fussell says the tone of Sledge's book is "unpretentious, unsophisticated, modest, and decent." Fussell continues:

But for Sledge the worst of all was a week-long stay in rain-soaked foxholes on a muddy ridge facing the Japanese, a site strewn with decomposing corpses turning various colors, nauseating with the stench of death, "an environment so degrading I believed we had been flung into hell's own cesspool." Because there were no latrines and because there was no moving in daylight, the men relieved themselves in their holes and flung the excrement out into the already foul mud. It was a latter-day Verdun, the Marine occupation of that ridge, where the artillery shellings uncovered scores of half-buried Marine and Japanese bodies, making the position "a stinking compost pile":

If a Marine slipped and slid down the back slope of the muddy ridge, he was apt to reach the bottom vomiting. I saw more than one man lose his footing and slip and slide all the way to the bottom only to stand up horror-stricken as he watched in disbelief while fat maggots tumbled out of his muddy dungaree pockets, cartridge belt, legging lacings, and the like. . . .

We didn't talk about such things. They were too horrible and obscene even for hardened veterans. . . . It is too preposterous to think that men could actually live and fight for days and nights on end under such terrible conditions and not be driven insane. . . . To me the war was insanity.

And from the other side of the world the young British officer Neil McCallum issues a similar implicit warning against the self-delusive attempt to confer high moral meaning on these grievous struggles for survival. Far from rationalizing their actions as elements of a crusade, McCallum and his men, he says, "have ceased largely to think or believe at all":

Annihilation of the spirit. The game does not appear to be worth the candle. What is seen through the explosions is that this, no less than any other war, is not a moral war. Greek against Greek, against Persian, Roman against the world, cowboys against Indians, Catholics against Protestants, black men against white -- this is merely the current phase of an historical story. It is war, and to believe it is anything but a lot of people killing each other is to pretend it is something else, and to misread man's instinct to commit murder.

Accounts of this kind are unknown to the American public. Most Americans are unaware of any and all such details; most Americans do not want to know them and will stop you, should you try to tell them. To the extent our political leaders are cognizant of such facts, they do everything in their power to prevent them from reaching the public. After all, our governing class might undertake the next campaign of slaughter any day now; if Americans knew what that slaughter actually entailed, they might not go along with the smug complacence they have exhibited on all such previous occasions. In an identical manner, if the ignorance of the American public were penetrated to any significant degree, they might demand an immediate end to the pointless murder in Iraq. But our governing class must maintain its prerogatives; as Higgs notes, it would not do to let the inmates run the asylum.

So the myths prevail. Our wars are always noble, fought for the purest of motives. Our warriors are similarly noble, engaged in a high-minded crusade. They butcher and slaughter, and are butchered and slaughtered themselves, so that "civilization" might be preserved. Never mind that many of the warriors themselves would not agree. Never mind that the front-line soldiers know that war is insanity, and only insanity. Never mind the overwhelming, senseless, futile, endless horror of what actually happens in combat, and the details that never reach the public.

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The Myth of Humanitarian Wars.

Republicans sell fear - often times creating whatever it is to be feared - in order to go to war. Democrats sell "humanitarianism" in order to go to war. Both are lies.

 Glenn Greenwald (below) spoke at the University of Chicago at an event entitled "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Empire: Humanitarian Intervention and Neo-Orientalism."  His speech focused on the myth of "humanitarian wars", clearly an oxymoron, no?

Greenwald contextualizes the use of international law and humanitarian intervention to justify U.S. involvement in foreign countries, especially in the Middle East, as well as advancing U.S. geo-political strategy in the post-Cold War Era.

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A Fourth Reich?

We all know Germany lost the war militarily in 1945; however, as documented in the Red House Report, which lays out a secret three-stage strategy for the Fourth Reich by Nazi industrialists, it appears that this plan for a strong German empire has, in some part at least, come to pass.

In stage one, the industrialists were to 'prepare themselves to finance the Nazi Party, which would be forced to go underground as a Maquis', using the term for the French resistance.

In stage two would see the government allocating large sums to German industrialists to establish a 'secure post-war foundation in foreign countries', while 'existing financial reserves must be placed at the disposal of the party so that a strong German empire can be created after the defeat'.

In stage three, German businesses would set up a 'sleeper' network of agents abroad through front companies, which were to be covers for military research and intelligence, until the Nazis returned to power"

For years, the Nazis had been covertly sending funds through neutral countries.  Martin Bormann, "an unquestioned genius of finance and administration", who set up "750 corporations throughout the world as depositories of money, patents, bearer bonds, and shares of blue chip industries of the US and Europe," informed a gathering of Nazi industrialists on August 10, 1944, at Strasbourg, of his flight-of-capital--to-safe havens state policy, which was launched immediately after this meeting.

"The war cannot be won by us; we must take steps in preparation for a postwar commercial campaign." - Martin Bormann, August 10, 1944

A 1943 FBI report stated:

After the rupture of diplomatic relations with the Axis by various countries of Latin America, the Axis began to use Argentina as the base of its espionage and sabotage activities against all American nations. It had been established that from this base of operations the Germans have spread the net of their subversive organizations to at least ten American countries, and that as a result of their work a large number of American lives, considerable American property, and the lives and property of the citizens and countries of the united nations which are engaged in the struggle against the totalitarian powers have been lost.

"The Economic Miracle"

Under the Marshall Plan, the money that was pumped into the economy arrived at the right time to rebuild German infrastructure.  But it was Martin Bormann who set the foundation for postwar recovery.  Because juxtaposed to the "Marshall Plan" funds, the  money funneled to "neutral" countries, under Bormann, and private investments from Swiss banks began to flow back into Germany, so that by 1951, 1936 levels of production were reached.The Korean War boosted the German economy to an "era of booming good times" when the Pentagon placed huge orders in West Germany to supply its needs for armies in Korea.

The following is from a secret memorandum written by high-ranking German officers and distributed among an elite group of German leaders in 1950. It can be found in T.H. Tetens’ 1953 book, Germany Plots With the Kremlin.

"Economic difficulties will one day plunge the United States down from its present dizzy heights. Such a catastrophe can be brought about through crafty manipulations and through artificially engendered crises. Such maneuvers are routine measures which have already been employed in international power struggle and will be used again and again as long as economic rivals fight for power positions and markets in the world.

It is quite conceivable that America, weakened by a depression, will one day seek support from a resurrected Germany. Such a prospect would open tremendous possibilities for the future power position of a bloc introducing a new order in the world."

Today, Germany is an economic powerhouse. While Spain suffers an unemployment rate of 23.3% and the rest of the euro zone, 10.7% Germany's unemployment rate continues to decline, their trade surplus, the largest in the world.

Recently, in addition to trying to reignite the debate over creating a EU constitution, and imposing financial sanctions on Hungary, while slamming their constitution, leaders of the EU nations signed a German-driven fiscal compact treaty on March 2, to enforce EU deficit-cutting and debt reduction rules more strictly. 

What about the German military?

Well, look out for the young aristocrat, Baron Karl Theodor Maria Nikolaus Johann Jacob Philipp Franz Joseph Sylvester Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg - or, for short, Baron Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg - who took Germany by storm for a little while in 2009. Before age 40, he was the German Defense Minister, and one of the most popular politicians in Germany. In an interview, the Mayor of Guttenberg told journalists: “His correct title is Reichsfreiherr Baron of the Holy Roman Empire!

While in office, he set out to redesign the German military. In Nov. 2010, he said that Germany should "use military force" at a security conference in Berlin. He urged Germany to “be prepared to use its military to defend the country’s economic interests.” He then noted that the competing demands of nations today for raw materials made it imperative that Germany—a nation whose export-driven economy is heavily dependent upon imported raw materials—should be prepared to use its military forces to secure trade routes for raw materials and exported goods.

His wife, “Stephanie, a Luthern, (Baron Guttenberg is an ecumenical Catholic) is a great-granddaughter of Otto von Bismarck, the founder and “Iron Chancellor” of the 19th-century German empire." Unfortunately, for him, he resigned over a plagarism issue, and is currently a "distinguished statesman" at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies” in the US. Nevertheless, I wouldn't count him out just yet.

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Point. Click. Kill. US Drone Strikes Target Civilians in Coward's War.

It's no secret that Nobel Peace laureate, President Obama has increased the frequency of drone strikes well beyond what former President Bush did, as they have been used with regularity, since he took office.  From the battlefields of Iraq, to Afghanistan, well situated for oil and gas pipelines, to tribal areas in Pakistan, from the comfort of their environmentally controlled offices, military forces, and the CIA are employing the use of drones with impunity.  According to the Brookings Institute, the US has 7,000 drones in operation and 12,000 more on the ground.

One military robotics researcher told Peter Singer, the author of Wired for War, “We modeled the controller after the PlayStation because that’s what these eighteen-, nineteen-year-old Marines have been playing with pretty much all of their lives.”

Just one week ago, January 31, President Obama (see video below) made the claim that the drone strikes, under his administration - 260 - have "not caused a huge number of of civilian casualties", and he went on to exalt the exceptional proficiency, and precision of unmanned aircraft, despite massive evidence to the contrary. Since 2009, between 282 and 535 civilians have been credibly reported as killed including more than 175 children. Is that a huge number?  Well, imagine it's American citizens who have died as a result of another country's drone strikes.



However, the huge numbers of civilian casualties, is only part of the story.  According to a recent report by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, civilian rescuers are being targeted! At least 50 civilians died as a result of follow-up strikes.

The CIA’s drone campaign in Pakistan has killed dozens of civilians who had gone to help rescue victims or were attending funerals, an investigation by the Bureau for the Sunday Times has revealed.

The findings are published just days after President Obama claimed that the drone campaign in Pakistan was a “targeted, focused effort” that “has not caused a huge number of civilian casualties”. . . .

A three month investigation including eye witness reports has found evidence that at least 50 civilians were killed in follow-up strikes when they had gone to help victims. More than 20 civilians have also been attacked in deliberate strikes on funerals and mourners. The tactics have been condemned by leading legal experts.

Although the drone attacks were started under the Bush administration in 2004, they have been stepped up enormously under Obama.

There have been 260 attacks by unmanned Predators or Reapers in Pakistan by Obama’s administration – averaging one every four days.

Why is it a coward's war?

Precisely because we are arbitrarily waging undeclared, trillions-of-dollars, so-called  "wars", without actually having any "skin in the game." Engaging state-of-the-art stealthy pilotless vehicles that murder people - halfway around the world - by joy-stick without any risk to ourselves is cowardly and contemptible. Point. Click. Kill. How long  before our own enemies have the same capability? How long before the decision to kill is ceded by a machine (talk about accountability issues)?

Related Links:

Afghan civilian death toll reaches record high

The civilian death toll for the war in Afghanistan reached a record high last year with 3,021 deaths, according to the United Nations.

The number killed rose by 8% last year – the fifth consecutive rise – with a further 4,507 civilians wounded, the UN report said. Many were killed by roadside bombs or in suicide attacks, with Taliban-affiliated militants responsible for three-quarters of the deaths.

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Are We Living in a Post Racial America? Or, Jim Crow Junior America?

After all, as the New York Times claimed, the election of President Obama into the White House, swept "away the last racial barrier in American politics with ease as the country chose him as its first black chief executive". Really? Then, why are the African Americans suffering more than any other group of people at this time? Remember, many of the white supremacy members said they voted for Obama to send the country into a tailspin...foment a race war.  One former member, Tim Zaal, said, "The faster this country falls, the sooner white revolution will arise." 

"Could it be that the nomination of Obama finally sparks a sense of unity in white voters? I would propose that this threat of black rule may very well be the thing that finally scares some sense back into complacent whites." -- Neo-Nazi, with the pen name, "LastOfMyKind"

For instance, under Mayor Bloomberg, the NYPD’s practice of “stop and frisk” - — practice of officers stopping city residents on the street and searching them- increased to 600,000 stops performed last year. "87% of those stopped last year were black or Hispanic, a number disproportionate to their share of the population. And just 7 percent of the stops resulted in arrests, meaning the vast majority of those stopped committed no crime. The NYPD argues the practice reduces crime, but it has been coming under increasingly intense criticism in recent months".

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Video-Game-Style Warfare: Terror From the Skies.

How can you create a war on terror when you're the biggest terrorist of all? The U.S. military and the CIA are terrorizing the skies with more and more unmanned missile-armed drones in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. To be sure, it won't be long before America is added to that list.

America’s Secret Empire of Drone Bases: Its Full Extent Revealed for the First Time

A ground-breaking investigation examines the most secret aspect of America's shadowy drone wars and maps out a world of hidden bases dotting the globe.

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French President Sarkozy's Mediterranean Union Cause of Libyan War?

The French were one of the first to say there should be a military no-fly zone over Libya. The reasons are threefold. However, I will focus on the Mediterranean Union only.

Unbeknownst to many, in 2008, French President Nicolas Sarkozy had planned to unite the 44 countries that border the Mediterranean in, what he said, was an effort to boost economic, political, and cultural ties with the EU's southern neighbors, and to reinforce the geopolitical weight of France.  In reality, his motivations, more than likely "lie elsewhere".


John Laughland of the Brussels Journal pointed out:

The plan, indeed, bears some resemblance to the “Greater Middle East” project favoured by the American neo-conservative strategists. Although the membership of the two proposed bodies is different (the Greater Middle East encompasses Arabia, Iran, Central Asian states and even Afghanistan and Pakistan) the ideology is the same: supranational and anti-national. The idea is to neutralise the Arab-Israeli conflict by “integrating” the Middle Eastern countries into a single political unit, rather as the Franco-German conflict was allegedly neutralised by the creation of the European Community. For there is nothing the neo-cons want to neutralise more than Arab nationalism.

Even more striking is the resemblance between Sarkozy’s plan and the existing Mediterranean Dialogue set up by NATO in 1994. Numerous Maghreb states have already signed partnership agreements with NATO. In other words, the Mediterranean Union would be but a political superstructure over a military organisation which already exists and which is under US leadership. Sarkozy is known to be extremely friendly to the US and Israel (the Israeli president has just been in Paris, the first head of state to be received with full honours since Sarkozy was elected last year) and his plans therefore resemble those which led to the creation of the original EEC which was also set up on the back of an existing US-led military structure (NATO was created in 1949, the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951).

The goal of Sarkozy’s Club Med is therefore not, after all, to reinforce the geopolitical weight of France, but instead to consolidate the power of NATO and the United States over the Middle East. That is why Germany, America’s senior partner in Europe, was determined to be involved – and that is why Sarkozy has agreed to it. I predict that, in due course, he will agree also to another American policy, the accession of Turkey to the EU.

So, what does this have to do with Libya? Well, it was Colonel Muammar Qadaffi's boycott of the 2008 summit launching the new "Union" in Paris, and his attack on the plan that interfered with the manifestation of Sarkozy's brainchild.  Qaddafi compared Sarkozy's "Union" to the  Roman Empire, and that it will fuel Islamist terrorism and will be regarded as "imperialism" by many in Africa and the Arab world.

"We shall have another Roman empire and imperialist design. There are imperialist maps and designs that we have already rolled up. We should not have them again." -- Col Qadaffi in Tripoli, the Libyan capital, July 9, 2008

Libya is one of only five of Africa’s 54 countries that have not been integrated into U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM).

Links:

Libya warns of disaster if 'Great Man-Made River' hit

Libya warned on Sunday that NATO-led air strikes could cause a "human and environmental disaster" if they damaged the country's massive Great Man-Made River (GMMR) project.

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Evil in Our Name: Up the Ladder of Collective Responsibility

The body of Gul Mudin, the son of a farmer, killed on 1/15/10. A member of the "kill team" is posing behind him. Der SPIEGEL published 4 photos from the hundreds, possibly even thousands of images and videos it has seen. 

Try, for a moment, to forget everything the corporately owned mainstream propaganda machine spits out, and take a look at the big picture of America, right now.

Our nation's infrastructure is crumbling. Trillions of dollars has disappeared from our treasury. The poverty rate continues to escalate. Americans are losing their homes at an alarming rate due to systemic fraud, so massive, that it's virtually incomprehensible. The middle-class is gradually disappearing. Domestic unemployment remains near 10% (or triple that, if you add in all of the unemployed adults capable of work, yet not fully employed). Over 50 million Americans lack sufficient health care. Billionaire banksters and corporate elites continue to reap reward for plundering our nation's economy, growing wealthier by the minute. Meanwhile, our government, bypassing Congress, in violation of our Constitution, under the guise of saving others, continues to invade one resource-rich country after another, killing and horrifically injuring millions of innocent civilians...and sometimes, for the pure joy of it.

Consider for one moment, how we, the people would react if any other country dared to do to us what we continue to do to them. Imagine the terror of living everyday, surrounded by death squads, house raids, checkpoints, detentions, curfews, unmanned predator drones constantly flying overhead, ready to fire at anything that these soulless machines deem suspicious, and the constant flow of blood in our streets. Imagine the terror of knowing that thousands of fully armed foreign soldiers and mercenaries - trained killers - roam our soil, free to do whatever they want, with impunity. Now, who are the terrorists, again?

So, it should not come as any surprise that some of our troops are participating in monstrously evil acts for fun.  Hundreds, perhaps thousands of horrific photos of our soldiers killing unarmed civilians, otherwise known as "free kills" in soldier speak, were finally released on Der Spiegel, yesterday.   But, the Daily Censored reported on this back in September of 2010.  One has to wonder why it took so long to come to our attention. 

As one person commented, this is not a single occurrence...these atrocious acts are ongoing, as fatigued soldiers, wrapped up in layer upon layer of protective covering, no longer differentiate between civilians and combatants - who, in their indoctrinated eyes, are considered less than human, in this "kill or be killed" environment.

"It's not just a couple of soldiers, my nephew is in the army and is on his 4th time over there, he's seen too many of US soldiers making free kills just for the fun of it. There's no such just 2 individual soldiers doing this. It's happening more often than you might think. That's the reality and it's not funny anymore."

No, this type of "group evil"...this blood lust flows out, like the demons inside Pandora's box,  from maintaining a constant atmosphere drenched in the pathology of war. Moreover, these illegal wars are not fought for the "greater good", they are created to line the pockets, and to increase the power of the predators and parasites who reside at the top of the global food chain.   When profit, power and status trump  human life, exhibited in the excess of materialism that pervades American culture, barbaric acts, like the ones that these soldiers (who just happened to be caught) committed, will continue to escalate, as it is an integral part of warfare that is perpetuated only to feed the greedy beast of empire.

The bottom line is that our hands are smeared in the blood of tens of thousands of human casualties. After all, not only are we aware of all of the wars in our name, we also know that the military very often serves as a dumping ground for the most incorrigible of our nation's children. It is we, the people, in effect, who choose, employ, and pay America's soldiers to do our dirty work...our killing for us.

"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation…want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightening, they want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters…. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will." -- Frederick Douglass, 1857

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Cushioning the Government from the Direct Expression of the Will of the People

Today, the terms republic and democracy are virtually interchangeable, but that wasn't always the case, especially at the time of the creation of our "Constitutional Republic" .

Democracy implied direct rule by the people, all of whom were equal. Whereas republic implied a system of government in which the will of the people was mediated by representatives, who might be wiser and better educated than the average person -- the elite.

For example, in the early American republic, the requirement that voters own property and the establishment of institutions such as the Electoral College were intended to cushion the government from the direct expression of the will of the people.

Well, it could be said that things have changed over the last 250 years, and no, not towards democracy, but, towards empire. And that cushion has/is growing to smothering proportions, as an interlocked corrupt oligarchic system, the ruling elite, works quietly in the shadows, "creating other new realities".

‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’ — Senior Bush Advisor, The New York Times, October 17, 2004

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Tools of God: Trickle Down Religion

What's with the conservatives and trickling things down? I get the myth that's trickle down economics, but trickle down religion? That's a new one on me, although, apparently trickle down theology came along way before Reagan preached his trickle down voodoo.

What is trickle down religion and where did it come from? Well, this guy Dr.Abraham Vereide, the founder of "The Family", formerly known as the International Christian Leadership, said God spoke to him one night in April, 1935. In so many words this is what God told him: Christianity was focusing on the wrong people - the poor, the suffering, and the down and out. I want you to be a missionary to and for the powerful, or the "up and out". These "key men" can dispense blessings to everyone else through a sort of trickle down religion.

Okay, but what are key men? Key men are men "The Family" identifies as chosen for his position of power or affluence by God. They are selected as the imperfect tools of God, much like King David, therefore need not be elected, or work their way up the ladder.
The elite fundamentalist group "The Family" began as a union busting organization, and for a long time saw their two goals as economic and foreign affairs. Economically, they coined the phrase,"biblical capitalism" to describe the deregulated, laissez faire, privatized market type of capitalism they believed was ordained by God. "The Family" believed in foreign affairs expansionism, envisioned as a kind of soft empire for America.




"Jesus didn't come to take sides, he came to take over." - Mark Prior

promote anti-gay, anti-abortion, pro free-market, ideas in America and other parts of the world.

The Family on C-Street The C Street House is run by a secretive Washington ministry known as The Family, or The Fellowship.

Jeff Sharlet's ground breaking book The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power.

Joe Pitts recruit Mother Theresa to American abortion politics
Tools of God

Trickle down religion, Biblical capitalism,

Adrian BElite fundamentalism

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