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The Pentagon was clearly delighted at the opportunity of trying out all the new-fangled lethal technology it had developed in the ten years since it last demonstrated its capability for mass slaughter in its 1991 terrorist campaign in the Gulf (this was in part a demonstration of its weapons systems for the benefit of potential purchasers, and the same happened again in Afghanistan).
The AC-130 [gunship, which began to be deployed in Afghanistan in mid-October 2001] is one of the most lethal American warplanes in terms of its ability to chew up ground forces. ... [and] because of its fearsome firepower. It circles a target and saturates it with automatic fire from three computer-controlled guns, including cannon and heavy machine guns capable of firing 1,800 rounds a minute. The plane's guns can cover an area the size of eight football fields with a round in each square yard ... [and] has banks of electronic sensors on board capable of detecting ground targets normally elusive from the air. — International Herald Tribune, October 17, 2001, p.1
It was an AC-130 gunship which attacked a compound in the village of Kakarak, Afghanistan, on July 1st, 2002, resulting in the deaths of 48 people, mainly women and children, and the injury of another 117. The AC-130 gunship was also used to attack Fallujah in Iraq in April 2004, and contributed to the deaths of over 600 people, mostly civilians (including, of course, women and children).
Such weapons are just the latest in a long line of devices invented in the United States for efficient slaughter on a large scale, from the Gatling gun (invented about 1862) to the atomic bomb (the two bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki caused more than a quarter of a million deaths and injuries) to the hydrogen bomb (whose capability to cause death and destruction is almost unlimited) to cluster bombs and fuel-air bombs.
The [fuel-air] bomb works thus: there are two detonations; the first spreads a fine mist of fuel into the air, turning the area [about the size of a football field] into an explosive mix of vast proportion; then a second detonation ignites the mixture, causing an awesome explosion. The explosion is about the most powerful "conventional" explosion we know of. At a pressure shock of up to 200 pounds per square inch (PSI), people in its detonation zone are often killed by the sheer compression of the air around them. Human beings can typically withstand up to about a 40-PSI shock. The bomb sucks oxygen out of the air, and can apparently even suck the lungs out through the mouths of people unfortunate enough to be in the detonation zone. Our military used it on helpless people [in the 1991 Gulf Slaughter]. — Wade Frazier: Attacking Iraq
A soldier who is prepared to risk his own life when attempting to kill enemy soldiers is a brave man. Such a man is not to be despised. But the design, development, deployment and use of this sort of highly efficient lethal technology is done, not by brave men, but by cowards — by those willing to slaughter other humans only if their own lives are not placed in danger. It can only be done by people who are either mentally ill, morally depraved or too stupid to understand what they are really doing. And as well they do it for the money — so they are basically hired killers.
In early November the Americans began to drop "daisy cutter" bombs on troops in the Taleban front lines. This "daisy cutter" is the fuel-air bomb as described above. Only a nation sunk in depravity could descend to the use of such diabolic devices against human beings, soldiers or otherwise. The United States thus shows itself to be depraved and barbaric. And any nation which, by providing military support to the American war machine, condones this barbarity forfeits (as the United States has already forfeited) any claim it might have to be regarded as a civilized nation in the eyes of the world. A barbarian nation drags its allies into barbarity also.
Under the leadership of Adolf Hitler the German nation sank also into barbarity (from which it emerged after 1945). One of the defining characteristics of the German Nazis was their willingness to use violence to achieve their ends — not just their willingness to use violence but their willingness to use unlimited violence. As for them, for those who now control the American military juggernaut, there is no limit to the degree of death and destruction that they are willing to use to achieve their ends. This is one reason why they may properly, truly and without exaggeration, be described as "Nazis".
Are these the sort of "leaders" that the American people really want? These calculating, cold-blooded, racist mass murderers? Are they representative of what America stands for?
Perhaps so. The worship of violence, death and destruction has in recent decades become a defining characteristic of contemporary American society. It appears in its television shows, its video games and its Hollywood-produced films. It manifests itself in the willingness of its multinational corporations to rape the Earth. America is by far the largest manufacturer and merchandiser on the planet of lethal hardware, of military and police equipment, of machines for the production of death and destruction. This is a sign of a profoundly sick society.
This state of affairs has not come about because the American people are inherently violent and psychopathic. As with all social matters of this scale the historical causes are complex. But one of them is the dominance in American society of corporate capitalism, which elevates shareholder profit above all other concerns, and which has created the social conditions where evil men can attain great power and influence, both within government and without. The American people tend to trust their government and their political leaders (though there have always been those who could recognize corruption in individual politicians when they saw it). This trust is given partly because of the indoctrination Americans receive as children in school but also partly because their government was in fact founded on republican principles designed to ensure their liberty and happiness. But this trust has now been betrayed. When evil men become leaders of the nation this corruption percolates down and sickens all levels of society.
Since the end of World War II, and partly due to the absorption then into the American "security and intelligence" agencies of so many former Nazis, the entire political structure of the United States has been infected with evil. There have, of course, been men of outstanding moral stature, for example, Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan Jr, U.S. Senator George Mitchell and President John F. Kennedy (whose assassination in 1963, probably an operation involving the CIA, Mossad and the Mafia, was the first coup d'etat in the history of the U.S., the second being the coup which began with the 2000 usurpation of the Presidency by George W. Bush, a coup which is still being implemented in 2002 under cover of the "War on Terrorism" and has not yet been completed).
But there have also been corrupt Supreme Court Justices (Rehnquist and Scalia), primitive, blatantly racist U.S. Senators (Jesse Helms), a transvestite head of the FBI who was blackmailed into ignoring organized crime (J. Edgar Hoover), a scumbag President (Nixon) succeeded by a series of traitors possessing only contempt for the U.S. Constitution (Reagan, Bush Sr. and Bush Jr.), along with a multitude of elected and unelected officials (including many judges at all levels) whose only concern was and has been their own power, prestige and material wealth, who were and are ready to support genocidal foreign and domestic policies (targeted at the expendable and the non-white both within and without the U.S.) as long as there is something in it for them.
But we should not blame only the leaders and official functionaries, corrupt and in same cases evil, though they may be. It is not fundamentally the government which is at fault — it is the mass of the people themselves, who seem to lack the moral sense required of a people who are to restrain their government from descent into depravity.
Many Americans have consciously prostituted themselves, realizing that the CIA and gang are creating immense death and destruction throughout the world, but as long as they enjoy cheap gasoline, coffee, bananas and tennis shoes, they think it is great. ... Many in the upper classes think that the CIA, FBI and NSA are great institutions, keeping the chips flowing their way. Those who condone bloodshed and exploitation in the service of their lifestyles, often coming up with highly strained rationales, will create future circumstances where they will find the shoe on the other foot. They will experience what living like a slave is like, barely surviving while their masters live in opulence.— Wade Frazier: Investigating Possible Conspiracies and Cover-ups
Actually democracy itself, when implemented so that every adult (however stupid) is given a right to vote, is inherently flawed, since it inevitably becomes the tyranny of the majority. As noted 200 years ago by A. F Tyler, democracy leads to the corruption of the financial system of any nation, because voters (in particular the stupid and self-interested ones) sooner or later discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury, by electing whichever politician promises to give it to them. In order to fulfill that promise (to some extent at least, so as to be re-elected) that politician must connive in the acquisition of government wealth by any means available, which in the case of the United States, is mainly the economic exploitation of third-world countries and of the economic resources of the planet (partly to manufacture weapons of death to sell to those and other third-world countries for financial gain).
A U.S. politician remains in office basically by stealing (together with his fellow politicians) from the rest of the world to finance the comparatively comfortable (and generally self-indulgent) lifestyle of the middle-class American voter (whether Democrat or Republican). George W. Bush's "War on Terrorism" is a campaign, not against terrorism, but to gain total control of the Earth's economic resources so as to maintain this system of global theft. Without continued capitalist exploitation of the planet's resources the American social and financial system will collapse. But if it persists then we face global tyranny and probably global eco-death once the fifty billion barrels of oil in the Caspian Basin (following a similar amount from already-exploited resources) has been extracted, refined and burned, with the major risk of producing irreversible atmospheric heating.
Contrary to the widespread belief among Americans that the U.S. is a constitutional democracy, the words "democracy" and "democratic" are nowhere used in the U.S. Constitution. The Constitution of the United States does not establish a democracy; it establishes a republic.
... democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security, or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths. — James Madison, as quoted in Robert Welch's Republics and Democracies
Democracy in the United States (in which the votes of dim-witted uneducated manipulable illiterates count as much as the votes of those of above-average intelligence who can understand what is best for society as a whole and not just for themselves) has finally produced a tyranny, with power concentrated in the executive branch of the U.S. federal government and denied to the states and to the people. The other two branches of the government, the legislative and the judicial, have largely become willing tools of the executive, exactly as happened in Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Everything the German Nazis did was legal, either because they appointed corrupt judges to interpret existing law as the Nazis wished or because they enacted laws to allow them to do what they wished to do (as has again occurred in the U.S. Congress with the October 2001 passage of the grossly misnamed "Patriot Act" — those congresscritters really have a perverted sense of humor).
The evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy. The people do not want [that is, do not lack] virtue; but are the dupes of pretended patriots. — Elbridge Gerry, delegate to the 1787 Constitutional Convention, as quoted in Republics and Democracies
But actually the executive branch no longer requires a compliant legislative branch to enact laws because it can do so itself, by means of executive orders. The President can stipulate that something is the case and if no-one in Congress raises any objection within a few weeks (and no congresscritter has ever raised any objection to the thousands of executive orders which have been promulgated) then whatever the President has stipulated becomes part of the law of the land. This mechanism of executive orders provides near-dictatorial powers to the U.S. President.
And George W. Bush has now issued an executive order giving him the legal right to order the killing of anyone deemed to be a terrorist (Bush Gives Green Light to CIA for Assassination of Named Terrorists). Interestingly, it seems that although the executive order is presented as applying to foreign "terrorists" there is nothing to prevent it from being applied to domestic "terrorists". A "terrorist" is a "terrorist" whether he is within the borders of the U.S. or beyond. And who's to say a "terrorist" cannot be an American citizen? Thus George W. Bush has now given himself the legal right to order the killing of any American citizen that he chooses to label as a "terrorist". The American Republic has indeed fallen upon grim times.
A tyrannical executive branch of the U.S. federal government, arrogating all rights and powers to itself in blatant disregard of the 9th and 10th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, has now embarked on a war of aggression against the rest of the world (particularly against any countries whose actions may threaten American economic dominance), having cynically duped the American people (by carrying out a fake terrorist attack which took the lives of thousands of them and then blaming "Arab terrorists") into believing that this is a just and moral war. It is an administration that is dominated by men who have no moral scruples, who seek only to increase their own power and wealth, who have only contempt for the principles upon which the United States was founded, who are in fact traitors to the American Republic, and who deserve to receive the penalty for treason — and that soon, before they succeed in extending the tyranny which now exists in the United States to encompass the entire planet (or else produce by their actions the enormous death and destruction resulting from another world war, with large-scale use of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons).
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