America’s "Noble" Cause:
Preserving its Right to Murder, Exploit, Torture, and
Impoverish with Impunity
By
Jason Miller
America is the only country that went from barbarism to
decadence without civilization in between. -
Oscar Wilde
“Why
are we over there in Iraq?”
“To protect our freedoms.”
“How are the Iraqis threatening our freedoms?”
“They attacked us on 9/11.”
“If that is true, why are so many Americans against the
war?”
“I don’t know, but I think Cindy Sheehan and all the other
war protestors should be rounded up and shot.”
04/10/06 "ICH"
-- --
I was involved in this exchange with a co-worker about two
months ago. I was utterly perplexed at how this individual
managed the obvious cognitive dissonance created by thinking
that we are fighting to protect our “freedoms” while
simultaneously holding the notion that non-violent
dissidents “should be rounded up and shot”.
In retrospect, why was I so surprised? As a vehement critic
of the United States government’s foreign and domestic
policies, I have received numerous death threats from
“patriotic” loyalists to the American Empire over the last
year. Recently, a severely brain-washed US resident who
maintains a site called American Jihad
issued a “Farwa” (his spelling) against the editors of
Counterpunch, Dissident Voice,
and Uruknet and against dissident writers
Mike Whitney and Kurt Nimmo. Many of my essays have appeared
on Dissident Voice and Uruknet,
so I suppose I am a target of the “Farwa” too.
Violent Extremists Abound
While many death threats issued by
American hate-mongers may be hollow, the nations of the
Middle East do not have the market cornered on fanatical
ideologues who commit acts of terror. Timothy McVeigh, Eric
Rudolph, Michael Griffin, Paul Hill, Ted Kaczynski, Baruch
Goldstein, David Lane, Donald DeFreeze, Clayton Waagner and
Earl Krugel are but a few of America’s home-grown violent
extremists. America, and often components of its government,
have a history of assassinating dissidents who become too
powerful as they pursue equality and human rights. Fred
Hampton, Malcolm X, RFK, MLK, and Paul Wellstone each met a
premature demise which ended their efforts to introduce real
social justice into the Empire.
Your Mind is our Vessel
Actually, I suspect many of the ardent
supporters of the American Empire truly believe that they
are preserving and spreading noble principles like freedom,
democracy, equality, and human rights. There is no shortage
of propaganda to convince them of this “fact”. Delusions and
illusions “generously” provided by the corporate-controlled
mainstream media afford Empire loyalists with the
opportunity to avoid the burden of independent thinking.
Sound-bites, canards, propaganda, stereo-types, and
white-washed versions of the truth supply their programmed
minds with a virtually endless loop of rationalizations to
justify their approbation of a morally reprehensible entity.
People who continue to nurse at the bosom of Lady Liberty,
the noble symbol of an imaginary land which has never
existed, rail against those who seek peace, social and
economic justice, and human rights. In their perverse
worldview, health care, safety, ample nourishment, and
adequate shelter are reserved for a select segment of the
population in the Empire’s homeland. Those of us who believe
in a more just and equitable world are indeed a threat to
the oppressive capitalist imperialism of the United States.
To perpetuate the Empire’s military dominance and parasitic
exploitation of humanity, our attempts to awaken and rally
the masses must be stopped by any means necessary.
Often accusing proponents of a more just and humane world of
seeking “entitlements” for the poor and oppressed, the foot
soldiers of the Empire are actually struggling with
virtually every fiber of their being to preserve what they
believe to be their own entitlements. Since the concept of
“might making right” reinforces their belief that their
“special rights” supersede the Bill of Rights and the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it is time to
identify and enumerate these exclusive privileges:
Inalienable Rights of Select Citizens
of the American Empire
1. We have the right
to pre-emptively attack the nation or region of our choice
simply based on our belief that they may be a threat to the
Empire. No evidence necessary.
2. We have established and will maintain
the right to murder an unlimited number of innocent
civilians so long as our military machine does the killing
and we label the victims as “collateral damage”.
3. We have the right to label whomever we
choose as “terrorists” or “enemy combatants” and to hold
them indefinitely without a trial.
4. We are exempt from the Geneva
Conventions and have the right to commit acts of torture or
to rendition our unconvicted prisoners to other countries
which will torture them.
5. We have the right to continue glorifying
and justifying the land theft and genocide we committed
against Native Americans.
6. We have the right to continue to
claiming we are the “leader of the free world” when slavery
was a legal institution in our nation until the Civil War,
women were not able to vote until the Twentieth Century,
institutionalized segregation existed until the 1960’s, and
we deny 5% of our population (Gays and Lesbians) equal
rights and protection under the Constitution.
7. We have the right to sell ourselves as a
“democracy” despite the fact that we are a constitutional
republic, and despite the fact that corporate interests,
lobbyists, wealthy campaign donors, and Israel shape most of
our foreign and domestic policy.
8. We have the right to bill ourselves as a
“bastion of human rights” (and thus justify our imperial
interventions) despite the fact that we have the highest
prison population in the world, we have a government which
tortures on a wide scale, and we are one of the few
“developed” nations which metes out the death penalty.
9. We have the right to hoard the largest
stockpile of weapons of mass destruction in the history of
humankind while prohibiting other nations from possessing
such weapons. We also are the only nation with the right to
employ WMD’s on a wide scale, as evidenced by our
annihilation of over 100,000 Japanese civilians.
10. We have the right to plunder 25% of the
world’s resources to provide for a scant 5% of the world’s
population, while blustering that if the rest of the world
embraced laissez-faire capitalism, they could reap the same
bountiful harvest. (Forget the mathematical impossibilities
involved. Those just get in the way of the propaganda!)
11. We have the right to continue to
empower multi-national corporations with the rights of
person-hood, limit their exposure to criminal prosecution
and civil suits, and to enable them to exploit human beings
in other nations. As long as our corporate friends are
showing a profit, they can operate sweat-shops, facilitate
the murder of labor agitators, maintain monopolies,
off-shore American jobs while exploiting the foreign workers
who take them, avoid paying taxes by setting up “shell
headquarters” in places like Bermuda, destroy the
environment, and continue the race to the bottom in wages
and benefits, here and abroad.
12. We have the right to maintain and
enhance a socio-economic system that places a significant
portion of the world’s wealth in the hands of about 3
million people (approximately one percent of the US
population). Tax cuts and an end to estate taxes will ensure
that the Empire’s plutocracy perpetuates its reign. We have
the right to foster a malevolent world economic order which
results in 3 billion human beings living on less than $2 per
day.
13. We have the right to account for half
of the world’s military expenditures to “provide for the
common defense” of 5% of the world’s population while 46
million of our people have no health insurance, 13% of the
overall American population lives in poverty, over a million
are homeless, an alarmingly high percentage of Black America
suffers poverty and receives a pathetic education, and
crises like New Orleans result in passive mass murder and
diasporas of “undesirables”.
14. We have the right to send military
recruiters into public schools. Our recruiters have access
to student addresses and phone numbers and we pay them to
use propaganda and financial incentives to entice our youth
into sacrificing themselves for the latest imperial crusade.
15. We have the right to accrue as much
public and personal debt as we deem “necessary” to
perpetuate the American Dream for our nation and to satiate
our personal obsessions with acquiring material possessions.
16. We have the right to impose our hollow,
shallow, and violent cultural values on a world cowed into
acceptance by the raw military and economic power of the
American Empire.
17. We have the right to spy on our
citizens, eliminate habeas corpus, and contract private
companies like Blackwater to avoid the constraints of posse
comitatus. It is of no concern to us that our actions
seriously conflict with the US Constitution.
18. We have the right to produce 25% of
greenhouse gasses, ignore and discount mounting evidence of
global warming, and refuse to sign the Kyoto Treaty.
19. We have the right to malign, threaten,
intimidate, or kill those within the Empire who have the
audacity to question or oppose our agenda.
20. We have the right to maintain a corrupt
Duopoly consisting of the Republican and Democratic Parties,
which consistently present American voters with candidates
whose goals are to perpetuate the Empire and the agendas of
its corporate and plutocratic leaders.
21. We have the right to use the IMF and
World Bank to impose our economic will on “developing”
nations which we “help” by burdening them with crushing
debt.
22. We have the right to ignore and violate
international law while demanding that the rest of the world
(excepting Great Britain and Israel) adhere to it
stringently.
23. We have the right to subsidize and
support Israel’s ongoing ethnic cleansing of the
Palestinians.
24. We have the right to concentrate the
power of the United States government in the hands of the
Executive Branch under the pretext that it is necessitated
by the “War on Terror”.
25. We have the right to label those who
dare to oppose our invasions or genocides as savages or
terrorists and strip them of their human rights.
There you have it. Now the American Empire’s principal
supporters and beneficiaries have their own “Bill of
Rights”. Ironically, it has more than twice the number of
rights guaranteed to all Americans under the original
Constitutional Amendments. Since the true Bill of Rights is
anathema to their cause, it is essential that the Empire
loyalists’ “special rights” outnumber the rights protected
by our Constitution.
A Severe Spiritual Malady
Certainly believing in America’s and
its supporters’ entitlement to these “special rights” would
qualify one as a sociopath (one with minimal concern for the
welfare and feelings of others) within the world community.
However, in the American Empire, those subscribing to such
depraved and self-centered “rights” receive affirmation and
acceptance.
Obviously this Bill of Rights II is my construct and does
not formally exist. However, each of the entitlements I
enumerated is necessary to enable the United States to exist
in its current perverse form. If you truly support and
pledge allegiance to the American Empire, this Bill of
Rights II represents the core of your sociopolitical
beliefs.
For those of you who embrace the notion that Divine
Providence bestowed these “inalienable rights” upon you and
your nation, I call upon you to search your souls. I
challenge you to do a long and fearless moral inventory. If
you do, and the maleficent elements of the United States of
America have not managed to burn your conscience out of your
psyche, I predict you will begin the journey to rejoin the
brotherhood of humanity by renouncing your support of the
American Empire.
If you are so narcissistic (or perhaps morally bereft) that
you have no problem with the means by which the American
Empire sustains its unregenerate existence, at least
consider a pragmatic angle. The United States is pursuing a
ruthless course which will eventually lead to a fierce and
violent backlash, which will probably affect you. The 6.2
billion other members of the human race are only going to
accept so much abuse before they strike back in a powerful
way.
Jason Miller is a 39 year old sociopolitical essayist
with a degree in liberal arts and an extensive
self-education. When he is not spending time with his wife
and three sons, researching, or writing, he is working as a
loan counselor. He is a member of Amnesty International and
an avid supporter of Oxfam International and Human Rights
Watch. He welcomes responses at
willpowerful@hotmail.com
or comments on his blog, Thomas Paine's Corner,
at
http://civillibertarian.blogspot.com/.
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