John Kaminski: The Dream In Flames

Dictator Bush and his wimpy quisling suckups at the New York Times, CNN, and Fox have proved that Adolf Hitler's strategy was right — if you tell a lie enough times it soon becomes the truth in the public mind.

And we see how this technique has now come full circle in this prerecorded nondebate about bombing Iraq into a deeper level of oblivion.

Remember late autumn 2002, when from seemingly out of nowhere Bush pulled the long-dormant Iraq issue out of nowhere? At the time the U.S. media were awash in stories about how many Americans would die from the president's ill-considered order to vaccinate the entire population for smallpox. That the president's father had just acquired a substantial interest in the company that was to make the vaccines never quite managed to make the front page.

The unsolved anthrax murders had already dissapeared as a story from the mainstream media, once the trail of suspicion led straight to the U.S. government's door. A permanent rigor mortis had already set into the 9/11 probe and the unsolved sudden murders of more than 3,000 Americans. But Enron and Halliburton's troubles seemed to be percolating a bit, as many business executives who had stolen millions from innocent but greedy Americans seemed to be headed for embarrassing questions in various courts. It was not until later that a Bush-appointed appeals court judge's order would take the heat off Cheney for engineering that whole deal that stole billions in energy costs from the people of California. Cheney never liked California; he's a Wyoming boy.

What the criminal administration needed was a distraction from all this consternation, and Iraq has been that and more.

Now, not one of those overpaid media succubi who smirk on the TV screen every night and tell you America is going to win this war against Iraq has the gonads to tell their dictator that his planned invasion of that bomb-pocked nation breaks every law known to man and signed by the United States: the Geneva Accords, the Nuremburg agreements and every treaty civilized people have endorsed since the Romans bugged out of Britain — it is illegal to attack someone if they're not attacking you. A pre-emptive war is not allowed by civilized people.

Hey, why would they ask such a question? It's only the reason why there's any peace in the world at all, that's why. You don't go around gunning down your neighbors because you think they're going to do something bad to you sometime in the future. Only a criminal psychopath would do something like that.

But the current president of the United States knows something more than all the diplomats in human history put together. After all, he says he's a religious man. And Jesus did say he brought not peace but a sword. That's George W. Bush's kind of religion. I'm sure you could convince him that somewhere in the Bible it says it's OK to obliterate anyone you suspect of having weapons of mass destruction even though you can't prove it. Wasn't that the rationale of the Biblical Israelites when they wiped out all those other tribes?

Or if it's not in the Bible, maybe those sophisticated designers of the Project for the New American Century, the ones who wrote America needed "a Pearl Harbor-type event" shortly before the World Trade Center came crashing down, can get it put in. Maybe in a new version of Deuteronomy 28:56-58, that part where God says mothers will have to eat their own children if they don't obey God's holy law, maybe Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz can change that to it's OK to nuke innocent families because their leader didn't obey orders from their masters to give them all the oil they wanted.

Probably most Christians wouldn't even notice the change. It's all about the collection plate, anyway.

Or I guess some religious people like the singing. Onward Christian Soldiers, marching off to war, with the cross of Jesus, going on before. Amen.

I heard the crosses they're taking to Iraq are made out of depleted uranium, too. A lot harder than gold. They can really smite the enemy with them, just like our drug czar, that Barry McCaffrey guy. You know he used to be a general and he was in charge of the operation that gunned down all those Iraqis trying to run away from Kuwait after the first Gulf War. They called it the "Highway of Death." A lot of American pilots thought it was just like a shooting gallery at an amusement park. I don't know if they got points for it or not. McCaffrey became real famous for killing all those people who didn't have a chance, driving rusted-out trucks trying to escape American jets. He's a true American hero.

Yep, America's really going to put on a show. The American armed forces have the coolest high-tech weapons ever, and they've been saying — especially that Rumsfeld fellow — that they're going to use some new weapons nobody's ever seen before. I'll bet they'll be on TV, too. I wonder if CNN will make up a jingle like "Showdown with Iraq" to go along with Rumsfeld's plans to use "calmative agents" on the population of Baghdad, so as to reduce the resistance to American forces, y'know.

I can just imagine the new logo on Fox: "Gassing the masses." The ratings will probably be good.

Calmative agents. I like that term. Just like the Russians used on those Chechen terrorists who tried to hijack that Russian theater awhile back. Just shot the gas in there and they all went to sleep. I think that's a big improvement in warfare, and Americans should be proud to use stuff like that. I mean, instead of dropping all these humongous bombs on people and blowing them to bits, just spread a little cloud of chemical smoke over them and put them all to sleep. That's a real improvement in warfare, and Americans should be real proud to use something like that. It makes war a lot more civilized. Just put 'em to sleep instead of blowing 'em to bits.

'Course the problem in Russia was that a lot of 'em didn't wake up.

But there'll still be bombs. Plenty of bombs that we'll watch on TV. Cameras right in the tips of the bombs. Ride 'em right down to the target. See all those buildings blow up. Cool. 'Course they don't show the people being blown up. They won't show the searing heat from those heralded U.S. laser-guided bombs incinerating the crinkled skin of already-sick Iraqi children. Try to imagine the sound that crackling would make and think of something appropriate for a U.S. military recruiting poster.

That wouldn't be right on TV. Hell, if you showed that, bodies flying apart and heads being blown off, the skin of little children crackling in flames, people wouldn't want to go to war at all, would they? Hell, we can't have that.

They also were going to use some kind of fancy bomb that knocked out everybody's electronics in the area it was used, but I think they ditched that idea when they figured it would also probably make all their own airplanes fall out of the sky.

But the best part, I think, the most effective form of warfare, is the depleted uranium ammunition, the gift that keeps on killing year after year after year.

Could anything be more illustrative of the top leadership in America being completely and certifiably insane than using ammunition that guarantees a bitter harvest of disease and death among its own troops for years to come. Consider the casualty factor from the first Gulf War. Only 147 American personnel were killed during combat, a substantial number of those from accidental (we hope) friendly fire. But now, the Gulf War death toll 13 years later is around 10,000 Americans (if you check around on the Internet), with another 140,000 afflicted with really nasty diseases that are passed to those wives and children who manage to survive for any length of time.

Sure, you get the standard argument from the psycho U.S. government that these maladies are caused by other things, like the oil well fires (now alleged by some veterans to have been set by American personnel) and poison gas attacks. But the two main suspected carcinogenic culprits continue to be depleted uranium ammunition and strange vaccinations about which the U.S. government never would say and won't to this day what was actually in them. Go wave your damned American flag about that one, buddy.

America kills it own soldiers just by using DU ammunition. People get rich selling nuclear waste to ordnance manufacturers. And American soldiers die because of it. You can't deny it. There's too much evidence, everywhere.

Now we must return to the lead of our story: lies told often enough that they become the truth in the minds of an addled and distracted populace that wishes the whole story would just go away.

It is not Iraq that has weapons of mass destruction and uses them against its neighbors. It is the United States.

Compare the two nations. How many nations has Iraq invaded under its present leadership?

Answer: Two. First Iran, with the eager backing of the United States, which supplied it with chemical and biological weapons (and now proposes to use the same weapons to attack Iraq for using chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction). Second, Kuwait, which was stealing Iraqi oil, and anyway, the claim that it is a part of Iraq is legitimate; Kuwait, Iraq and Saudi Arabia were all created arbitrarily by the oil companies (as was Saudi Arabia).

Then, how many countries has America invaded and used weapons of mass destruction against during the same time period.

Answer: Try 13. Grenada 1983, Lebanon 1983, 1984 (both Lebanese and Syrian targets), Libya 1986, El Salvador 1980s, Nicaragua 1980s, Iran 1987, Panama 1989, Iraq 1991-2000, Somalia 1993, Bosnia 1994, 1995, Sudan 1998, Afghanistan 1998, Yugoslavia 1999. (Thanks to William Blum, "Rogue State.")

So when those mostly white men (they're all white at heart) gather around the table at the United Nations and make their judgment that Iraq needs to be invaded, they're just pulling out the same story that the Western powers have used ever since the Crusades were started to go and loot the dark-skinned natives. The lie is so colossal that it just makes me want to throw up.

When Americans — otherwise intelligent and kind — say Iraq should be invaded because they are connected with the 9/11 attacks — there is no recognized shred of evidence that this is so — it makes me want to throw up as well.

And when the world's media feigns hysteria about Iraq being a menace to its neighbors — at the same time when not far away Israel is perpetrating one of the great genocides in human history, the erasing of the entire nation of Palestine, and because most newspapers are owned by interests allied to Israel, no one is saying a word — it makes me want to ... well, you know.

The world is, in fact, mad. Willfully and deliberately so.

People of principle need to assert themselves now. A poison has spread around the entire globe. Every echo of every thought emanating from virtually every radio station, television channel and major newspaper throughout the entire world (well, certainly the Western world, anyway) is a lie. And for this lie, thousands of people are being murdered every day.

The United Nations itself, consisting of representatives of all the countries on Earth, looks with favor on this newest lie, that Iraq is the threat to the world and needs to be divested of its leaders and its resources. So, the whole world agrees to participate in this lie, presumably in exchange for future political advantages from the aggressor government that seeks, as is its usual custom, to perpetrate this particular lie for its own geopolitical and financial gain, yet couches its motives in phrases of perfunctory and insincere nobility.

The big news in this is that the whole world is agreeing to participate in the slaughter of innocents because the most powerful country wishes to perpetrate its continuing campaign of dishonest, imperialistic gambits in order to increase its wealth. There is no other reason. The alpha dog wishes to destroy an entire nation, and the subservient pups that all other nations have become gather round, hoping to steal leftover scraps from the slaughter.

In all this, where are the principles of a free society of free people living in a free world? Where is the compassion that supposedly distinguishes humans from other animals? Where is the basic integrity of members of any society who agree to be civilized and not kill other people except in self-defense?

I'll tell you where they are. They're gone.

Of this event, our posterity will calculate the loss of our humanity and our honor, but in sociological terms, this complicity of the entire world to participate in this latest vigilante lynching of Iraq may well signal for us as a species the end of evolution and the beginning of entropy ... and the long, slow slide toward an ignominious extinction.

The future of the whole world is mortgaged to the vicious caprice of the American police state. Honest men cower in their castles and calculate the cost of their betrayal of the human race. The dream is in flames.

- John Kaminski is a writer who lives on the coast of Florida, and has a book coming out soon filled with essays a lot like this one.

© Scoop Media