foreign policy
Apathy is the New Fascism
The United States is the most powerful country on Earth. Our military is huge and our politicians send it anywhere they please. Our corporations are some of the largest private companies to exist in all human history. Some of the greatest artists, scientists, writers, musicians and inventors of all time are Americans. We were the first colony to rip off the chains of imperialism.
We now place the same chains on others.
The United States of today perpetrates the same crimes on the rest of the world as the Europe of centuries ago. We’re ruled by a partnership of corporations and politicians willing to destroy liberties and lives in order to maintain their power. How long we’ve been this way is unclear, but when I look at the things we’ve done lately --- like choosing to topple a sovereign government in Iraq, eagerly purchasing mass goods made by sweatshop labor in the Third World, blocking action on global warming --- I see a nation that’s completely betrayed its founding ideals. We do to the rest of the world what the British did to us: exploit without shame.
Beyond Iraq
In retrospect, the War on Terror was lost in 2002 when President Bush began campaigning for war in Iraq. It wasn’t even the act of bombing and invasion. It was his insistence, the inevitability, the lack of discussion, the assertion that America was allowed to topple a country that, for all its terrible flaws, did absolutely nothing to deserve being torn down by a state all the way on the other side of the world.
We lost the hearts and minds of people all over. Only a minority within the U.S. --- the liberals --- stood up for peace and were easily swept aside by a panicky, easily manipulated, ignorant, bloodthirsty mass who called themselves patriots and accused everyone else of being traitors. Bush got his war. America signed its own death warrant. The “moderates” and the “centrists” and other people with no principles besides taking the easy path and not rocking the boat, all went along with it. Never forget.
We often measure the cost of war as five and a half years, 3500 dead soldiers, 27000 wounded, an impossible-to-pin-down number of dead and wounded Iraqi civilians, police and military, hundreds of billions of dollars and so on. But what about the other consequences? The ones that don’t have numbers?
They might hurt even worse.