Russia and China made up for their shameful conduct in the Libyan tragedy by vetoing the UN ploy to invade Syria, temporarily muffling those war drums. But the crazed drumbeat about Iran continues even though cooler heads argue against military action. This while they impose punishing sanctions on Iran in order to avoid diminished funds for Obama in an election year when American Zionist money is vital for the purchase of American Christian votes.
Wikileaks documents revealed Israel behind a group that murdered several Iranian scientists and when an attack was made on Israeli diplomats in the same fashion, charges that the Iranians were behind it all but drowned out the American presidential campaign farce. In all this fantasy, mainstream media are not just stenographers but leaders in hyping information poor Americans into believing Iran, Syria, Muslims and socialists are menacing the USA. A severely damaged global economy is major reason for this epidemic of unreason and its capitalist class becomes further detached from reality as the situation grows more critical.
After a recession bordering on a depression the U.S. continues economic war on its people by cutting public spending while other nations reduce their populations to even more misery. Greece slashes its minimum wage and lays off more than a hundred thousand public employees so that private investors can collect interest on the national debt. That is the same situation all over the capitalist world, including Russia and China. Though they have only recently jumped into that economic frying pan they seem to have noticed it has become so overheated that the entire kitchen may burst into flames at any moment.
The attack on economic survival is what financial rulers call an austerity program. It means the majority is being forced to pay for the profits of a small minority. As one example, the U.S. Postal Service – the nation’s number one public employer – is under assault because it uses too many workers in an electronic age that finds profits increasing even faster for the few by loss of jobs for the many. These economic rules are a malignant social disease which is at the root of much that threatens humanity’s future.
As western people suffer this austerity assault, those in countries not yet totally under the smothering blanket of finance capital are menaced with the even more deadly threat of war.
Like Libya, Syria has played according to rules not wholly in accord with global capital’s political priests and rabbis and for this reason they are treated as aberrations. They, and nations like Cuba , Iran and Venezuela are labeled anti-democratic by perverters of language who define democracy as the minority rule which exists everywhere in the western world. Libya is now controlled by foreign capital and much less a unified state than it ever was under Kaddafi’s rule. Syria has been run by a party and dynasty for a longer time and is less dependent on a single figure but more on a bureaucracy , a military and a middle class which probably supports the regime, including many who want change but not if it’s imposed on them for the benefit of the west. The depiction of a murderous dictator is a gross simplification, as in Libya, with infiltration and financing from outside the nation helping to foment violence among people with honest grievances, dishonestly provoked. Divisions are heightened among Islamic groups and economic classes with contradictions that find America’s supposed arch enemy al-Qaida now often aligned with its program.
While Syrian people are bombarded with violence and suffering at least partly caused by the west, western people are bombarded by media with inflated death tolls seemingly coming from the only Syrian not yet murdered but whose calculator may soon need new batteries so he can keep counting the slaughters he miraculously avoids.
Bloody foreign policy is an extension of America’s domestic problems, with a billion dollar presidential race that reduces social and moral issues to a battle between religious fanatic patriarchy and secular obsessed bigotry providing a distraction from the reality of a collapsing political sham resting on a precarious economic foundation. An emerging trend towards real democracy offers hope for the future but little immediate relief.
So we continue enduring attacks on our sanity and intelligence that claim Iran is a threat to the planet, especially Israel, while we pile embargos, sanctions and hostilities short of overt war on a nation which has never done anything to the USA or Israel, except rebel against our interference in its rule and criticize that apartheid state , a crime of genocidal anti-Semitism in the mental health crisis center of USraeli misinformation.
Surrounded by American and NATO military bases, without nuclear weapons and no history of invading any nation in modern times, Iran is a threat. Israel, with hundreds of nukes and a record of assaulting its neighbors, and the U.S, with hundreds of military bases all over the world and the only nation to ever use nuclear weapons, are guardians of the peace. If you believe that, you need to take a sedative and see a mental health professional. The rest of us need to further investigate our supposed democratic reality before we allow it to be imposed on other nations.
196 individuals – less than one millionth of a percent of our population! – – have each already given 100,000 dollars or more to “our” presidential candidates, and there are still nine months to go before the election. If excrement is cuisine and war is peace, that’s democracy. We’d better Occupy our government before it destroys us and the rest of the world as well.
By Frank Scott
18 February 2012
@ Countercurrents.org
Frank Scott writes political commentary and satire which appears in print in The Independent Monitor and online at the blog Legalienate http://legalienate.blogspot.com Email: fpscott@gmail.com