my question was perhaps based on this type of statement - but if it was assuming too much, then I recind it completely: I did not take offense at your essay. go back and read my post. I took offense at the anti-semitic material. I did not say to ask al qaeda. That is ridiculous. As you know, I said to ask the Iranians, who, having been attacked by weapons furnished by a third party, might be able to sympathize with a US being threatened by weapons furnished by a third party. An analogy. Again, as you know, I did not say those countries were the same, only that they all share nuclear capability and are therefore arguably potential threats. My 'whining' is based on the fact that the actions now being contemplated are the very type of thing that leads to crises. Your posts seem to be little more than foolish exaggeration and mischaracterization of others' posts, rather than an exchange of ideas. If you wish to believe what the politicians say today, that they are benevolent and free of profit motive, and that anywhere in their list of 'goals' is to keep 'my ass safe,' more power to you. You are in good company. I hope you continue to enjoy your discussion.
"Why, of course the people don't want war... but, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament or a communist dictatorship... voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger." -- Hermann Goering 01 NOV 2002 Is America Becoming a Fascist State? - Anis Shivani Since mainstream left-liberal media do not seriously ask this question, the analysis of what has gone wrong and where we are heading has been mostly off-base. Investigation of the kinds of under-handed, criminal tactics fascist regimes undertake to legitimize their agenda and accelerate the rate of change in their favor is dismissed as indulging in "conspiracy theory." Liberals insist that this regime must be treated under the rules of "politics as usual." But this doesn't consider that one election has already been stolen, and that September's repeat of irregularities in Florida was a clear warning that more such thuggery is on the way. If the "f" word is uttered, liberals are quick to note certain obvious dissimilarities with previous variants of fascism and say that what is happening in America is not fascist. It took German justice minister Herta Daeubler-Gmelin to make the comparison explicit (under present American rules of political discourse, she has been duly sacked from her cabinet post); but at the liberal New York Times or The Nation, American writers dare not speak the truth. The blinkered assertion that we are immune to the virus ignores degrees of convergence and distinction based on the individual patient's history. The Times and other liberal voices have been obsessed over the last year with the rise of minority fascist parties in the Netherlands, France, and other European countries. They have questioned the tastefulness of new books and movies about Hitler, and again demonized such icons of Nazism as Leni Riefenstahl. Is this perhaps a displacement of American anxiety onto the safer European scene, liberal intellectuals here not wanting to confront the troubling truth? The pace of events in the last year has been almost as blindingly fast as it was after Hitler's Machtergreifung and the consolidation of fascist power in 1933. Speed stuns and silences. Max Frankel, former editor of the Times, quotes from biographer Joachim Fest in his review of Speer: The Final Verdict: " . . .how easily, given appropriate conditions, people will allow themselves to be mobilized into violence, abandoning the humanitarian traditions they have built up over centuries to protect themselves from each other," and that a "primal being" such as Hitler "will always crop up again." Is Frankel really redirecting his anxiety about the primal being that has arisen in America? When Frankel says that "Speer far more than Hitler [because the former came from a culturally refined background] makes us realize how fragile these precautions are, and how the ground on which we all stand is always threatened," is this an oblique reference to the ground shifting from under us? The proposed Iraqi adventure, which is only the first step in a more ambitious militarist agenda, has been opposed by the most conservative warmongers of past administrations. If the test of any theory is its predictive capacity, Bush's extreme risk-taking is better explained by the fascist model. Purely economic motives are a large part of the story, but there is a deeper derivation that exceeds such mundane rationales. Several of the apparent contradictions in Bush's governance make perfect sense if the fascist prism is applied, but not with the normal perspective. To pose the question doesn't mean that this is a completed project; at any point, anything can happen to shift the course of history in a different direction. Yet after repeated and open corruption of the normal electoral process, several declarations of world war (including in three major addresses, and now the National Security Strategy document), adventurous and unprecedented military doctrines, suspension of much of the Bill of Rights, and clear signals that a declaration of emergency to crush remaining dissent is on the way, surely it is time to analyze the situation differently. Absent that perspicacity, false diagnoses and prescriptions will continue. It is fine to be concerned about tyrannous Muslim regimes, and surely they need to set their own house in order, but not now, not in this context, and not under the auspices of the American fascist regime. Liberals don't yet realize, or fail to admit, that they may have been condemned to irrelevance for quite some time; the death blow against even mild welfare statism might already have been struck. The similarities between American fascism and particularly the National Socialist precedent, both historical and theoretical, are remarkable. Fascism is home, it is here to stay, and it better be countered with all the intellectual resources at our disposal.
Excerpt from Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf: The function of propaganda does not lie in the scientific training of the individual, but in calling the masses' attention to certain facts, processes, necessities, etc., whose significance is thus for the first time placed within their field of vision. The whole art consists in doing this so skillfully that everyone will be convinced that the fact is real, the process necessary, the necessity correct, etc. But since propaganda is not and cannot be the necessity in itself, since its function, like the poster, consists in attracting the attention of the crowd, and not in educating those who are already educated or who are striving after education and knowledge, its effect for the most part must be aimed at the emotions and only to a very limited degree at the so-called intellect... The more modest its intellectual ballast, the more exclusively it takes into consideration the emotions of the masses, the more effective it will be... "The art of propaganda lies in understanding the emotional ideas of the great masses and finding, through a psychologically correct form, the way to the attention and thence to the heart of the broad masses. The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand [or believe]... "The war propaganda of the English and Americans were psychologically sound. By representing the Germans to their own people as barbarians and Huns, they prepared the individual soldier for the terrors of war, and thus helped to preserve him from disappointments. After this, the most terrible weapon that was used against him seemed only to confirm what his propagandists had told him; it likewise reinforced his faith in the truth of his government's assertions, while on the other hand it increased his rage and hatred against the vile enemy For the cruel effects of the weapon, whose use by the enemy he now came to know, gradually came to confirm for him the 'Hunnish' brutality of the barbarous enemy, which he had heard all about; and it never dawned on him for a moment that his own weapons possibly, if not probably, might be even more terrible in their effects... "The function of propaganda is, for example, not to weigh and ponder the rights of different people, but exclusively to emphasize the one right which it has set out to argue for. Its task is not to make an objective study of the truth, in so far as it favors the enemy, and then set it before the masses with academic fairness; its task is to serve our own right, always and unflinchingly... The broad mass of a nation does not consist of diplomats, or even professors of political law, or even individuals capable of forming a rational opinion; it consists of plain mortals, wavering and inclined to doubt and uncertainty. As soon as our own propaganda admits so much as a glimmer of right on the other side, the foundation for doubt in our own right has been laid. The masses are then in no position to distinguish where foreign injustice ends and our own begins."
Um, last I checked, China, Israel, France, and the ex-Soviet Republics are not calling for our destruction. And good grief, are we not in a crisis at the moment?!? Have we not been targeted? Does a crisis only exist in your mind if US foreign policy has created it? Grow up. Exchange of ideas? There has been no exchange from you other than to blame our government for the woes of the world. And I bitterly dislike my conversion being called 'foolish exaggeration'!! Low blow, Mad, Low Blow! If you honestly believe our government cares nothing for its citizens and exists solely to fatten the pockets of its minions, you really ought to move somewhere you can feel nurtured and loved. Seriously. How can you bear living in a country that is so purely corrupt and uncaring about the welfare of its citizens? I hear the immigration policies are considerably lax at the moment in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon....but if you do any trading, it'll be in the barter of cooking oil, banana leaves, and a lot of sorghum. And oh, those things you take for granted, like running water, central air/heating, access to the Internet, supermarkets with actual goods on the shelves, schools, the right to speak out, religious tolerance, etc. - you don't really need those, do you? Have a good trip, and please take Wild and trader 556 with you as they are obviously as miserable living under the yoke and tyranny of our evil government as you are. Whoa! Sorry Mad! I had a flashback to my former warmongering self! That was a close one...Excuse me while I put "We Are the World" on the stereo.....there we go....I love this song...ah yes, all is well now, all is well, all is well...
North Korea adds fuel to nuclear crisis George Bush's decision to go easy on Kim Jong Il leaves his plans to invade Iraq looking ever more inconsistent and ill-considered, writes Julian Borger Wednesday January 8, 2003 Could Kim Jong Il be receiving a retainer from Saddam Hussein? No doubt the "Dear Leader" needs the money and the oil, while his timing could not be better from the Iraqi despot's point of view. The sudden escalation of the North Korean nuclear programme and Pyongyang's ejection of international inspectors has complicated the United States strategy both diplomatically and militarily. It is now much harder for the US to go to the security council to make the case for military action against Saddam Hussein, who might have nuclear weapons in a few years time, while pushing a diplomatic approach towards the quixotic North Korean government, which probably has a couple of crude plutonium weapons already. Militarily, while Donald Rumsfeld insists the US can handle two major conflicts at once, in practice the very prospect strains even the American military. For example, the USS Kitty Hawk aircraft carrier and its battle group had been earmarked to serve as a platform for special operations against Iraq. Now it is likely to remain in the Far East. Moreover, while the world has more or less reconciled itself to the inevitability of a war in Iraq, the prospect of a clash in North Korea with nuclear implications would produce an international backlash that could derail even the Bush administration's determined advance on Baghdad. Most strategic analysts say that - short of a coup in Baghdad - a significant worsening of the North Korea confrontation is just about the only scenario that could postpone an invasion of Iraq until next winter. The untimely eruption of defiance in Pyongyang has thus forced the White House to improvise hastily to plug the holes it has punched in the Bush doctrine. There is, for instance, an administration-wide ban on using the word "crisis" in relation to North Korea. Speaking to troops in Texas last Friday, the president argued that while the world was still trying to find common ground on North Korea, it had "spoken with one voice" over Iraq. This was both obviously false (there are still deep splits in the security council over Iraq) and an admission of failure for Washington's policy of containing North Korea. Both South Korea and China have little stomach for more economic sanctions against a country on the brink of implosion. To the question of why North Korea is currently the "lesser evil" on Bush's axis, American officials also point out that Saddam Hussein has, unlike Kim Jong Il, already used weapons of mass destruction. That is true, but it is a statement about the past. Currently Saddam is in better international standing than his North Korean counterpart, having opened his doors to UN weapons inspectors. The "Dear Leader" has not only ripped up international controls on his nuclear activities, he has a track record of supporting terrorism (the central yet unproven charge against Saddam). He also makes most of the currency he seeks for buying Mercedes and Hennessy brandy (he is apparently the company's biggest single customer) from selling weapons systems abroad. The real reason containment remains the US policy of choice in North Korea, but a dirty word when it comes to Iraq, has nothing to do with international law and a lot to do with crude military reality. Kim is being handled gently not in spite of his transgressions, but because of them. He already has the bomb and could conceivably destroy South Korea and large parts of Japan if attacked. Meanwhile, because Saddam's weapons programmes have proceeded more slowly under more intense international scrutiny, he is more vulnerable. Give him another a couple of years, the Washington hawks argue, and we will have to treat him as gingerly as Kim. There is a persuasive logic behind this, but the Bush administration has made it almost impossible to sell on the international stage because of the clumsiness of its foreign policy, which is all the more astonishing in view of the veterans on its team. Having begun 2002 vowing to bring "regime change" to Iraq, Washington has faced an uphill struggle in persuading the UN security council (a body whose usefulness the US belatedly remembered) that its primary interest was disarmament. The about-turn required some unconvincing wordplay from the secretary of state, Colin Powell, and the White House spokesman, Ari Fleischer, who both suggested that if it comprehensively disarmed, the Baghdad regime would by definition have "changed", and might therefore be permitted to stay in power. The performance did not impress. The administration's rhetorical baggage quickly became a cumbersome diplomatic burden, deepening the distrust of would-be allies who suspected that renewed weapons inspections would serve as little more than a pretext for going to war. Furthermore, by warning Saddam Hussein that he will be a target whatever he does, it takes away any incentive he might have had to surrender his most fearsome means of defence. Even if the administration genuinely believes that the only way to truly disarm Iraq is to remove Saddam, it would be in a far better position now if it had kept the revelation to itself, pursued disarmament in word and deed, and allowed the rest of the world to come to its own conclusions. As far as North Korea is concerned, the Bush team's apparent compulsion to act tough (in self-regarding "contrast" to the Clinton administration's policy of engagement) has helped precipitate the current crisis. Pyongyang appears to have been riled by its inclusion in President Bush's celebrated "axis of evil" trio, and by the incoming administration's abrupt and seemingly arbitrary decision to cut off Clinton-era contacts. Kim's nuclear brinksmanship, most analysts agree, is primarily a means of demanding respect and recognition. Having talked tough with no credible threat of force to back it up, the Bush foreign policy team is anxiously looking for a diplomatic way out. The White House is now saying it is ready for "talks" with Pyongyang, but not negotiations. The "axis of evil" must have sounded like a catchy motif when it was first slipped into the president's state of the union address a year ago (Bush's speechwriter, David Frum, originally suggested "axis of hatred", but was told "evil" sounded more "theological"), but there is no end to the trouble it has caused the administration that spawned it. Apart from prodding North Korea into a game of atomic "chicken" and tipping off Saddam Hussein that he has little to gain by disarming, it has mightily annoyed Iran, which could otherwise have been a much more willing and useful ally when it came to getting rid of Saddam. President Bush's aides make much of his "moral clarity", by which they mean his preference for dividing the world into "good and evil", "for us or against us". It was a useful rallying cry in the immediate wake of September 11, but with each passing month since the "axis of evil" came into being, and deals are struck with regimes inhabiting the shadows between good and evil, the picture is getting murkier. Mr Bush's vision looks increasingly as though it has the wrong kind of clarity altogether - easy rhetoric in place of clear-headedness. http://www.guardian.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/story/0,7792,870746,00.html
I believe there is plenty of corruption, but I wouldnt live anywhere else. I LOVE THE USA.....I am with you on that one....
Bush 'drags down the strike threshold' The international taboo on the use of nuclear weapons is being weakened by America's development of new tactical devices, its active targeting of so-called rogue states and its preparations to resume testing, monitoring groups said. A succession of White House policy initiatives had progressively lowered the threshold at which a nuclear strike might be ordered, Martin Butcher of Physicians for Social Responsibility told the conference. more at http://www.guardian.co.uk/nuclear/article/0,2763,871097,00.html World on path to disaster, bomb pioneer warns President George Bush, hijacked by hardliners in his administration, is setting the world on a course towards nuclear disaster, a founder of the nuclear deterrence policy said. The 1995 Nobel peace laureate, Professor Sir Joseph Rotblat, accused the US of developing a policy which regarded nuclear weapons as bad if in the possession of some states or groups but good if they were kept by the US for the sake of world security. more at http://www.guardian.co.uk/nuclear/article/0,2763,871169,00.html regards wild
So nukes should be had by everyone? If not for nukes, what would the world look like now? Seriously, if the US didn't have nukes, what would have stopped the USSR from taking over Europe? Then Asia? What about China? Nukes are here to stay Wild. You can't wish them away. The question thus becomes one of keeping them in the hands of those who would use them for deterrence and not as a means to an end to be used with impunity by fanatics.