The Machine Is Dying (Why You Should Leave America)

Chris Hedges, one of the braver authors in America nowadays, was asked recently what he thought was coming.

He was being asked this in the context of a feature film produced by Vice Magazine, entitled "The Second American Revolution."   Hedges, if the name isn't familiar, has written some pretty forthright books; "Christian Fascists - The Christian Right and the War On America", and "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning" are two of his.

"America is an Empire," said Hedges.   "That empire is really a machine.   The machine is dying."

He then posited that civil war was our next stop in the sorry decline of our country.   "The machine requires violence.  It permits further repression."

Bleak words.

I don't often post requotes - but this is one you need to read.  It's in the public-domain, without an author-credit - -but it's another one I'd've written.

See, I've traveled a good part of this globe, and can attest to what the unnamed author states here.   Hope is fading pretty fast for any sort of cheerful outcome to the mess that our leaders have made - I fear those of us who are the smartest of the bunch will abandon our altruism and start looking for the exits.

But don't listen to me.  Read on.....

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Why You Should Leave America

Americans, I have some bad news for you:

You have the worst quality of life in the developed world – by a wide margin.

If you had any idea of how people really lived in Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and many parts of Asia, you’d be rioting in the streets calling for a better life. In fact, the average Australian or Singaporean taxi driver has a much better standard of living than the typical American white-collar worker.

I know this because I am an American, and I escaped from the prison you call home.

I have lived all around the world, in wealthy countries and poor ones, and there is only one country I would never consider living in again: The United States of America. The mere thought of it fills me with dread.

Consider this, you are the only people in the developed world without a single-payer health system. Everyone in Western Europe, Japan, Canada, Australia, Singapore and New Zealand has a single-payer system. If they get sick, they can devote all their energies to getting well. If you get sick, you have to battle two things at once, your illness and the fear of financial ruin. 

Millions of Americans go bankrupt every year due to medical bills, and tens of thousands die each year because they have no insurance or insufficient insurance. And don’t believe for a second that rot about America having the world’s best medical care or the shortest waiting lists: I’ve been to hospitals in Australia, New Zealand, Europe, Singapore, and Thailand, and every one was better than the “good” hospital I used to go to back home. The waits were shorter, the facilities more comfortable, and the doctors just as good.

This is ironic, because you need a good health system more than anyone else in the world. Why? Because your lifestyle is almost designed to make you sick.

Let’s start with your diet: Much of the beef you eat has been exposed to fecal matter in processing. Your chicken is contaminated with salmonella. Your stock animals and poultry are pumped full of growth hormones and antibiotics. In most other countries, the government would act to protect consumers from this sort of thing; in the United States, the government is bought off by industry to prevent any effective regulations or inspections. In a few years, the majority of all the produce for sale in the United States will be from genetically modified crops, thanks to the cozy relationship between Monsanto Corporation and the United States government. 

Worse still, due to the vast quantities of high-fructose corn syrup Americans consume, fully one-third of children born in the United States today will be diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes at some point in their lives.

Of course, it’s not just the food that’s killing you, it’s the drugs. If you show any sign of life when you’re young, they’ll put you on Ritalin. Then, when you get old enough to take a good look around, you’ll get depressed, so they’ll give you Prozac. If you’re a man, this will render you chemically impotent, so you’ll need Viagra to get it up. Meanwhile, your steady diet of trans-fat-laden food is guaranteed to give you high cholesterol, so you’ll get a prescription for Lipitor. Finally, at the end of the day, you’ll lay awake at night worrying about losing your health plan, so you’ll need Lunestra to go to sleep.

With a diet guaranteed to make you sick and a health system designed to make sure you stay that way, what you really need is a long vacation somewhere. Unfortunately, you probably can’t take one. I’ll let you in on little secret: if you go to the beaches of Thailand, the mountains of Nepal, or the coral reefs of Australia, you’ll probably be the only American in sight. And you’ll be surrounded crowds of happy Germans, French, Italians, Israelis, Scandinavians and wealthy Asians. Why? Because they’re paid well enough to afford to visit these places AND they can take vacations long enough to do so. Even if you could scrape together enough money to go to one of these incredible places, by the time you recovered from your jetlag, it would time to get on a plane and rush back to your job.

If you think I’m making this up, check the stats on average annual vacation days by country:

Finland: 44
Italy: 42
France: 39
Germany: 35
UK: 25
Japan: 18
USA: 12

The fact is, they work you like dogs in the United States. This should come as no surprise: the United States never got away from the plantation/sweat shop labor model and any real labor movement was brutally suppressed. Unless you happen to be a member of the ownership class, your options are pretty much limited to barely surviving on service-sector wages or playing musical chairs for a spot in a cubicle (a spot that will be outsourced to India next week anyway). 

The very best you can hope for is to get a professional degree and then milk the system for a slice of the middle-class pie. And even those who claw their way into the middle class are but one illness or job loss away from poverty. Your jobs aren’t secure. Your company has no loyalty to you. They’ll play you off against your coworkers for as long as it suits them, then they’ll get rid of you.

Of course, you don’t have any choice in the matter: the system is designed this way. In most countries in the developed world, higher education is either free or heavily subsidized; in the United States, a university degree can set you back over US$100,000. Thus, you enter the working world with a crushing debt. Forget about taking a year off to travel the world and find yourself – you’ve got to start working or watch your credit rating plummet.

If you’re “lucky,” you might even land a job good enough to qualify you for a home loan. And then you’ll spend half your working life just paying the interest on the loan – welcome to the world of American debt slavery. America has the illusion of great wealth because there’s a lot of “stuff” around, but who really owns it? In real terms, the average American is poorer than the poorest ghetto dweller in Manila, because at least they have no debts. If they want to pack up and leave, they can; if you want to leave, you can’t, because you’ve got debts to pay.

All this begs the question: Why would anyone put up with this? Ask any American and you’ll get the same answer: because America is the freest country on earth. If you believe this, I’ve got some more bad news for you: America is actually among the least free countries on earth. Your piss is tested, your emails and phone calls are monitored, your medical records are gathered, and you are never more than one stray comment away from writhing on the ground with two Taser prongs in your ass.

And that’s just physical freedom. Mentally, you are truly imprisoned. You don’t even know the degree to which you are tormented by fears of medical bankruptcy, job loss, homelessness and violent crime because you’ve never lived in a country where there is no need to worry about such things.

But it goes much deeper than mere surveillance and anxiety. The fact is, you are not free because your country has been taken over and occupied by another government. Fully 70% of your tax dollars go to the Pentagon, and the Pentagon is the real government of the United States. You are required under pain of death to pay taxes to this occupying government. If you’re from the less fortunate classes, you are also required to serve and die in their endless wars, or send your sons and daughters to do so. You have no choice in the matter: there is a socioeconomic draft system in the United States that provides a steady stream of cannon fodder for the military.

If you call a life of surveillance, anxiety and ceaseless toil in the service of a government you didn’t elect “freedom,” then you and I have a very different idea of what that word means.

If there was some chance that the country could be changed, there might be reason for hope. But can you honestly look around and conclude that anything is going to change? Where would the change come from? The people? Take a good look at your compatriots: the working class in the United States has been brutally propagandized by jackals like Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity. Members of the working class have been taught to lick the boots of their masters and then bend over for another kick in the ass. They’ve got these people so well trained that they’ll take up arms against the other half of the working class as soon as their masters give the word.

If the people cannot make a change, how about the media? Not a chance. From Fox News to the New York Times, the mass media in the United States is nothing but the public relations wing of the corporatocracy, primarily the military industrial complex. At least the citizens of the former Soviet Union knew that their news was bullshit. 

In America, you grow up thinking you’ve got a free media, which makes the propaganda doubly effective. If you don’t think American media is mere corporate propaganda, ask yourself the following question: have you ever heard a major American news outlet suggest that the country could fund a single-payer health system by cutting military spending?

If change can’t come from the people or the media, the only other potential source of change would be the politicians. Unfortunately, the American political process is among the most corrupt in the world. In every country on earth, one expects politicians to take bribes from the rich. But this generally happens in secret, behind the closed doors of their elite clubs. In the United States, this sort of political corruption is done in broad daylight, as part of legal, accepted, standard operating procedure. In the United States, they merely call these bribes campaign donations, political action committees and lobbyists. One can no more expect the politicians to change this system than one can expect a man to take an axe and chop his own legs out from underneath him.

No, the United States of America is not going to change for the better. The only change will be for the worse. And when I say worse, I mean much worse. As we speak, the economic system that sustained the country during the post-war years is collapsing. The United States maxed out its “credit card” sometime in 2008 and now its lenders, starting with China, are in the process of laying the foundations for a new monetary system to replace the Anglo-American “petro-dollar” system. As soon as there is a viable alternative to the US dollar, the greenback will sink like a stone.

While the United States was running up crushing levels of debt, it was also busy shipping its manufacturing jobs and white-collar jobs overseas, and letting its infrastructure fall to pieces. Meanwhile, Asian and European countries were investing in education, infrastructure and raw materials. Even if the United States tried to rebuild a real economy (as opposed to a service/financial economy) do think American workers would ever be able to compete with the workers of China or Europe? Have you ever seen a Japanese or German factory? Have you ever met a Singaporean or Chinese worker?

There are only two possible futures facing the United States, and neither one is pretty. The best case is a slow but orderly decline – essentially a continuation of what’s been happening for the last two decades. Wages will drop, unemployment will rise, Medicare and Social Security benefits will be slashed, the currency will decline in value, and the disparity of wealth will spiral out of control until the United States starts to resemble Mexico or the Philippines – tiny islands of wealth surrounded by great poverty (the country is already halfway there).

Equally likely is a sudden collapse, perhaps brought about by a rapid flight from the US dollar by creditor nations like China, Japan, Korea and the OPEC nations. A related possibility would be a default by the United States government on its vast debt. One look at the financial balance sheet of the US government should convince you how likely this is: governmental spending is skyrocketing and tax receipts are plummeting – something has to give. If either of these scenarios plays out, the resulting depression will make the present recession look like a walk in the park.

Whether the collapse is gradual or gut-wrenchingly sudden, the results will be chaos, civil strife and fascism. Let’s face it: the United States is like the former Yugoslavia – a collection of mutually antagonistic cultures united in name only. You’ve got your own version of the Taliban: right-wing Christian fundamentalists who actively loathe the idea of secular Constitutional government. You’ve got a vast intellectual underclass that has spent the last few decades soaking up Fox News and talk radio propaganda, eager to blame the collapse on Democrats, gays and immigrants. You’ve got a ruthless ownership class that will use all the means at its disposal to protect its wealth from the starving masses.

On top of all that you’ve got vast factory farms, sprawling suburbs and a truck-based shipping system, all of it entirely dependent on oil that is about to become completely unaffordable. And you’ve got guns. Lots of guns. In short: the United States is about to become a very unwholesome place to be.

Right now, the government is building fences and walls along its northern and southern borders. Right now, the government is working on a national ID system (soon to be fitted with biometric features). Right now, the government is building a surveillance state so extensive that they will be able to follow your every move, online, in the street and across borders. If you think this is just to protect you from “terrorists,” then you’re sadly mistaken. Once the shit really hits the fan, do you really think you’ll just be able to jump into the old station wagon, drive across the Canadian border and spend the rest of your days fishing and drinking Molson? No, the government is going to lock the place down. They don’t want their tax base escaping. They don’t want their “recruits” escaping. They don’t want YOU escaping.

I am not writing this to scare you. I write this to you as a friend. If you are able to read and understand what I’ve written here, then you are a member of a small minority in the United States. You are a minority in a country that has no place for you.

So what should you do?

You should leave the United States of America.

If you’re young, you’ve got plenty of choices. You can teach English in the Middle East, Asia or Europe. Or you can go to university or graduate school abroad and start building skills that will qualify you for a work visa. If you’ve already got some real work skills, you can apply to emigrate to any number of countries as a skilled immigrant. If you are older and you’ve got some savings, you can retire to a place like Costa Rica or the Philippines. If you can’t qualify for a work, student or retirement visa, don’t let that stop you – travel on a tourist visa to a country that appeals to you and talk to the expats you meet there. Whatever you do, go speak to an immigration lawyer as soon as you can. Find out exactly how to get on a path that will lead to permanent residence and eventually citizenship in the country of your choice.

You will not be alone. There are millions of Americans just like me living outside the United States. Living lives much more fulfilling, peaceful, free and abundant than we ever could have attained back home. Some of us happened upon these lives by accident – we tried a year abroad and found that we liked it – others made a conscious decision to pack up and leave for good. You’ll find us in Canada, all over Europe, in many parts of Asia, in Australia and New Zealand, and in most other countries of the globe. Do we miss our friends and family? Yes. Do we occasionally miss aspects of our former country? Yes. Do we plan on ever living again in the United States? Never. And those of us with permanent residence or citizenship can sponsor family members from back home for long-term visas in our adopted countries.

In closing, I want to remind you of something – unless you are an American Indian or a descendant of slaves, at some point your ancestors chose to leave their homeland in search of a better life. They weren’t traitors and they weren’t bad people, they just wanted a better life for themselves and their families. Isn’t it time that you continue their journey?

Thanks For Finally Growing A 'Set', Mr. President!

There might well be hope for the Obama administration, after all.

President Obama has been the recipient of plenty of barbs from the Far Right - according to them, he's either a Socialist, a Communist, or a Fascist (depending on the day of the week and the particular lack of education of the person making the accusation); he's not a citizen, having been either born in Kenya or Indonesia (again; depending) - and he's taken plenty of nonsense from the military, beginning with his announcement that closing Gitmo was a priority.  He's responded with intelligent civility to all of this nonsense.   I'm glad to see another side to the man - a side which required some cojones and the long-overdue exercise of his authority (in this case, over the military).

Now, understand something - I love this country.  My father was a U.S. Air Force officer.  No one needs to tell me how to salute a flag.  However, there comes a time when Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice needs to be enforced, and enforced by serious example - and today was one of those times.

By today's action in relieving General Stanley McChrystal, President Obama told the entire military, "You've all been behaving like a bunch of baby birds -- all mouth; and full o' shit.  You talk big until someone whacks you on the backside, then you cry and run to the press.   Those days are over.   I'm done with your bullshit.   While I'm in office, I'm the boss, and that's the end of this discussion.   Questions?  I didn't think so."

Yes, the fallout worries me.  The Right is going to turn McChrystal into a warrior/martyr, and hold his situation up as an example for everything that's wrong with the Obama administration.  The Right, however, is sorely in need of some basic education - starting with the real meaning of the Constitution, and the aforementioned Article 88.

Now, understand something else - I respect veterans.   They're the ones we send to do a job no one else wants to do, and for less money than it's worth.  I respect them for all the reasons why I respect anyone who serves the nation for pay, including letter-carriers; the guy at State who processed my latest passport-application, and the folks in the Forest Service.

On the other hand, they don't get worship or adulation.   The ones who retire are entitled to a pension; the ones who die in combat are due the rites we grant anyone killed in action.   The ones who do their two or four years and leave for university or voc-ed school on the government dime get to march in the Fourth of July parade and brag about their exploits - we tolerate this behavior in our fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers because they did, after all, serve.

When they die, we bury them in a National Cemetery with a flag on their coffin and a bugler playing 'Taps'.   This, too, is deserved.

What they don't deserve is the adulation of the public when they wrap themselves in the flag and bitch.



And, it's for all these reasons that I'm glad the President finally grew a set.

See, he's been the subject of a lot of bullshit-behind-the-back from the U.S. military's officer corps and rankers, alike - and it's not only wrong, it's against the laws governing the military.  Period.  General McChrystal's tawdry behavior in running to the press and whining about his boss was not only bad manners, it was against the code he signed up to serve - he had his ass handed to him, and rightly so.

By example, what President Obama did was to let the rest of the military know, in no uncertain terms, that while they might disagree, those disagreements had better never leave the immediate area, and had better never wind up in the press under any circumstances - because everyone from the CentCom commander on down to the lowliest private can, and will, be replaced faster than you can say 'Truman/MacArthur'.

There are those who'll say, "You don't love your country because you don't worship soldiers."

To them, I'll simply say, "I believe in the Constitution - all of it."

A Chair; Some Sandbags; and America's Moral Bankruptcy

"How often does this come along?  100 percent justice.  I've shot squirrels I've felt worse about.  It was another day at the office. The death penalty is nothing more than sending a defective product back to the manufacturer. Let him fix it."

--  Utah State Police officer and firing-squad volunteer


America, as sad as it is for me to write these words, is a morally-bankrupt nation besotted with cruelty and a complete disregard for life.

Friday's execution of Ronnie Lee Gardner in a hail of gunfire at the state prison in Utah confirmed this beyond any reckoning.   The only remaining question centers on what America will now do - shrug its collective shoulders and move on, as the officer in the quote above suggests, or take this as a wake-up call to step beyond its collective savagery.
 

Utah is probably not America's greatest example of forward-thinking. 

Run for years by the Mormon church, Utah (among other things) never outlawed bigamy - this was left to the Federal government in 1862.  They were one of three states to allow a firing-squad as a first-line option (Idaho outlawed it in 2009; Oklahoma retains it as a 'backup method' - in the event the electric chair and lethal injection are both ruled unconstitutional).

The Mormons, you see, have this mystical 'thing' about blood-atonement - the notion that the only way to square accounts with the Imaginary Friend is to spill one's own blood in this life to 'atone' fully, and get a clean slate in the next.  This past Friday's circus in Utah is a carry-over from those days.

That the officials of Utah's state prison were able to find five moral-degenerates-in-uniform from their State Police who were willing to aim a rifle at a man who was strapped to a chair with a hood over his head, twenty-five feet away is, or shouldn't be, of any particular surprise, given that Utah is also the home of Orrin Hatch and the many descendants of Joseph Smith.  We shouldn't be surprised that one of the executioners elected to fire at the count of 'two' (not waiting until zero - we can only suppose he wanted to be first).

We also shouldn't be surprised at the comments of the man, above, who chose to talk big, but remain anonymous.  However, what should be appalling to everyone outside of Utah (and Texas) is the lack of protest from the rest of us.

We've done an excellent job, us Americans, of rationalizing the process of allowing the state to take someone's life.

I'm told, "But you don't know how the victim's families feel," or "What about justice?"
 

Let's talk about justice, just for a moment.

The United States ranks fifth in the use of the death penalty.  We're only surpassed in its use by such enlightened social-democracies as Iran, Saudi Arabia, the People's Republic of China, and our newest-conquered province, Iraq.  We've executed 28 people so far this year; a little less than 50% of whom were persons of color (that disproportion should speak to several things - among them the incidence of poverty among persons of color in the U.S., as well as the increased likelihood to apply capital punishment to dark-skinned peoples here in the U.S.)

Japan is the only other industrialized/first-world nation to apply the death penalty. If we're looking at a 'top-ten-of-barbarous-nations', Yemen, Sudan, Vietnam and Syria all precede Japan, which rounds out the list at #10.
 

We're in pretty rotten company.

As to the process, it's also pretty rotten - in fact, it was so corrupt in Illinois that the governor announced a moratorium on executions after a staggering 13 people were freed from death row after their convictions were overturned on DNA evidence.   It would appear that while we're pretty good at throwing the switch/pulling the trigger, etc.; etc - we're not terribly good at fingering the right perpetrators.

With this sorry company and equally-sorry record, one might think that the United States, an educated, enlightened nation, would demand of its state representatives that the death penalty be overturned.

However, any recent attention spent following the national political debate-in-general will convince even the most casual reader that America is not terribly well educated (remember all of those Tea Party placards?), and not terribly enlightened, either.

No - with people like Palin, Angle and Bachmann driving the national political agenda and their handmaidens, Porter, LaHaye, Dobson, et. al. providing their 'spiritual leadership', it's small wonder the rest of the world views us as they do.
 

I'm just sorry to have to admit that they're right.

Reading:

Capital Punishment Statistics (Wikipedia; upd. 2010)

Executioner:  'Death By Firing Squad Is 100 Percent Justice' - (CNN; June - 2010)

Illinois Moratorium on Executions (JusticeDenied.Org)

Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act (Wikipedia; 2010)

Reynolds vs. United States (Wikipedia; 2010)

Executions in 2010 (Death Penalty Information Center; 2010)

Firing Squad Executes Convicted Killer (Yahoo News - June; 2010)

A Response From The Israeli Embassy....

Today, I received a response from the Embassy of Israel to my recent letter.  The exchange is below.

In their response, Israel states that '15,000 tons of supplies enter Gaza weekly'.   While this sounds like a large amount, the devil is in the details - and the math is a remorseless bitch.

1.   There are 2,000,000 people living in Gaza.
2.   Gaza is 139 square miles.
3.   It's necessary to cut that figure by about two-thirds to account for roads, bridges, alleys, streets, and other non-liveable space.
4.   The average Gazan has 645 square feet to live in.

Now, let's look at the supplies:

1.   There are 2,000,000 people living in Gaza.
2.   15,000 tons of supplies make it there every week.
3.   This means that a little over 2,100 pounds are imported per day for 2,000,000 people.
4.   A little less than two pounds per day per person is allowed by the Israelis for the Gazan population.

All right - now, ask yourself this question:   If I were given 645 square feet to live in - about the size of a studio apartment with a single bathroom - and then were allowed to buy only two pounds of supplies per day (including everything from washing soap and toilet paper to food and medical supplies) - how 'well' do you think you'd live?

That's what I thought.

Now - let's remember that a total of 27 Israelis have been killed since the first rocket attacks on Israel.  The standard Hamas rocket, the "Qassam", is a stovepipe-and-solid-fuel affair that's lit by a Zippo - pretty much the same technology that lofted my model rockets in the park when I was ten years old. 

Israel's response to this?    "Operation Cast Lead" - which destroyed nearly all of Gaza's infrastructure, and killed 1,400 Gazans, with four times that number wounded, some horribly.  Many, many people died like the man in the photo, above.

The Israelis blame the current government for the 'necessity' of these actions:   "...if Hamas, which has deliberately fired more than 7,000 rockets at Israeli civilians, would renounce violence and join the peace process...."   There's a problem with this statement.

Hamas is the elected government, by Israeli sanction. 

That's right - Israel agreed to elections - and the people in Gaza wanted Hamas as their government - largely because they were fed up with the 'humane treatment' (645 square feet of living space and two pounds a day in supplies).

The answer is much like the old cartoon we all saw when we were kids - 'find the elephant in this room' - it's right there in front of us. 

Israel is the problem.

___________________________________________

From: [Blank]
Sent: Saturday, June 05, 2010 1:06 PM
To: IsraelEmb DC
Subject: Gaza

Good morning.

You should know that many Americans – and I am numbered among them – view your recent actions in international waters as little more than piracy, and your shameful treatment of the Palestinian people as a crime against humanity.

Please know that I will support the efforts of other Americans to bring about a true change to this situation.

Regards,

[Blank]



Dear Mr. _____:

Thank you for writing the Embassy of Israel.

Israel regrets the casualties on both sides of this tragic incident, although responsibility rests solely with Hamas, an internationally recognized terrorist organization, and the participants who organized this flotilla. Israel labored intensely to persuade the demonstrators to convey the flotilla’s cargo to Israel where, after proper screening, it would be transferred to responsible parties in Gaza. Unfortunately, the organizers were not interested in providing humanitarian aid to the civilians of Gaza, but rather in staging a premeditated and highly publicized provocation of Israel.  
                                                                       
By the time Israeli soldiers reached the Mavi Marmara they had already boarded five of the six vessels in the flotilla without incident. However, when they boarded the sixth ship they were met with a premeditated attack. The Israeli forces, who boarded the ship with paintball guns, initially used non-lethal means to repel the demonstrators. According to initial reports it was not until after their fellow soldiers were shot that the Israeli soldiers resorted to using their side arms in self-defense.  

In a typical week, 15,000 tons of supplies enter Gaza through the land crossings and since the ceasefire in January 2009, well over a million tons of humanitarian supplies entered Gaza from Israel - that is almost a ton of aid for each man, woman and child in the Strip. Each day some 100 trucks, laden with food and medicine, enter Gaza from Israel. Israel only bans those items that can assist Hamas in its stated goal of destroying Israel. If Hamas, which has deliberately fired more than 7,000 rockets at Israeli civilians, would renounce violence and join the peace process, then Israel would gladly remove all such restrictions.

Israel regrets having to make these tough decisions and run the risk of incurring casualties. In intercepting the flotilla, Israel acted as any state, including the United States, would. But given the option of either running such risks or endangering the lives of its citizens, Israel has no choice.

For more information on this event please visit the website of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Sincerely,

Joshua Felice

Joshua Felice | Embassy of Israel
Department of Public Diplomacy
Phone: (202) 364-5480
embassy1@israelemb.org | www.israelemb.org

Apple Of His Eye....

He found him in a desert land, and in the waste howling wilderness; he led him about, he instructed him, he kept him as the apple of his eye. -- Deuteronomy 32:10; KJV Bible

The other day, I saw a post by someone who stated that all of the anti-Israeli 'propaganda' being circulated on the 'net was also 'against the Bible' - and that God would punish those who were against Israel, because the Israelis were the 'apple of his ('god's') eye'.

This isn't going to be a long post.  I've got better things to do with my time than educate morons who prefer to believe a book which also said slavery was a good idea, the earth was flat, and that the sun revolved around it.

However, it's time to set some facts straight, as well as agree on the definition of 'fact':

Fact:  (n);something that actually exists; reality or truth; something known to exist or to have happened.

A fact, it appears, requires objectivity.  It also requires evidence - which eliminates most, if not all, of the 'Bible'.

Some facts are apparent about Israel:   (1) It was created from the collective guilt of the West after the events which occurred in Europe between 1934 and 1945 ('the Holocaust'); (2) It was created without the consent of the residents of the land which was set aside for that nation (the Palestinians); (3) It was created by the efforts of people like Menachem Begin, who did things like blow up hotels.

The people who created Israel were Jewish - but more importantly, they were part of a movement called Zionism.   Zionists believe that, regardless of the movements of history, the land their ancestors occupied belongs to them, forever (it's a little like driving back to the home where you were raised, rousting the current residents from bed, and throwing them into the street.  This only works if the local authorities will support you.)

(These are facts - not to be confused with opinions or religious moronity).

In their case, the Zionists did a great job convincing the 'local authorities' (most of Europe, the United Nations, and mainly the United States) that they should be allowed to do this.  When confronted, the largely-Christianized nations of the world said, "But the 'Bible' says it belongs to them!"  (this is much like telling the local authorities that you had the right to evict the current owners of the family homestead, because you have a piece of paper stating that your great-great-great grandpappy was the first one to live there.)

Now, we come to what Israel has done with the place.

Since 1948, they've taken the U.N. mandate (which provided for a Jewish homeland, a Palestinian homeland, and an international zone in Jerusalem) - and completely abrogated it through the effects of two wars.   Now, they own the whole place - and the Palestinians are now living in tin-and-tar-paper shacks with open sewers, little medical care, education, or infrastructure.

Needless to say, the Palestinians took umbrage to this treatment, and organized two separate uprisings to put an end to Israeli rule.   These failed miserably - because when a Palestinian rocket (something not much different than the stuff I used to launch at the park when I was a kid) would find its way into an Israeli town, they'd respond with an air strike.

This has been going on for a long, long time.

Last January, the whole thing came to a head when the Israelis got tired of Zippo-launched rockets -- and began their self-styled Operation Cast Lead, during which Israel used white-phosphorus shells over civilian centers - which caused things like this, and this, and this.

(Note:  The use of white-phosphorus against civilians is a war crime according to international law.)

Again - -these are facts.  They're not disputable - although Israel tried to dispute them, organizations like Amnesty International, as well as U.N. inspectors, verified the use of white-phosphorus during Operation Cast Lead.

 

What was done about any of this?   That's right -- nothing at all.

Since 2007, the Israelis, not content with making the Palestinians live in shacks with open sewers, have blockaded the main Palestinian homeland of Gaza - where some of them have actually managed to make a 'go' of living like humans with a semblance of order - to the result that everything from food and medical supplies to energy (in the form of LNG and propane, which have to be imported from Israel due to the near-complete lack of infrastructure in Gaza).  To counter this, a robust smuggling operation has been conducted between Gaza and Egypt over the past three years.

Routinely, the Israelis counter this effort by bombing the tunnels used for bringing supplies in.  They've also blockaded Gaza's coastal waterways - but hey; absent a navy and any real recognition by the real powers of the world, there's not much they can do.

You're all familiar with recent events - a flotilla from Turkey recently attempted to send supplies to Gaza (since Cast Lead, the Palestinians need everything, including concrete to rebuild the buildings stomped flat by Israeli F-16's.)

The Israelis sent several gunboats and a commando-laden helicopter to stop the flotilla -- while they later stated that they'd been 'attacked' when they boarded one of the boats, it's clear by the video that they weren't dropping in for tea (it also turns out that concrete can be used to build bunkers, so the Israelis have classified it as a 'weapon'.   No word on the medical supplies, food, and other things.)

Predictably, nothing's happened with this one, either - except a lot of dithering by U.S. and other world powers, all who are afraid of offending Israel, or pissing-off their supporters.

Again - these are facts.   Sorry to pee in your Cheerios, but here it is.   You can do some reading, or not (I've provided links here, along with some pretty graphic photos in them) - that choice is yours.   However, defending Israel at this point is a lot like defending the concept of Manifest Destiny here in the U.S., where we uprooted the native peoples by the trainload, rounded them up, and put them in reservations.

Maybe the Neocons, Fundies, and other moral degenerates who support Israel's sixty-year history of depredation are comfortable with this - growing up on a steady diet of John Wayne and the concept of westward expansion likely inured them to such things, and allowed the acceptance of a common set of very twisted values vis-a-vis the U.S. and Israel.

I've just summarized Israel's history for you - it's up to you to agree, or not.   However, in supporting Israel, you're also announcing to everyone who believes in human rights and decency that you're also a moral degenerate.

Whatever moral ascendancy Israel might have had at the end of WWII is gone; it was gone the moment that they created the first of their 'refugee camps', ironically incarcerating multiple generations in a de-facto ghetto.  They've punched their ticket; their dance-card is full - they've got no more moral-chits to cash in to the world.

Hiding behind a moldy book full of irrelevancies is no longer valid.   Invoking the Holocaust as a justification for their continued behavior is no longer an option.

Before anyone starts in on my position, I'll ask you to consider this:  Unless you've been there -- unless you've seen the camps; smelled the shit and the fear and the hopelessness in the air; unless you've seen children playing near open sewers  - don't.

Don't jump in to talk about something you know nothing about.   I've been there.  I've seen it.

The Israelis are racist monsters, bent on destroying a people.   That's also a fact.

What the world does about it is another matter.

As to the quote in the beginning of this piece?

There are people like me - who see that the Apple has worms; that the Book is not only irrelevant, but dangerous - and that the value of human life trumps anyone's religion.

Fuck Israel.