Lunacy is ruling the world. Eternal wars, environmental damage, neglect of the common people, are all proof of the total lack of common sense. The ever-increasing movement towards inequality and the gradual strangling of democracy are signs that people matter no more. Culture has been replaced by the accumulation of material goods. Information has turned into mass propaganda. The truth is of no significance. Greed has won out over humane instincts of solidarity. Individualism (read: selfishness) is the creed of this age and sharing and caring have gone out the door. Governments try to make fear and hatred the ruling instincts of the masses and the Other must be seen as the enemy. The general apathy and ignorance that is typical for the average citizens of most countries add to the ease with which the people can be kept blind and deaf to what is going on around them. And thus they also become easy victims of nationalistic propaganda.

Wars make the Other into a sub-human being

The policies of the United States from the very beginning of the colonial days down through the centuries of heedless murder and takeover of lands belonging to foreign countries and to native Americans have always been greedy, callous and self-righteous.

The people in power decide that their country has to go to war for conquest and increased power, wars to dominate, to oppress, to minimize people who are different from us. And the ‘enemy’, the people who are sacrificed on the altar of greed, are always depicted as inferior, as barely human.

The propaganda machine gets turned on and the ‘Gooks’, the ‘terrorists’ or whatever name they may have been labeled with, are now seen as not really worth humane treatment. The death of a ‘Gook’ or the suffering of a ‘terrorist’ is of no importance. The term ‘collateral damage’ for the deaths of civilians in the enemy country is a clear sign that those uncivilized people are of no importance.

The Main Stream Media go along with this belief by not mentioning the numbers of enemy deaths. Even the deaths of our own people are insignificant and the numbers weren’t even published during the war in Iraq until they somehow became so openly known in spite of the hushing-up, that it became impossible even for the MSM to ignore the fact that U.S. military were dying in huge numbers. Internet sites posted the increasing numbers of U.S. dead day by day until they became common knowledge. They were OUR people so the leaders had to at least pretend some concern. But deep down it didn’t really matter. Those kids were mostly from poor families and limiting the number of poor people in the world is one of the major goals set by the wealthy elite. The people at the top are of course immune to any danger of becoming the victims of wars or of the gradual destruction of the environment. Or so they think.

Purported reasons for wars vary all the time, but the true reason is always greed. Selling the wars is made possible by creating mass hysteria and the firmly rooted and constantly repeated theory that the U.S. is threatened by inferior people only worthy of being obliterated. Millions and millions of Americans lap up the propaganda: white skin good, dark skin bad.

The outcome of all this century-long propaganda is that the average U.S. citizen actually believes that they are in fact superior to all other nations. God made them unique. ‘Commies’ kept making excellent targets even as late as Ronald Reagan’s criminal interventions in Central America, the covert war on the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the support of the death squads in El Salvador and Honduras and even the invasion of little Grenada under the phoniest of pretexts. A war was needed to make Reagan’s sinking ratings go up, so a war was staged. And it worked. Again and again and again it works and the people never get wise. It was their right and duty to defend their country from ‘Commies’ who were out to conquer the world and destroy the superior values of the free American people.

When other made-up reasons for invading Iraq were finally shown up to be all lies invented by the crooked administration, people were made to believe, once again, that the U.S. needed to save the world from infidels and uncivilized creatures who didn’t share our Western values and culture.

United States moral superiority has become dogma

The Neocons set an indelible mark on U.S. warfare. Their carefully constructed plan was made public through the think tank ‘Project for the New American Century’ (PNAC, founders - neoconservatives William Kristol and Robert Kagan). It formally dated from 1997 but had been in the scheming process since the days of Ronald Reagan. According to PNAC “American leadership is both good for America and good for the world". These worthies supported a policy of superior military strength and what they euphemistically called ‘moral clarity’. In their hammer-style and scarily successful propaganda the word ‘moral values’ at home was repeated ad nauseam to cover up the vicious nature of their program of global military and economic domination abroad. They had to convince the world, and of course their own country, that they were the superior moral force on the planet. The U.S. megalomania had reached a new height.

This ‘moral clarity’ would bring the United States to increase their military bases all over the planet and to confirm their power in islands of concentrated U.S. presence in the most gigantic embassies anywhere in the world. The first one in Central Asia was in Baghdad, but it is now being followed by equally city-like walled-in fortresses in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Their military bases now number 737 [1] spread over 130 countries on all five continents with 325,000 US military personnel [2] .

These neoconservative pillars of a U.S. Empire under construction were totally void of any realistic thinking or human concerns. They were playing a huge game and all they were concerned with was winning that game – at any cost. Their main goals are summed up by Global Research in “The Worldwide Network of US Military Bases - The Global Deployment of US Military Personnel” by Jules Dufour – as follows:

“Major elements of the conquest and world domination strategy by the US refer to:

“1) the control of the world economy and its financial markets,

“2) the taking over of all natural resources (primary resources and nonrenewable sources of energy). The latter constitute the cornerstone of US power through the activities of its multinational corporations.

“Geopolitical Outreach: Network of Military Bases

“The US has established its control over 191 governments which are members of the United Nations. The conquest, occupation and/or otherwise supervision of these various regions of the World is supported by an integrated network of military bases and installations which covers the entire Planet (Continents, Oceans and Outer Space). All this pertains to the workings of an extensive Empire, the exact dimensions of which are not always easy to ascertain.”

War is the Siamese twin of Corporatism

Ever-lasting wars and unregulated capitalism are the two arms of the same monster. The Free Market is the war backed up by a hidden armory that enables Big Capital to go on plundering the rest of the world. Washington today still seems to believe that anything is for theft, for sale or for conquest. The country has been blinded ever since the success of the Marshall plan after WWII into believing that anything can be bought. And that funds are limitless. The enormous deficit does not seem to bother them seriously. China and Japan and other countries own a huge part of the U.S. economy and Washington sees them as their friendly creditors, a financial interdependence having developed that the leaders seem to believe is here to stay. And the game goes on. More military bases in Colombia, more money to military intervention in Afghanistan which is of course not a war, according to the present administration, but rather a helping hand. The fact that there are ulterior motives for the U.S. not to abandon Afghanistan is of course not even referred to. The hyperbole is that U.S. military are in the country to make it more ‘civilized’ and ‘democratic’, to free the Afghan women who are forced to wear burkas by the Taliban and who have no right to get an education. The truth is though that democracy and justice have gone out the door, if they ever existed. As soon as corporatism takes over it’s the death of democracy.

Hypocrisy and megalomania

Since United States citizens have constantly been bombarded with self-righteous talk about their moral superiority as well as their military/economic invincibility, it did not occur to them at first that their leaders may be inventing a world image that did not correspond to reality. It was a given that all nations outside of the U.S. borders were of little importance. The superior power of their own country, the right of U.S. military to interfere wherever greed took their country was taken for granted. They were always morally right and they were invincible. So they thought.

After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1992, it became easier than ever to convince the people of the worldwide power of the United States of America. Nothing could now stand in their way. Therefore, the only thing that was missing at the beginning of this century was an enemy. Then came September 11 and the whole stage underwent a complete rearrangement. One scheme was born after the other. Alongside with Afghanistan and then, later on, Iraq, military bases were installed in a number of countries, which had formerly been part of the Soviet Union. The planning went well to begin with, but more and more those countries started to become wary of the U.S. Empire and a competition for the favors of the ‘Stans’ is becoming increasingly heated between the U.S. and Russia. The U.S. builds a conclave in one country and is kicked out of another one.

The geopolitical situation today

What the U.S. can’t conquer, they buy. For decades the United States has been paying billions to countries like Israel, Turkey, Egypt and of course now Pakistan, among others. Strategic countries must be kept as friends and ultimately the United States must be able to take over the natural resources of the whole Middle East and Central Asia region.

They actually seem to believe that they can have friendly relations with India, Pakistan and China, all at the same time, which in view of the long-term hostility between India and the other two countries seems to most of us to be pure fantasy.

Even with the economic crisis threatening to subject the whole country to a complete meltdown, the new administration is still playing the game as if it could get friendly with countries like India and China while at the same time they are invading or, as they claim, peacefully taking over countries like Afghanistan and Pakistan. The fact that the real reason for never giving up on Afghanistan is the vital importance that is given to the pipeline that will give the Unites States access to natural gas from the Caucasian region is of course a badly kept secret for those who keep their eyes open. Getting access through Iran is obviously seen as unrealistic, even by the fantasists in Washington The long-time competition between Russia and the U.S. for military bases in the countries along the southern border of Russia concerns nothing else than the control of oil and gas exports from the Caucasus and the Caspian Sea basin.

Reality counts for nothing. The whole imperial agenda seems to Washington to be played out like a video game. The fact that Afghanistan has never been conquered by any nation since the Mongol invasion under Genghis Khan in 1219 – 1221 does not seem to bear any reality for the U.S. fantasists. The British tried and lost, the Soviet Union tried and lost and Washington is still refusing to see their Mission Impossible for what it is.

As far as Pakistan is concerned, Washington still imagines that they can be seen as the Big Brother who has come to mend a torn country. They are the friendly nation builders who will win over the people and get rid of the feared Taliban and all the various groups of religious fanatics and different shades of jihadists who are holed up in the mountainous areas in the west of Pakistan. But they never asked the people what they wanted. It turns out that a vast majority of Pakistanis want more than anything else to see the Americans leave. They see them as colonizers, not as a helping hand to mend a torn country. This is not surprising after the drone bombings of the mountainous regions in the West, started by President Obama very early on in his presidency.

Changes at home

Washington’s major goal is to keep everybody else from getting the upper hand on the income from the precious oil and the general control of the region. As a result American citizens, suffering from the effects of the financial crisis, see their lives and livelihoods being shattered, while their tax money goes to the upkeep of client states that will serve as buffers against countries that threaten U.S. domination of Central Asia, in particular Iran. It’s all about control. Controlling the whole world, even if it takes making newly Capitalist China a friend. Which no one else has ever managed to do.

Even though U.S. citizens are propagandized to believe in the infallibility of their country, it is still possible that the light of reason and truth is beginning to seep through the cracks in the walls of secrecy. The present-day wars are becoming less and less supported by the people, for whatever reason, and we might finally begin to ask ourselves how much longer they will put up with the megalomania of the administration and the outrageous corruption of the members of Congress without which the war machine would have come to a halt a long time ago. And it may never have taken on its present proportions at all if it had not been for the powerful lobbies of the arms industry.

Many Europeans were deluded into believing that President Obama was going to change the fundamental position of the United States in the world, as were of course most of the U.S. citizens who voted for him. However, all we are seeing is the same unilateralism and the same imperial agenda as under the previous administration.

Where are the people who should be banging pot lids in the streets and causing such mayhem that the hypocritical and corrupt leaders would have to listen?

Footnotes:

[1] 737 U.S. Military Bases = Global Empire, by Chalmers Johnson, excerpted from Chalmers Johnson’s new book, “Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic” (number of bases in 2005). On July 3, 2009 the number of bases is cited as 800 by Chalmers Johnson

[2] How many military bases do we have around the world? - May 14, 2009 by Dusty

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Siv O'Neall is an Axis of Logic columnist, based in France. Her insightful essays are republished and read worldwide. She can be reached at siv@axisoflogic.com. Read her Biography and more of her articles on Axis of Logic.