I am not politically eloquent. I will instead quote Gore Vidal:
For a country to turn itself into an imperial kind of despotism, you need an outside enemy. This was the brilliance of Adolf Hitler and his team. In fact, Goering gave a fascinating interview at Nuremberg. He said that the only way that you can organize an intelligent and well-educated people like the Germans into going to war, a war of conquest, was to frighten them. And you frighten them with, We have great enemies everywhere, in Poland, in Czechoslovakia, all over the place, and they have their eye on us, and you go from there.
Well, its the same techniques in a very crude way that were seeing today. You cannot have a war on an abstract noun. Terrorism is that. Its like a war on bad temper. Oh yes, I really want to join that battle. Where do we start? It is semantically stupid, and actually in practice its diabolical. We knocked down two countries who had done us no harm and intended us no harm. God knows what they intend now. And certainly after 9/11, they were innocent of any of that. But it happened through sheer reiteration and just telling lies, ferocious lies between Cheney and Bush about the connections of al Qaeda and Saddam and so on.
I think were a bit tired of that story, but the story never registers. Sixty percent of the American people think that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11. When youve got people as hypnotized by that, you can only do it two ways, and it can only be done with a lot of premeditation. One is you have a terrible educational system for the general public, where theyre taught nothing when it comes to American history. I think they erase whatever it is they might have in their head.
America, I wash my hands of thee.
For a country to turn itself into an imperial kind of despotism, you need an outside enemy. This was the brilliance of Adolf Hitler and his team. In fact, Goering gave a fascinating interview at Nuremberg. He said that the only way that you can organize an intelligent and well-educated people like the Germans into going to war, a war of conquest, was to frighten them. And you frighten them with, We have great enemies everywhere, in Poland, in Czechoslovakia, all over the place, and they have their eye on us, and you go from there.
Well, its the same techniques in a very crude way that were seeing today. You cannot have a war on an abstract noun. Terrorism is that. Its like a war on bad temper. Oh yes, I really want to join that battle. Where do we start? It is semantically stupid, and actually in practice its diabolical. We knocked down two countries who had done us no harm and intended us no harm. God knows what they intend now. And certainly after 9/11, they were innocent of any of that. But it happened through sheer reiteration and just telling lies, ferocious lies between Cheney and Bush about the connections of al Qaeda and Saddam and so on.
I think were a bit tired of that story, but the story never registers. Sixty percent of the American people think that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11. When youve got people as hypnotized by that, you can only do it two ways, and it can only be done with a lot of premeditation. One is you have a terrible educational system for the general public, where theyre taught nothing when it comes to American history. I think they erase whatever it is they might have in their head.
America, I wash my hands of thee.
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SO I WROTE AND PERFORMED A RITUAL WELCOMING THE NEW YEAR AND HONORING THE DEAD.