new nov04

Four More Years.

Oh well. Four more years of George “Dubya” Bush in the White House. Four more years of Guantanamo Bay and Abu Graib and deadly threatening postures against anyone in the world who doesn’t buy into the reality of the New American Century and its economic priority, which can be easily summarised by the following phrase: “to the rich, even more, to the poor, even less“. Four more years of destruction and deliberate obfuscation and creepy lies along with the wholly embarrassing spectacle of our own dear demented Prime Minister showing off on our TV screens about how very Churchillian he has become since he bought into this crazy illusion known as “the war on terror”.

I can’t pretend to be excited about the prospect.

However, I think that there are definitely some questions we need to ask.

I was in Smiffies on Tankerton Road after I first heard the result, buying a stamp. I mentioned it to the lady there. And she said, “mind you, what would have happened if the other one won? Would he have pulled out and left us there?”

Two observations about this. Firstly, that she didn’t even know Kerry’s name (or at least that it didn’t come to mind easily). Secondly, that his policies were so vague and inconsistent that she even had the impression that he might have unilaterally withdrawn American troops from Iraq, leaving our own troops in there to fight on alone.

They say that we get the government we deserve. In the case of whoever is in the White House, we get the government (deserved or not) without the right to vote on the matter. We get a government, in fact, whose loyalty doesn’t even extend to its own electorate, let alone to the rest of the world.

So Halliburton continue to make a killing, in more ways than one. Bush and his cronies continue to get richer as a consequence of their war profiteering. The Muslim nations continue to feel aggrieved and offended, while their hot-blooded young men continue to join the ranks of the fanatical Islamists, vowing to take revenge. And our own governments, knowing that this is the consequence of their actions, continue to dismantle what little remains of our civil liberties in order to counteract this. And we continue to the frightened out of our lives.

Well I refuse to be frightened. I know that the war on terror is an illusion. Or rather, it is the case of a self-fulfilling prophecy, because by creating the illusion, and acting upon it in the way that they do, they are actually creating the conditions by which terrorism will flourish. And don’t you think they know this? Of course they do.

But the reality of American elections is that it takes vast amounts of money to get elected. And where does the money come from? From the corporations. So before anyone dares to stand for office in the US he has to have his policy options cleared by his paymasters in the boardrooms. Hence the impossibility of ever getting anything remotely resembling sanity into government policy in the USA,

Add to this the extraordinary power of the media to shift the truth, and to pass off truth as lies, and you can see that there is very little hope of ever getting this changed. Take John Kerry, for example. A genuine war-hero who took a principled stance against the Vietnam war, who the Republicans successfully portrayed as a “flip-flopper”. While Bush, a certified coward who bought his way out of the draft, is portrayed as a hero. And if this isn’t turning reality on its head, I really don’t know what’s what anymore.

And isn’t this insane? Isn’t it simply the case that the madmen have now, finally, taken over the asylum?

The day the results came out you had some Republican spokesman offering threats to Iran. And, during the campaign Bush bought ex-pat Cuban votes by promising an invasion of Cuba. Remember, these guys are all Mafia. In other words, Bush was buying off organised crime to get himself elected. And isn’t the reality of that that this administration is effectively a gangster organisation anyway, a vast protection racket with the world’s deadliest arsenal at its disposal?

It was Hermann Goering who said: "Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war: neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. 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, of course, was a war criminal, and tried and condemned as such by the judges at Nuremburg.

I think you know what comes next.

One day, I promise, we will have our own Nuremburg, and our current leaders will have to stand before it and justify their actions.

But at least they will get a fair trial, which is more than they have allowed to the haunted prisoners of Guantanamo Bay, who, even now, lie likes rats in cages, not even knowing what crimes they are accused of.

These are my last words on the matter. I can bother myself with this insanity no longer. I am tired of the despair of having to think about these things. I am tired of not knowing if my children will even have a world to inherit. I am tired of all the lies and the rhetoric and the needless destruction. I am tired of Bush and Blair and the whole mad pack of them. If I could wish them all away, I would.

And good riddance to the lot of them!