Musings, perspectives, rants

It's either a feast or a famine.  I've been absent for months, but now I have a bit of time and there is so much that I want to write about.  Browsing the internet brings up a lot of issues that are interesting and I haven't even touched on books I've read recently.

I found this article:

A young marine speaks out

It's wonderful to see young Americans in the military realise the truth of the 'war' in Iraq.  It is time that Americans were educated about the truth of their corrupt government and stop the hatred.  Now more than ever is a time for understanding, a time to step back and allow others to come to terms with their own troubles.  No-one asked America to interfere to "save" the Iraqi people.  No-one asked them to be judge, jury and executioner. 

The greatest threat to the world is the current US administration.  The sooner the American people realise that, the better for all of us.

Americans wonder why they're hated.  They seem to think that only Muslims or the poor and oppressed hate America because they're 'jealous' of the 'freedom' and 'democracy' that American people 'enjoy'.  They argue that America only wants to help the rest of the world obtain freedom and peace and that they give aid to so many countries and lead the world in technological developments, etc, etc, etc, ad nauseum.  They believe this.  They really do and they just can't understand why there is such hatred in the world.  The truth reveals otherwise. 

They probably don't realise just how many people in the west also hate America and America's "values" and "culture", or the depth of that hatred.  I have talked to any number of Australians, New Zealanders, British, German, French, you name a 'white' country - and they will all have some reason for hating Americans.

Check out this rant by an Australian:

http://junaman.wordpress.com/2006/09/04/america-fuck-you/

What we, in the rest of the world, see, dear Americans (some of you are truly wonderful people), is arrogance on a huge scale.  Your brainwashed patriotism leaves no room for others.  You call yourself the greatest but you're not - far, far from it.  We're bombarded with American TV, American 'values' and opinions, American merchandise, American advertisements for American products of American corporations, made by underpaid third world workers.  The American government does not stand for justice, or liberty.  It stands for oppression, corruption, greed and an arrogance that's beyond belief. 

The American government wants everyone to be American.

Two words:  "Fuck" and "off".

Mini-rant over.  Just occasionally we have to let off steam at the risk of offending several million people, but the current American administration IS fueling that hatred.  Don't expect the rest of the world to welcome Americans with open arms.  Oh no.

I just watched a very interesting DVD called "Control Room" about the beginning of the Iraq war from the viewpoint of Al Jazeera, Arab media.

It was worth watching, if only to get the viewpoint of the Arabs, rather than the continual biased Western viewpoint.  Rather than be subjective and, as some Americans claim, full of lies, Al Jazeera was objective, trying to understand the true reasons for the invasion (they could see through the lies, they understand that the words 'peace' and 'USA' never come together).  The American soldiers spouted the bullshit they'd been fed - that it was all about freeing the Iraqi people, using 'precision' bombs.  Never mind the thousands of innocent civilians injured and killed, portrayed on TV by Al Jazeera (who, of course 'pretended' that there were casualties).  This was a war, what did they expect?  Americans wanted, of course, scenes of celebration from Iraqi people, but the scene in the square in Baghdad - the 'liberation' of the people, was rigged.  A handful of men waving cloths.  An Iraqi said 'they were not Iraqis... I am Iraqi, I grew up here, I recognise an Iraqi accent'.  The US could have got any Arab-looking person (probably Saudi Arabians) to pose as Iraqis for the photo shoot - the propaganda.  Of course they wouldn't admit it's propaganda.  Only the 'enemy' uses propaganda and lies.

I urge you to watch this movie with an objective mind, without any preconceived ideas. 

I loved the ditty sung by one of the reporters.  It said it all:

Yankee Doodle went to town
riding in on Sunday
saw some people living there
and killed them all by Monday

How right he is.  The Americans have always shot first and asked questions later, if they bothered at all.  Americans caring?  Bullshit.

Apologies for not having updated here in a long long time.  Often there is so much I'm enraged about, so much that I want to bring to people's attention, that I don't know where to start.  The Bush Administration continues to violate treaties and conventions, continues to whittle away at the world's and his own people's human rights and yet the public continue blindly on their own narrow paths, either oblivious or apathetic or just plain selfish.

I will endeavour to write about some of them, even if it's only a sentence.  Something is better than nothing. 

I will start with the decreasing access to information, another nail in the coffin of democracy in the USA.  Read this following article about Bush denying access to or destroying once public information.  The list of examples is a long one and continues.  Much of this information we can no longer access is very important.  If we don't know about it, the government becomes a totalitarian regime, able to do anything it wants (as if it isn't anyway), holding all relevant information for itself, so the public is ignorant of the truth.  To quote the title of an article about the importance of archives "No records, no access, no rights, no accountability" (no democracy).

It's the US public who have to do something, who have the power to do something, before this madman influences the rest of the world with his version of 'democracy'.  For a start, do something about the closures of the EPA libraries:

EPA closes down libraries

That is a link to the 'take action' page.  You can read more about the closures here.

Fare well.  I'll try to return more regularly.