Thursday, January 19, 2012

Truth Is Behind the Lies People Tell Themselves About Their Empire

Source: Al Jazeera Witness "Four Days in Guantanamo"
A lot of angry responses to the satirical video my husband and I made about the rationalizations people tell themselves in order to continue to support their naked emperor, and some of them mistook us for actual Obama supporters. Stuff Obama Supporters Say has 13,000+ views after a couple of days on YouTube, and 100+ comments in a lively debate where it was posted to Common Dreams (thanks, Abby Zimet).

As one critic of the video put it, "But some of those things are true." In celebration of the success of stop SOPA/PIPA blackout day yesterday, I have used the Internet and yes, Wikipedia, to unearth some nuggets of truth alluded to in the video. It was our intention to lampoon those in denial; the ugly facts of detention in Guantanamo or Bagram, where our tax dollars support the torture of kids as young as 15, are out there just waiting to be discovered. But the mainstream media feed in the U.S. will, as a matter of policy, not help people discover many facts. Instead, it will enable the skewed priorities of valuing organic gardening over drone attacks on civilians.

Inverted priorities have been typical of affluent imperial citizens throughout history. What did "good Germans" mainly do to support the Nazi's genocidal plans? They looked the other way.

Quite possibly they were afraid -- and rightly so -- of becoming the victims of indefinite detention.

Feeble thinkers, they believed that the rule of law was not important to them, because they were not criminals (or Communists, or trade unionists, or terrorists, etc.). A basic failure to understand why the writ of habeas corpus is the cornerstone of equal access to justice goes hand in hand with the failure to understand why the rights outlined in the first ten amendments to the Constitution are worth struggling to uphold.
Source: Mother Jones article on Iranian government's plan to send Obama a pink toy model of the U.S. drone that landed in that country last month.
If I don't see any drones patrolling my skies (yet) then they must not be a problem for me -- right?
Source: http://revolutionaryfrontlines.wordpress.com reprint of Al Jazeera article UK: Campaigners Seek Arrest of Former CIA Legal Chief over Pakistan Drone Attacks
(Obama thinks he is such a good father, he can joke around with his pals about ordering Predator drone strikes against boys that might be interested in his daughters.)

And who is Bradley Manning anyway?
Logan Price, a 27-year-old activist, said he went up to the president and asked why he hadn’t addressed the concerns of the protesters. “I thought that Bradley Manning was the most important whistleblower of my generation..."
Source: Politico
( Chip Somodevilla, Getty Images / March 14, 2011 ) via CODEPINK blog PINKTank

1 comment:

chrisrushlau said...

The Israel lobby: how many devoted followers does it have? Read Haaretz from Israel. They're at each other's throats. Look around in the US. Where is the pro-Israel figure ready to fight to the death? It might be one or two people. That is probably because Israel makes no sense, so there is no argument to be made in its behalf. So there is only a crowd in a panic--acting like lemmings, it's true, but all they need to do is stop for a second and look around. That's where anger comes in. "Don't tread on me." Or to put it in Global-speak: "quit shoving".