America: Arms Dealer to the World
The White House proposes a $20 billion arms sale to Saudi Arabia. Can you believe this? The same nation that birthed Osama Bin Laden is offered high-tech weapons and upgrades to fighter jets by the nation that suffered from the same man’s obsessions: Freaking brilliant.
It’s just business as usual for the military-industrial Corporatocracy. "Who?" you ask. (Or maybe "What’s he getting on about?") You know, the people who have the money to influence elections, buy presidencies and profit on war and bloodshed; the people who really run this country. I cannot imagine that the founders of this country - in their worst nightmares - would have imagined the nation they strived so hard to create fall into the role of an unscrupulous gun seller. Kind of give new meaning to "Wild West."
Can our government get more out of touch with the will of it’s people? Can it get more arrogant? More defiant?
Yes. Things can always worsen. But I believe the bottom has been reached. The political pendulum is swinging away from rampant capitalism, pre-emptive aggression, and wanton destruction. We are moving away from the narrow, selfish greed of a well-placed few and steering the the nation back toward a sense of stewardship of it’s people and their needs.
Congress must stop this deal. But even the Democrats in congress will accept this hypocrisy if the American people don’t make a lot of noise against this move. Our unwillingness to cry foul in the face of political idiocy has gotten us into the mess we’re in. Will we, in our silence enable our nation to continue to be the butcher of the world through it’s insistence of selling war material to anyone who will pay?
What kind of future will that bring? There is only one logical end to such maneuvering: traffic in the tools of blood, and blood is the product. Only by a concerted effort of millions of Americans will this cease. Let’s make a new America: one that doesn’t profit from destruction.
Don’t expect congress to do this for us.
July 29th, 2007 at 7:39 am
What do you think of China arming Iran? Iran and now Iraq both? Do you think the surge you imagine of the caring, comfortable western public will effect the “rampant capitalism” of Communist China? Do you fantasize it all started with the USA?
The world you believe in is an illusion. You’re lost in a fairytale. If you must read socialist nonsense try Bertrand Russell. He understood mankind and the world and he was funny.
Primer 1:
The Saudis are dragging their heels helping Iraq; The Persians are actively arming and training the enemy in Iraq; The Chinese are arming the Persians; The US leans on the House of Saud to shape up; The King wants arms in return to deter Persia; They make the deal… We’ll see who lives up to the bargain.
It’s similar to the Russians arming Iran and the US arming Saddam back in the Cold War. It’s similar to strategic manuevers from the days of Xerxes to today. As always there is a profit component but it has nothing to do with capitalism per se. Of course you’re too invested in your illusion to see that. The anti-capitalist blurb spurts out like a reflex sans actual thought.
A student of Zen should be able to see things as they are.
I remember a post of yours noting your Buddhism teacher claimed that people are essentially good. I remember the opening words of D.T. Suzuki’s Intro to Zen Buddhism, “Life is suffering.” That’s a more honest place from which to study the world and man. Your life I bet is very much free of suffering. Be grateful you live here in the USA and in this prosperous time. It is a brief moment in a history of brutality and want.
R.
July 29th, 2007 at 1:29 pm
Are You a student of Zen, Richard? I find it tedious that every dissenter I know needs to pick on my choice of philosophy and use it against me. By declaring my affinity to Buddha, I am not inferring that I have reached enlightenment - far from it. While I may not have all the facts of the world at my disposal, I understand this: People who tell me to wake up to our horrible reality are enablers. Their acceptance of “The Way Things Are” is part and parcel of why “It Will Never Change.” They live a self-fulfilling prophecy and ask nothing better for their world, for their children or for themselves.
And that’s exactly what they get!