“A brief and crucial history of the United States”
Not for USA flag-wavers, but a strong dose of medicine for the rest of us.
The transcript can be found here: http://www.informationclearinghouse….ticle30620.htm (although the transcript is not completely accurate to the spoken word, it is the only place I can find it)
Here’s a snippet:
Nightmare and insanity are akin: mysterious and involuntary states that skew and distort objective reality. One wakens from nightmare; from insanity there is no awakening.
Whether Americans live in the one state or the other is the paramount question of this era.
For two hundred years Americans have been indoctrinated with a mythology created, imposed and sustained by a manipulating cabal: the financial elite that built its absolute control on the muscle and blood, ignorance and credulity, of its citizenry. It has now metastasized into the corporate tyranny that owns and controls America.
America began with the invasion of a populated continent and the genocide of its people. Once entrenched, it embraced enslavement of another race.
With those pillars of state in place, it declared itself an independent nation in a testament that proclaimed the equality of all mankind.
In that monumental act of hypocrisy, America’s myth had its genesis.
The title for this post is the theme of the video, taken from a Thoreau quote:
In 1846, Henry David Thoreau, offended to his soul by the injustice of the American government’s invasion of Mexico, protested it and went to jail for his convictions. Later, in his essay On Civil Disobedience, he said this:
“If injustice is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.”
For some here, this is preaching to the choir. To others – especially those that need to cling to the concept of the US ‘founding fathers’ as being something akin to saints, and the Constitution as a holy document, and the US military as sacrosanct – well, this will be a bitter pill. In fact, some will not swallow it – the pill is too bitter, the information presented too far from the “reality” seared into their brains.
My two minor criticisms of this film come first from the overarching meme of wasted
money in Afghanistan and Iraq – rather than a focus on the Afghani and Iraqi lives snuffed-out and Afghani and Iraqi lives and infrastructure destroyed. Secondly, my own belief that directly attacking capitalism (sort of the author’s proposal) will create an immovable object that will withstand our less-than-irresistible force.
I believe that our best chance is to attack “predatory capitalism” from a different angle than has ever been tried:
Step 2: define a firm dividing line between needs and wants, and allow capitalism to cater to wants. Why? Because (step 1) we need inroads into self-governance. We need to control our own destiny, we cannot do that if we have no control, and we will not gain control if we insist on telling capitalists that we plan to destroy them.
Step 1: We the people need to be on the inside, not outside the castle walls, and I believe we can get there in one brilliant chess move – but NOT if the capitalists (that control governance) see it as a direct attack on capitalism. Once we operate from within the castle walls, we can (part of Step 2) declaw and defang predatory capitalism down to capitalism. Then we – we the people – reevaluate, and we decide how to deal with capitalism, from a position of power.
Attempting to make changes from outside the castle walls is bitching, complaining, protesting. That won’t work. That won’t change anything. That won’t put us into positions of power within the government.
If this short documentary movie/social and geopolitical commentary does not move you to action, watch it again.