My Brain Hurts Just a Little

"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 tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country." - Nazi Reich Marshal Hermann Gring during the Nuremberg Trials

What does it take? Honestly...what does it take before people start to do something, anything about their lot in life? Let me be clear, because it could seem like I'm just yet another commentator on the horrors of the Bush administration, and no, I'm not so crass as to compare George Bush to Adolf Hitler or the Republicans to the Nazis. They are entirely different, but my point is that the tools of the devil can also be the tools of the common thief. Propaganda and manipulation change little through the ages. Where is this coming from? Let me begin.

Bill Kristol was on The Colbert Report tonight, jumping on the bandwagon of Bush-bashing (everyone jumps ship from their favorite captain when the poll numbers hit 32% in a Fox poll), yet supporting every initiative that the Bush administration has backed. He is certainly having his cake and eating it too. When asked about the November elections, he predicted, accurately I hope, that the Democrats would take back the House of Representatives at the least, thanks in large part (this is the part he didn't say) to the recent exposure of just how corrupt the modern conservative politician is. Meanwhile, as the Republican party scrambles to discredit every Democrat they can get their hands on, and pretend that these controversies are libelous hearsay, Mr. Kristol tried claiming that this is just what the Republicans want, for the Democrats to take back the house so that in the two years leading up to the Presidential election they can show the American public just how awful they are, by raising taxes and raping babies, or whatever it is that he thinks they could possibly do to upset people. Here he is telling us that even if the Republicans lose, that it's a good thing for them, and it just means they are going to win big later, hoping that none of us notice that he just made 2 and 2 equal 5.

And while we are being told that George Bush didn't want to be a war President, that he was forced into it when we were attacked, no one seems to care much that the entire world is becoming a more unstable place. Having obviously not learned their lesson, especially since the easily-fooled public keeps putting them back in office, the New American Century crowd now has their eyes on Iran, and probably four or five countries after that. Considering that none of these countries has yet to attack us, I find it hard to follow the logic of "we don't have a choice" when we knowingly choose to ignore threats the likes of North Korea or Darfur (yes, instability and human rights abuse is a threat in the world today, at the very least to our humanity).

There was a brief and shining moment in my early life when I thought that, perhaps, the world had learned a valuable lesson from the Cold War era of nuclear terror, when the doomsday clock edged closer to midnight. Even for a child in the 80's, and era of comparitively little strife, the paranoia and fear were palpable, but it seemed that out of that we might live in a world where real war, aside from peacekeeping and the likes, was a thing of the past; where, maybe, we might be able to slowly move towards disarmament and cooperation. But with the leadership of the neo-'conservative' movement, we've faced not one but two wars in Iraq, the second of which smells vaguely familiar, and a vague war on terror which means that, for the forseable future, war will be the appetizer, meal, and dessert. We live in a state of perpetual war, which can be counted on to create fear, to justify horrible atrocities and violations of law, to manipulate and redefine.

As we struggle to bend the world to our own choosing, we interupt the natural process of national evolution throughout the world. In our attempts to democratize the middle-east, or more accurately make the middle east the puppet of other democracies, we give these dictatorial leaders the tools by which to control their people and instill fear, quelling their natural urges for reform or revolution. Iran is a nation that, left to its own devices, and with encouragement from the western world, could become a free and democratic nation in a part of the world where we clearly don't know how to create such a thing. Yet here we are, ready to fire our weapons before we can speak, killing not only the regime that terrifies us, but the peaceful populace which becomes the human shield.

And what makes me sick is that no one notices or talks about it, that the issues of the day become immigrants and hydrogen cars. And what makes me even sicker is that then I ramble on and sound like some high school anarchist or community college hippie. I wish that the world could be the sort of place that allowed me to be the vacuous, self-indulged person we all long to be. I don't want to care about such things. But when the bully stands up, someone stands between him and the lunch money that isn't his.