WAR IN OUR HEARTS

THE THOUGHT OF WAR MAY BE AMERICA’S MOST SUCCESSFUL PRODUCT

HAVE WE LOST AMERICA BY DEFENDING AMERICA?

By Gordon Duff

Nearly 70 years ago, Republican isolationists warned that President Roosevelt was pushing America into war against a man they admired and millions of Americans looked up to, Adolf Hitler.  Today this claim sounds odd but in 1940 Hitler may have been the most admired man on Earth. 

In 1939, Time Magazine named him “Man of the Year”.  Everyone from prominent religious leaders, the American Legion, Henry Ford to Charles Lindbergh, among endless others saw Hitler and his policies as a viable replacement for our “broken democracy.”  Getting America to fight against what we now know would have been a new "dark age" of barbarity took every trick in the book. 

Millions of Americans believed Pearl Harbor was "staged" much as millions believe 9/11 was a "CIA fundraiser".  Conservatives saw World War II as “Mr. Roosevelt’s War” with many sticking by their Nazi beliefs and business partners while our soldiers fought and died around the world by the hundreds of thousands.

Wealthy Americans preferred a Nazi America to war.  Was it that they were afraid of war or that the “conservative pro-business” Nazi movement and totalitarian government was preferable to the chaos of democracy?  If the answer wasn’t clear before, it certainly is now.  A look at the last 60+ years may yield some clues….

From 1947 to the collapse of the Soviet empire, we were at war, a 50+ year war, with nuclear armed B-52s on station 24 hours a day and hundreds of thousands of troops awaiting a Communist onslaught.  Vietnam, a minor skirmish killing 50 thousand, a hundred thousand or maybe 300 thousand Americans, we will never really know the count, was only an episode, nothing more as was Korea before it  As a second and then a third generation grew up with America either at war or preparing for war, selling war as a "state of mind" became an industry itself. 

Americans were conditioned to see any and every discord, no matter what remote corner or how insignificant, as a direct threat to "national security".  With ever looming nuclear war a threat to all life on the planet, the option of continual “regional conflicts” was presented as a diverting entertainment and source of economic stimulus.  Victories make good press, casualty figures list with the comics and returning flag draped coffins dissolve into thin air.

Today’s America keeps a list of current and proposed future wars the same way a debutante keeps a dance card.  "Sorry, but Venezuela has to wait, I promised Iran a dance after I finish with Iraq.  My steady date, Afghanistan, is out getting cigarettes and both North Korea and Russia have asked to drive me home." 

Our “threat list” includes nations, some with little or no military and some even facing starvation and ruin.  Any foreign ruler who acts up, by “acting up,” I mean, acts as though he were an American cowboy president, can look forward to precision munitions, helicopter assaults and Abrahms tanks crushing cars in his capital. 

According to our “national security council”, our biggest enemy is a pack of religious extremists who hate women, homosexuals and liberals.  No, I am not talking about the Bush Administration and our domestic "Neocon" terrorists but the “radical Islamic terrorists” who read the wrong bible, pray in the wrong churches and love blowing themselves up in public places. Fighting this pack, which may have only been a few dozen men, paid for and supported by our closest friends, has cost us thousands of lives and over 3 trillion dollars.

This tiny group has bankrupted America, isolated us diplomatically, driven the world into near economic collapse and forever altered life in “the land of the free”. Could they have accomplished any of this if we weren’t looking for an enemy, any enemy, to help accomplish a task our “ruling class” has sought for over 200 years, the end of democracy in America?  Economically, we have forgotten how to live at peace, emotionally, we have become addicted to fear and hate that threat of war brings and politically, we have learned, each year, to value real freedom less and less. 

We have become a nation of trolls.  We hide in our homes, bullying our families, reading, but mostly watching and listening to what we want to hear.  We blame.  Someone else we never met but others tell us about, is taking away our freedoms.  We are no longer able to smoke in restaurants.  In California, you can’t eat fried foods cooked in oil that kills people.  Senators get arrested for minor problems involving gifts from friends and a few favors.  Congress goes on and on about billions being stolen and wars being started for no reason.  All of this is foolishness.  Al Gore invented Global Warming and the Internet is going to turn the world into a desert.  It is all stupid and we keep listening, reacting, believing.

The real problem is stem cell research and gay marriage and abortion rights.  Telling us this while our kids can’t find jobs should disturb people.  Dems are telling me that assault rifles are destroying civilization.  Never has a country in the history of the world been so involved in issues around the world, and yet knows so little about the world. 

All of us know that news is all “controlled” in nearly every country.  In the US it has never been controlled as it is today.  The danger is that presenting controlled news and manipulating fears of an isolated people who are told that everyone wants to destroy them is a purposeful “rerun” of Germany in the 1930s.  Anyone who thinks otherwise knows little of history and less about the background of the leaders running American now and their families.

Americans don’t see what Europeans see.  Europe borders on the Middle East.  The Islamic world is their “Mexico” with cheap labor, runaway immigration and sunny holidays.  To people from the Middle East, Europe is a “Walmart” version of America with jobs, housing, green grass and a social welfare system.  For the rich it is a place where money, even without family connections, buys power, prestige and security.

For Europeans, it seems like they have been invaded, not only by the poor from the Middle East or Africa but by tens of thousands of wealthy Arabs who live in London, Paris, Munich, Berlin, Rome and other cities as a ruling class, often under the most abrasive circumstances imaginable.  Simply put, it just isn’t working out.  The Islamic religion is a powerful wall meant to keep both worlds totally separate and the Islamic extremism movement in Europe operates like a “Gestapo” meant to stop European and American influence, not in the world, but with Islamic people who would rather live with American values.

This is what our war is about.  Where America has failed politically and economically thru corruption and mismanagement, we have hardly failed socially.  We are, by far, the ruling culture of the world.  The Bush America was meant to be like the Islamic extremist Middle East.  Bush and his cronies meant to isolate us from the world and “liberal influences” much as Bin Laden, the primary “Neocon” leader of the Middle East has meant to protect Islam from liberal and progressive ideas.

Both leaders, Bush and Bin Laden share many views.  Both want religion to have power over the state.  Both believe that government should control every aspect of life.  Both believe that people will sacrifices their lives, families and future for “ideas”, unsound and even idiotic ideas.  Both share other things too, both are wrong and it is the hope of all of us that history moves to prove them so while the world is still in one piece.

Europe is more America every day.  Cars are bigger, supermarkets and discount stores are going up everywhere and, in most areas of Europe, an American can function seamlessly.  Germany is more American than America, it is almost like we are becoming the copy.  Half the people there speak better English than we do.  Northern Italy is the same.  However, so is Dubai, Kuwait and, more than they will ever admit, Iran.

Learning to hate the “Japs” and Nazis opened a door we don’t seem able to close.  In a world where 95% of the people want to be Americans, eat, dress and live American (not necessarily Christian), we have found our way in seeing only the 5%.  Anyone who suspects this is done as a way of blinding us to the inequities of our own system may be on the right track.

In ten years, North Korea, Iran, Sudan, Zimbabwe and Libya will be filled with McDonalds and Starbucks.  Russia and China already are, simply check online, you will be amazed.  There isn’t a country on Earth, no matter how much hate for us we are told they have, where an American wouldn’t be welcomed and looked up to.  Things in the real world and the Bush/Limbaugh imaginary world are divergent beyond imagination.

Ideas are the danger.  “Neocon” is an idea much the same as “communism”, “Wahabism”  or the more childish and simplistic labels of “liberal” and “conservative”.  People who live inside labels do so, inevitably, to justify fear, hate or exploitation.  Every time someone tells me about “liberals” I ask them what a "conservative" should think about the Department of Homeland Security and FISA.  We now live in a nation where our own government, which has always had its hand in our pocket, now has a gun at our heads and a microphone under our bed.

America was a country built by farmers and small craftsmen.  That we have been migrating toward, alternatively, a social welfare hellhole and totalitarian dictatorship has been an expression of the opposing forces in the hearts of men.  Those that “give”, too often give what belongs to others.  I love that part of government, a government that starts wars but never fights, a government that spends but never earns.  Our society has submitted itself to rule by the least capable.  Those who we present to the world as our "best" are usually our worst and we know it.  Politics in America is a road that goes two directions, theft and riches or theft and jail.

When power goes to those who “take”, restoring balance is almost impossible.  Takers “have” and “havers keep”.  “Keepers” hold.  “Holders” take.  This cycle brings out only the worst in people.  The more the “holders” talk about “character” and “morality”, the more they take and more and more people die or live in poverty and want.  The framers of the Constitution never foresaw this.  They never foresaw how the government they built could disappear inside a fog of money and backstabbing that has left nothing of their original vision.

Belief is the enemy.  It is the job of every human to be a person.  Every language but English has a common word for people who are no longer human, who have ‘beliefs”.  Beliefs led the Nazis, communists, Islamic extremists and our home grown “Neocons” to nearly destroy the world.  Beliefs, ideas, not “ideals” dehumanize all of us.  Repairing a society bred for war and hate, being human, is going to take work.  Don’t wait for the government to tell you when to start.

    Gordon Duff is a regular contributor on social and political issues.

Gordon Duff

Gordon Duff posted articles on VT from 2008 to 2022. He is a Marine combat veteran of the Vietnam War. A disabled veteran, he worked on veterans and POW issues for decades.

Gordon is an accredited diplomat and is generally accepted as one of the top global intelligence specialists. He manages the world’s largest private intelligence organization and regularly consults with governments challenged by security issues.

Duff has traveled extensively, is published around the world, and is a regular guest on TV and radio in more than “several” countries. He is also a trained chef, wine enthusiast, avid motorcyclist, and gunsmith specializing in historical weapons and restoration. Business experience and interests are in energy and defense technology.

• Gordon’s Archives:  2008-2015
• Gordon’s Archives:  2016-2022