IS THE TIME OF GREATNESS GONE?
By Gordon Duff STAFF WRITER/Senior Editor
How do we define greatness in leaders? Simple, we look around us find none of it and use that as a definition. Is it that great men (and women) are gone or that we simply don’t deserve any better than we get? If you ask many Americans, they still believe Reagan to have been a “great president.” Myth makers try to hang the “fall of communism” on Reagan or some idea of an economic surge based on conservative values.
In truth, the Soviet Union collapsed, only to reemerge more powerful, an economic giant beyond our reckoning and a real look at “Reaganomics” shows little but fraud, big government, debt and a race into poverty for a hundred million Americans, a race continuing to this day in his honor.
Was Reagan responsible? No, not hardly! He was out of his depth, surrounded by con men, thieves and phonies. If he could have been great, because of some power in his soul or special humanity, we will never know. When the myth makers dragged out his corpse to justify the creating of a police state and kleptocracy, the America we know today of wiretapping, secret prisons and a massive propaganda machine spewing Orwellian trash 24 hours a day, was born. Reagan will remain a mystery. For years, including most of his presidency, he told stories of his life to those around him, such as when, during WW2, he took part in the liberation of a German concentration camp.
These stories were from movies he played in, perhaps from some he had only seen. How should we feel about this? Should we be sad for him, ourselves or angry at those who traded weapons for drugs while American children went hungry?
At best, we look for “the common touch,” a feeling of underlying decency. What we buy are packaged buffoons, malignant narcissists and weaklings sold to us as synthetic humans. We buy them because we want them. We admire them. We are building a history of America that can’t even be described as a “decline.” The world is entering a new “golden age” of pollution, poverty, extremism and war, all fueled by a select and powerful few, always in the shadows. No “conspiracy” could ever come close to the truth.
You don’t need a “New World Order” or “Illuminati” to run the planet into ruin. We have our own governments, the United Nations, the World Bank and IMF. Who needs comic book villans when those tasked with helping keep the world in order make Genghis Khan or Caligula seem “unimaginative.”
WAS KENNEDY A MYTH?
There is no question, John Kennedy was the last American leader, the last man to stand up to the military, to the Israeli lobby and the economic thieves that had begun the rape of America’s economy, the one completed so thoroughly under the miserable shirker, George W. Bush. Was Kennedy murdered to justify the insanity of Vietnam or because of his demand that Israel end it’s nuclear program? Those are your choices. Maybe it was both. His threat was that he would do what was right for America no matter the cost. He was killed for it. When his brother tried to carry forward his honor and values, he was murdered too.
Both were murdered by our own government, or what claims to be a government. No one has stood up to take their places and the rats and roaches that scurry about so publicly now have worked tirelessly to murder any memory we might have of hope or decency. Think about the Heritage Foundation or the American Enterprise Institute when you think cockroach.
Since that time, nobody strong and decent has been able to survive the financially driven electoral system in America. Millions of Americans are fearful that the independent sounds beginning to come out of President Obama may not be an act. What if he really means to protect Americans against the Wall Street thieves and the gangsters pulling so many strings from the sewers of Tel Aviv? Don’t tell me any of you would be surprised to hear of an assassination, followed by a “commission” and some moron found hanging in his cell, another “lone gunman.”
NOT JUST AMERICA
Look around the world for a leader, for anyone? Is Gordon Brown more useless than Tony Blair? Who picked out Germany’s Merkel? Who is she working for, certainly not Germany. Circle the globe, does anyone stand out? How could be know? It doesn’t take a genius to look past our own news to see how easy a target America has become. Painting us as the “axis of evil” with our oil and drug wars, our kidnap gangs and continual reports of one atrocity after another, year in and year out, no decent leader would want anything to do with us. How could a real human being sleep at night having to turn his or her back on the crimes we commit, the crimes we allow and the suffering we cause?
Is this too harsh? Is this anti-American propaganda? Isn’t America (and Israel) the shining light of freedom?
Even if we didn’t have numbers, not 6 million mind you but certainly more than one million dead, not all thrown into ovens but dead just the same, cluster bombs, tortured to death, veterans dying of neglect or the thousand overdosing on the tons of heroin America is shipping around the world, we would still be as guilty as any nation we have damned in the past. It is almost as though we having a war between factions, those who saw Hitler as an example and those who are looking for something purer, closer to Satan.
Now, every election carries the rhetoric, each camp tying the other to the Prince of Darkness. Even a fallen angel would be offended.
The numbers climb hourly, 2 or three members of a family may have died in Afghanistan, shot at a checkpoint run by Americans “Mafia” Afghan National Police or overdosed in Moscow from some of the crops I have been told are currently being harvested in Helmand this week, a plague worse than ten Al Qaeda’s, even if such an organization did exist. We don’t really know if it does, actually. We made it all up. Hey, maybe it does exist now. If it does, we can take credit. Perhaps the CIA is franchising it.
WHAT IF YOU MET ONE?
I was in Pakistan with my good friends Raja and Jeff earlier in the spring. We met with Imran Khan, perhaps Pakistan’s best known celebrity and leader of a minor political party, a man famous for being one of the least successful politicians in the world. Khan is a great man, it is impossible to miss. One of that “other world’s” greatest athletes, a cricketer, tireless worker for the underclasses, outspoken critic of evil and exuding charm, charisma and humanity, meeting him was a joy. Everything about Khan said “Jack Kennedy.”
Jeff and I are cynical American political hacks, used to seeing politicians kiss babies they would just as easily throw under a train to save their skin.
We looked at each other that night, walking out of Khan’s party headquarters. Simultaneously, “We could get that guy elected president in a minute!”
Then Jeff said, “Gordon, what if he actually means what he says?” I turned to Jeff, “Yup, soon as they saw he wouldn’t play their game, he would be dead as a doornail.”
Remember when George H.W. Bush visited a grocery store for the first time. He was amazed to see a checkout scanner and food in packages. He had never seen those things before. Ah, the common touch.
CONTROLLED, HAVE THEY GOTTEN TO EVERYONE?
Today, going through the minds of American “elitists,” not necessarily the educated but the intellectually honest, the kind of people who can be patriotic and decent at the same time, is the Obama question. If he means what he says, why hasn’t he closed the prisons, why is Dick Cheney out of prison, why are we still killing and dying for the lies Obama says he opposes?
You can’t watch news in America without knowing you are being conned. It seems, at times, the only politically motivated Americans are the lunatic fringe shilling for Wall Street and AIPAC. “Normal” people are so disgusted with corruption and lies, now decades of little but, that they feel being involved in politics is like swimming in sewage. The lunatics are immune to the smell and those who are in politics, especially those “up and coming” reformers are, as we all tell ourselves, going to become tomorrow’s thieves and liars like those who have gone before them.
Why do we know this?
Even without the scandals and corruption, at least 50 politicians a week, from city councilmen to senators are arrested for crimes, on TV shows at least. One of the main themes Hollywood has saturated our nightly entertainment with is public corruption, crooked cops, crooked judges, everyone being paid off, everyone being blackmailed, hiding money, ordering killings, everything but, well but what?
POP CULTURE CONDITIONING, UNDOING EVOLUTION
I have seen the CIA run drugs in 2 dozen films, I have watched intelligence agencies plan and execute terror attacks and murder political leaders. I have seen this so many times that the plots have become tiring. Read the credits. Check to see who the producers are, the network management and the corporations controlling both the news and “entertainment” in broadcasting, now really one in the same. Then look at the plots you don’t see.
Are we being drowned in corruption and scandals in fiction so we are immune to the real thing? Did video games make a generation of American children immune to killing? Do movies and TV sell, not just smoking and drinking but anger and divisiveness as well?
Remember those psychological tests, the “word association” ones. I say “priest” and you say “sex abuser.” I say “politician” and you say “crooked.” In fact, y0u should try it yourself. Think of anyone in a position of trust or respect and try out “crooked.” Does it fit? “Crooked librarian?” No. “Crooked building inspector?” Yes.
America’s Supreme Court is, perhaps, the biggest scandal in the country today. Several recent decisions, starting from a rigged presidential election to the utterly corrupt 5/4 opinion making massive political bribery not only legal but mandatory, are just part of it.
It isn’t just the Supreme Court. You should look at how the Bush appointees on the Veterans Court of Appeals have done. I can’t even describe it and it is never reported.
Doors are kicked in without search warrants, judges allow any imaginable abuse of human rights and the real protections of the Constitution are thought of by most Americans as radical and unAmerican. “They,” the same “they” that do our TV shows, do our news. The “talking heads” tell us that the Constitution is all about homosexuals and illegal aliens. I keep asking how 65 billion dollars in drug money leaves Afghanistan, a country with fewer than 6 ATM machines.
Get elected, ask that question and duck. Famed White House correspondent has asked every American president in the last 40 years if they know of a Mideastern country with nuclear weapons. None have ever answered. President Obama looked visibly fearful.
Israel has had nuclear weapons for 50 years, now a massive arsenal. Not one American politician will publicly say it, though everyone knows it, in fact Israel makes no attempt to deny it.
What does this tell you about the kind of people we have in Washington or London?
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.
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