Editorial note: If you have not yet read our mission statement above, please do so in order that you can put our blogs in context. 

 15 February 2012

We continue the process – started on 30 January 2012 – of publishing as posts selected extracts, sometimes updated, from our Mission Statement. Today we attack the warfare culture of the United State.

KILLER NATION

Antigone1984 believes that the greatest danger to world peace comes from the United States and its satraps. The USA is the killer nation. It is not for nothing that every second film that comes out of Hollywood shows a killer with a gun in his hand. The aim of US foreign policy is to make the rest of the planet subservient to the interests of the US Government (we are careful not to say “the interests of the US people”). It is for this reason that the US has military bases in more than 150 countries. But there is nothing new in the US appetite for war. The country owes its existence to emigrants from Europe driving the native American peoples off their ancestral lands and massacring them if they resisted (compare the seizure by Israel, “the 51st State of the Union”,  of Palestinian land since 1948). Killing by the US continues to this day with the slaughter of Pakistani civilians and soldiers by remote-controlled US drones operated from mainland America. My Lai, Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, Fallujah, Baghdad, Kabul: these are just a few of the deadly landmarks of recent US invasion and domination. Torture and rendition for the purposes of torture are the Empire’s stock-in-trade. In 2011 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Barack Obama developed a new niche in the killer market: the targeted assassination of suspects without trial (Osama bin Laden and the US/Yemeni citizen Anwar al-Awlaki). So  much for the rule of law, which is supposed to constitute the bedrock of western society, that which distinguishes us from the barbarians outside the gate. The reality is that the rule of law is dispensed with when it clashes with realpolitik.

The US is also a major killer of its own citizens. According to Wikipedia, it ranked  fifth among the countries of the world for the number of judicial murders carried out in 2010. The world’s number one superpower came next after such stalwart champions of human rights as the People’s Republic of China, Iran, North Korea and Yemen. The blog believes that no nation which commits judicial murder is civilised. By this token, the USA is firmly outside the pale of civilisation.

By way of a postscript to our condemnation of the USA as a killer national, consider this news item in the UK’s Guardian newspaper for 1 December 2011: “An Arizona gun club is offering a chance for children and their families to pose for photographs with Father Christmas while holding weaponry such AK-47 rifles and grenade launchers.”

The US drive towards world domination is aided and abetted by its “allies”, satellite nations whose governments, bribed or browbeaten, are too cowardly to stand up to the bullying of Uncle Sam.

Why do we single out the United States? After all, other nations also behave brutally with a cavalier disregard for human rights. For instance: Russia, China, India and Saudi Arabia. We single out the United States because it is the most powerful state of all. As of now, it is the only superpower. And of the only superpower, the leader of the western world, the world has a right to expect great things. It has been sorely disappointed. The United States invariably acts on the basis of narrow national self-interest, as defined by the political clique which happens to be in power in Washington at any particular time. We are not talking here about ordinary Americans, with whom we have no quarrel. We are talking about the US political establishment. However, some might think that a nation gets the government it deserves. After all, someone voted these guys into office.

 ——————