Has the Word "Freedom" Ever Been So Debased?

[Crankie Avalon]

The current frontman of the ruling cabal of the United States of America says, over and over again in his coronation speech, that he and the ruling elite he represents will be "expanding freedom" in the years ahead--the same ruling elite that has spent generations propping up despots that repress their respective peoples all across the world, and particularly the Muslim world.

Yes, that ruling elite now solemnly invokes the fig leaf of "freedom and democracy" to obscure what is being done to Iraq, and what will be done to any other place in the world that is weak enough to be cut down and refuses to play ball with the ruling elite of the United States. Because that's the real reason Iraq was invaded--Saddam Hussein stopped playing ball with his erstwhile friends in the U.S. ruling elite, and his country had something that our country's ruling elite wanted. Otherwise, Hussein would be as in with the U.S. as the Saudi ruling family.

This "bringing freedom and democracy to the people of Iraq" is just the palatable smokescreen for hanging a giant "OPEN FOR BUSINESS" sign on an entire country.

I'm reading a book called "Rubicon" about the death of the Roman Republic. As she became an Empire, the elite of Rome used the same tactic--dribbling virtue out of one side of their mouths and hypocrisy out the other, pontificating about their duty to civilize the world and bring peace, order, and Roman law to it. It was all a high sounding beard for the enrichment of their business class, the publicani, who would be the driving force behind each new military adventure, and who, along with the Roman tax collectors, would descend on each new province like locusts or Halliburton contractors. At the same time, the Romans always, no matter how obviously false the claim was, brazenly insisted that every one of their invasions were undertaken as matters of survival, defensive wars that were the only way to continue preserving the lives of the Roman people.

And now, here we are, listening to the self-serving lies of this empire's publicani frontman on the day of his Triumph, as he fulfills his role of jamming an idealistic face onto our client-"nation building," our modern legionary soldiers and corporate contractors swarming into a small nation whose people have as much right to their own country as we have to ours.

It's an awful day for Americans who care, and an awful day for the world.

[SammyWinstonJack]

1. I am starting to despise the word, it's meaningless these day anyway.

To hear the Chimperor spew it out makes the word "freedom" sound vile.

[EVDebs]

2. We should change Inauguration Day to Gen Smedley Butler Day

for a man who saved the country and who's memory might revive it again:

http://www.ihffilm.com/r547.html

[geniph]

3. Orwell was a prophet

Doublethink and Newspeak rule the airwaves.

WAR IS PEACE.

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY.


...to say that black is white...to believe that black is white...to know that black is white
and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary...
the prevailing mental condition is controlled insanity.

"To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink."

[cascadiance]

4. Likewise with "spreading Democracy"....

Bush is constantly talking about how he wants to "spread" or "install" Democracy everyplace. Much like how freedom is more for people outside this country than it is for those in it in their view of the world, Democracy is more for the rest of them than it is here.

You ask a Republican here why we've violated so much of our priniciples of Democracy in our elections or other things that they've violated here, and they'll respond back that we don't live in a Democracy, but live in a Republic. If that is the case then, why don't we practice what we preach and advocate spreading "a Republic" to everyone else, instead of spreading "Democracy" which isn't something we're allowed to have here or talk about protecting here according to the dittoheads' view of the world.